Sunday Review of Links: 03.29.09

If by 03.29.09 you mean...04.29.08. No links today -- life interrupts. But here's a trip in the way back machine. Links from exactly eleven months ago. Seems like eleven years ago, but that's the way it goes out here in the blogosphere. A little Jeremiah Wright, a little giant squid thawing, plus a great shot of then Sen. Obama driving the lane on Tobacco Road. In other words, a little something for everybody...

Read/Watch Along: Mar 23-29

Here’s what’s occupying the crack staff (implied Royal We!) here at Beitel-Blog. As always, it’s a little something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Star system explained below.

BOOKS

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (****). Mal writes cultural criticism that is A) smart, B) accessible, and C) page-turning. Oh, and it also has a sense of the moment—like, as you’re reading, you start to understand that these ideas will be indispensable in helping you figure out how to navigate the very tricky business of being human in a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world. That’s very, very hard to do. This would be such a book for the “Rule of 10,000 Hours” alone. But it’s way more than that.

Heaven Overland by Jim Murphy (****). Great for both its exquisite line-level riffing and for what/who gets to be in these poems. W.E.B. DuBois. Elvis. Chuck Berry. Elizabeth Bishop. New Orleans. Thomas Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemani, in Kentucky. That these disparate elements fit seamlessly in the same book—sometimes even in the same poem—says all you need to know about the kind of music Jim Murphy can make.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. Any collection of David Foster Wallace's is more of a reference book than it is a sit down and read it straight through kinda deal. I'm piece-mealing my way through Brief Interviews, so I'll reserve my rating for a while. I'll say this: about halfway through the story called "The Depressed Person" it became a battle of wills. DFW thinks I'm not gonna wade through all these footnotes and read this Bataan Death March of a story. But dammit I will. I will. And I did.

MOVIES

Mike Judge Mini-Retrospective: Idiocracy (*½) and Office Space (**). The beauty—dare I say “genius”?—of Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, etc.) is his spot-on understanding that the institutions of mainstream American life are as much like cartoons as they are like anything we might prefer to call “reality.” Take Beavis and Butthead. That show was funny not because it was an outlandish send-up of two idiosyncratic white-male-American teenagers. It was funny because there was little if any exaggeration to it. At all. Maybe there was some comedic embellishment (sometimes, not always) to the fixes they got themselves into, but those two 2-D cartoon characters were exactly like maybe a dozen (or more?) guys in my high school alone. I’m not even kidding. Therefore. A good bit of the smart social commentary is embedded in the form: cartoons, episodic ones at that. All that’s to say something gets lost in the translation to feature films with actual humans. Same strengths are there: premise, memorable characters (particularly the supporting ones), a slow and steady stream of gags that’ll probably produce a chuckle or two. But in both of these movies, the whole is a little less than the sum of its parts.

Life Is Beautiful (***). Subtitles—always tricky. As is the whole “The Italian Jerry Lewis Does The Holocaust!” thing. Bobby Benigni pretty much pulls it off (all those awards can’t be wrong, right?), but I don’t know that I’d ever watch it again. The issue isn’t one of poor taste. A tragi-comedic treatment of the Holocaust is, I think, an inspired choice. It’s mood and pace. Things proceed via goofy gag after goofy gag until the end. When they don’t.

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For those of you scoring at home:

**** = Buy It
*** = Borrow It
** = Take It or Leave It
* = Forget About It

Sunday Review of Links: 03.22.09

News & Opinion
...Last time Geithner had something big to say, his boss whipped the crowd into a frenzy in anticipation (Just wait till you hear what Tim's got to say! You're gonna love it!! Tim's awesome!!!). And then poor Doogie laid an egg. ("Wait, what did he say? Did that make any sense to you? It's like, he was moving his lips and sound was coming out but...?!") So this time they learned their lesson. Tomorrow, Trez-Sec Tim's unveiling the plan for dispatching all those pesky toxic assets, and just so there's no surprises -- or big expectations -- they're leaking the details ahead of time. (WaPo)

...Frank Rich says 44 and the Gang better get their collective act together or else it's back to the no-idea-having Republicans (NYT)...

...while Friedman says folks like Rich need to back up off the blame game for a sec or else nobody who has any sense at all will ever want to serve in public office again. (NYT)

...Crisis averted, at least for now, in Pakistan. (The Economist)

Sports
...This just in: Tiger Woods sucks at golf! And he was never really that good to begin with!! Plus he's losing his hair!!! Oh wait. Only that last part is true. So who's spreading all these vile rumors? Why, it's none other than Grumpy Old Man Jack Nicklaus! (ESPN)

Books
...Steven Johnson picks some noteworthy smart-people books for (The Week).

...Andy Sullivan links to Kassia Krozser, who blogs about books and publishing and who attended the recent South by Southwest conference (which, for the uninitiated, is kind of like TED but with more of an arts/culture bent. [TED? What the hell's TED? Forget it, he's on a roll...]). Anyhoo. Let's just say Kassia's not impressed with the book industry's Helen-Keller-esque view of the changing landscape it faces. (The Dish)

...Here, too, is what she wrote a couple weeks ago re: author blogs and why they shouldn't suck. A) I agree and B) I'd like to think this one follows the basic guidelines she sets down. Even though I'm not technically an author yet. Nothing wrong with a little wag-the-blog, as it were. (Booksquare)

Alabamiana
...Normally I don't just flat-out pull-quote Pastor Jim, even though I could every week. This week's different: "Confining someone to a conservative pigeonhole, or a liberal pigeonhole, without bothering to fully define what those terms mean, is just another way of not having to think about things. Our world and the many issues we face as human beings are far too complicated for us to find ways to not think about them." Can I get an amen? (Anniston Star)

Watch This!


This blog-guru guy gets a little technical (re: bidness blogging) at sxsw08. But watch it anyway, The takeaway is that A) content is king (that's gotta be good for the future of Beitel-Blog, right? [Just nod and keep your wisecracks to yourself, thanks very much...]) and B) he loves to use the word "evangelize," albeit in a secular sense, when describing what blogs do best. So let's review: the best blogs spread the Good Word (broadly defined) with fervor and immediacy. Yup, says here he's right on both counts.

Missing W

Prepare for the blogpost that will have my dearly departed Pops turning in his grave like some kind of crazed rotisserie chicken. (Except he was cremated so that’s, at the very least, a mixed metaphor. And probably it’s in poor taste to boot. Shaky start, I admit…)

So, yeah, let’s get even shakier: Already I miss the 43rd President of the United States of America.

Now let’s be clear: dude was awful at his job. No question there. Awful. Way, way Peter-Principled. But that’s not an interesting observation. Everybody everywhere—and I mean everybody, probably (especially?) even W’s parents—understands that.

Put it this way. If somebody was as bad at making hamburgers as George W. Bush was bad at being president…wait, I’d be willing to bet nobody has ever been as bad at making hamburgers as George W. Bush was bad at being president. The equivalent in burger-flipping would be, like, sickening almost every single person who ate at your burger joint—we’re talking at least projectile vomit and probably worse—over the course of eight whole years, bankrupting not just your particular burger joint but all other burger joints like it, thereby sullying the whole idea of burgers as we know them.

Or something on that order of magnitude. And, as far as I know, that’s never happened in the history of burger-flipping.

Therefore. I’m not an idiot: I’m not nostalgic for eight long years of incompetence and anti-intellectualism in the highest office in the land (nay world). If you’ve been paying any attention at all to this here blog, you won’t be surprised by that assertion.

Also, I love Barry. Yes, he and his are stumbling around some as they find their stride. Aint perfect—why on earth would it be?—but it’ll prolly work it out in the end because they’re smart and they want to do right by the basic principles of what is Good and Right and Pure. (And besides, our alternative is…?)

Now that we got that settled. Here’s why I miss W, the poor lug:

I think it’s a little like at the end of Catcher in the Rye, where Holden says you should never write about anything that happened to you because you just start missing everybody. George W. Bush happened to me/us, just like Maurice the Evil Bellhop happened to Holden Caulfield. (And Maurice was a much bigger jerk.) W is an inextricable part of the American experience for those of us who are living this particular version of it.

And while we’re at it, let’s review the American experience in general: the folks who got the ball rolling burned “witches” and eventually, in effect, wrote the institution of slavery—fricking human bondage—into the official books. Things were so catawampus they were like, you know what, everybody oughta have a gun. If they want.

Given the fact that we’re building on such sandy soil as that, it’s a wonder we’ve made it this far.

Here’s the inconvenient truth (Hat Tip: you know who you are!): democracy aint no perfect solution. It’s only the best solution we got. The promise of America is that we have committed (eventually and, in some cases, way too reluctantly) to the concepts of universal suffrage, equal representation (as long as you don’t live in DC!), balance of powers, the rule of law. And from there we take our lumps. That’s all it is. No guarantees.

Sometimes (okay, too often) that means you get somebody like W. Somebody who, yes, has some unfair advantages. Name, money, access, and privilege normal folks don’t have. Somebody who isn’t—and never will be—good at the job we elected him to do. Maybe even somebody who has an axe to grind.

But because we commit to this weird idea that everybody gets a vote and we’re just gonna add ‘em all up—and then, just in case, let’s put it into some weird electoral-college calculus nobody really gets—to figure out who makes all the important decisions for four whole fricking years…oh yeah, and there’s absolutely no way whoever it is could really prepare for the enormity and impossibility of that task…well, any failures we get aren’t just one person’s. They’re ours.

I never voted for George W. Bush—I fricking cried in frustration/fury when I watched Fahrenheit 911…in the movie theater, that’s how dyed in the wool my “progressivism” (a.k.a. socialism) is. But the Bush administration’s abject failure is as much mine as it is his/theirs.

I don’t blame you if you don’t get that. It’s tempting to not get that. But. If you do, in fact, choose to not get that…

1. You’ve never played team sports. Which everybody should probably have to do, at some point in their lives, in order to vote.
   
2. You’re an ideological purist. Just like Dick Cheney.
   
3. Empathy isn’t your strong suit.
   
4. You’re watching way too much Keith Olberman.
   
5. You’re probably forgetting all the things you could’ve done, within the very broad context of the democratic process, that actually might’ve made a difference —e.g., taught not in an inner city school but a rural school; written and called and otherwise ceaselessly badgered your congressman/senator in the late 1990s to implore them not to waste the government’s precious time and resources on a frivolous impeachment trial that no reasonable person believed in; given your time, money, and effort to Al Gore and John Kerry; given your time, money, and effort to John McCain in 2000; read the Patriot Act; run for office yourself; and, oh, by the way, you yourself know and can recite in public how a bill becomes a law; etc...

The 0.0000000138% of you out there who actually did all of #5 above, you guys can be as haughty and indignant and unforgiving as you want. The rest of us—even us card carrying "progressives”—are stuck with the spoils of democracy as we know it.

That means you, too, Pop. Even from beyond the grave. Here’s hoping that, from there, all this stuff seems trivial at best.

Baseball Superhero Alex Rodriguez: Dumb Like a Fox!

Everybody's all "Ooh, A-Rod -- How come you're so stupid to let those metrosexual men's mag people (Jason, uh, "Gay" -- did somebody say nomme de plume?!) take pictures of you where you end up looking like a clueless and pathologically narcissistic tool?"

Not so fast, Smartypantses! Who/what entity stands for the quintessence of American intellect these days? Why, it's the Best Buy Geek Squad, of course. (Duh.) Therefore. It's fairly obvious, people: A-Rod is simply dressing up like a Geek Squad guy in a savvy media effort to borrow some of the trappings of that particular brand -- i.e., know-how, competence in the crunch (hard-drive meltdowns; playoff ABs, esp w/ runners in scoring position; etc.), the opposite of willful ignorance and rank stupidity. All in an effort to inaugurate his resurrection as a cultural icon that transcends even American sport.

Clearly. And let's just say it's a safe bet he's not the only Geek Squad guy to make out with himself in the mirror. So, you know, enough already: Leave Britney alone, okay?!

Newsflash: Benazir Bhutto Was Hot

The most keenly observant among you (who am I kidding: all Beitel-Blog readers are keenly observant!) will have noticed by now the Benazir Bhutto bio-doc in the wacky Amazon carousel over there. If you’re super-keenly observant and you’ve been around a while, you will have noticed that I’m trying to write me a story about ol’ Benazir. A story about her that is not really a story about her. It’s coming along nicely, thanks for asking. (FYI: It has footnotes. Yay!) More to our purposes at the moment, I feel the need to come clean.

I so totally have a crush on the martyred Minister Bhutto.

Here’s the whole story. A while back, I was reading one of these things on the mainstream interwebs about courtship and mating in humans. And somebody—a lady—got on there and was talking about how her boyfriend so totally had a crush on Minister Bhutto (she wasn’t martyred yet). And I was like, Lady, he just thinks you want him to have a crush on Minister Bhutto. Because that’s, like, way more cultured and smart and, you know, mature than having a crush on Jessica Simpson or Jessica Alba (how come they’re all named Jessica?). Like every other humanoid possessed of a Y chromosome on Planet Earth in the New Millenium Industrialized World.

Anyway, that got the fictive germ embedded: Dude who's got a thing for Benazir. What would that story look like?

Then, two Christmases ago, when Mrs. Bhutto was gunned down in Rawalpindi as she campaigned for her third term as Prime Minister of Pakistan, I couldn't get the story concept out of my head. Pretty much had to write it. So I started researching her life and times.

Turns out the unassailable, God's honest truth is that Benazir was a complete dish. Politics aside (you know, what’s a little corruption and unmet potential amongst friends?), the lady could charm a body six ways to Sunday. And I’m not just talking the twenty-something Benazir—as the photo above would indicate: Harvard + Oxford + Reedy Version of Sophia Loren? Uh, duh. Of course she was hot then. But it wasn’t just that. I’m transcribing the interviews from the aforementioned bio-doc and it’s just unmistakable. Even in her fifties. She just had It. One minute she’s wonking it up and the next she’s flirting effortlessly. (I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers—more on that later—and dreamy Benazir totally fits his argument: successful people aren’t just smart and talented in their respective fields; they got mad people skills too.)

So. Yeah. Dude dating the mainstream interwebs courtship lady, he’s got a point. Give him his props. (Even though he probably also has a crush on all manner of pop-star Jessicas too. Because that’s pretty much the way us boys do.)

Liveblogging the Mississippi Delta in June!

This just in: dirt-poor people live right here in the US-of-A, and the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the uninitiated) wants you to know about it. They're fittin-a have a march (rally? conflagration?) in the Mississippi Delta this June to underscore the plight of folks living in what the SCLC calls (and, really, what rock you gotta live under to argue with them?) Third World conditions. This is your Humble Beitel-Blogger's solemn pledge: you'll have a front row seat on any SCLC Freedom March come June. That's because if they really do throw this par-tay, we (Royal We!) are gonna blog the sucker. Live and in-person. With pitchers. June 19-21. Be there or be square.

Preoccupations: A Found Poem

Here's what I do sometimes when I'm bored and the carousel widget's gotten old (Admittedly, that takes a while: round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows! Fun times...): I just scroll down to the "Preoccupations" section in the bottom righthand corner of Ye Olde Blog. Damn thing's a veritable found poem. What's more, it's a living-breathing-changing-growing found poem. A literary gift that keeps on giving. And that's what we're here for: contributing to the commonweal via the idiosyncratic juxtaposition of odd words and phrases. On the interwebs.

Only in America!

(Okay, gotta go get a $40 haircut. Stylists gotta eat too -- there's a Depression on, dang it!)

The Writing Life Update: No Love from NYC

Just so's you know: this is the face I make when confronted with the world's blaring indifference to my unique and transcendent brand of Genius. As you might imagine, it is a face I make way more often than that leafglow-smiley-boy face over there in the upper righthand corner. (And, yes, I do wear that sweater every single day of my life. It's a cool sweater.)

Anyhoo. I most recently made the above face yesterday afternoon, when I got Ye Olde It's-Not-You-It's-Me e-mail from Agent #3 (actually Agent #3's assistant), this time a really well-known and influential guy in NYC who represents a friend of mine.

Three rejections is a drop in the bucket, of course, but I'm leaning towards some advice I got from the inimitably cool/talented Rebecca Brown when I was at Centrum last October: agents don't like weird stuff. And this was before the end of commerce as we know it (and we feel fine). Sure, you can point to all manner of artsy weirdness that's sold--and sold big--in the big houses. But they're exceptions and not the rule. Brown's point is that if you fancy yourself an artiste (no use in denying that shoe fits me), you're probably gonna have to do your own legwork and go Indie. And, you know, I don't mind that so much. I'm way more Werner-Herzog-Tom-Waits-Miranda-July than I am Madonna-Steven-Spielberg or even Junot Diaz.

You are what you are. You gotta own it.

So that's what I'm fittin-a do. Got a list and I'm checking it twice. If any of yous self-styled artistes out there know of some cool small (reputable) presses I can query, feel free to slap something up in the comments section. Or if you yourself acquire cool books for an equally cool small (reputable) press, zap me an e-mail and let's see if we can't do some bidness! I promise not to sneer at you...as long as you let me wear that sweater in the author shot on the back of the book.

Birmingham: An Empty American City on Any Old Saturday Night

In the 1870s, the city of Birmingham, Alabama, sprouted up at the very tail end of the Appalachian mountain chain. There were natural reasons: by luck or providence, all the resources needed to make pig iron lie buried in the ridged-up earth around Jones Valley, where the city sits. There were manmade resources as well, namely the confluence of two big railroads—the Alabama & Chattanooga and the South & North Alabama. Kaboom. Seemingly out of nowhere—Nothing in my hands…Poof! Ta-da!—the Magic City appears.

And then came the Twentieth Century.

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There are lots of reasons Birmingham is what it is today, some of which are (too?) easy to point out—fully 137 years of sundry forms of racial strife and class disparity; the death of the steel industry; finishing runner-up to Atlanta in an airport deal that set the two cities on vastly different tracks. There are other reasons too, reasons I don’t pretend to fully understand. Whatever the causes, population in the city proper has decreased by more than 25% since the 1960s. Jefferson County, of which Birmingham is the county seat, is poised to file for bankruptcy because it’s piled up a fetid mound of sewer debt. Great hulking ruined buildings loom here and there in the core of the city. There are quixotic efforts at an urban renaissance (lofts, a growing rep as a foodie town, etc) but the fact remains that a metro area of 1.1 million has a downtown heart that flat-lines after five and on weekends.

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With all that said, I think it’s all too easy to deride these mid-sized American cities that, like Birmingham, live dual lives. A vibrant (or semi-vibrant) diurnal existence of businessfolk and bustle followed by a freakishly good nighttime impersonation of a bombed out city in the developing world.

This is my effort to explain why I love this city, even—no, especially—at night. This is my effort to explain why I am at home here.

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I love this city at night because—narcissistic blogger that I am—it is just like me. This, I learned walking around in it last night, camera in hand.

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Walker Percy has a great essay about the Grand Canyon. Actually, it’s not about the Grand Canyon as much as it is about the people who go to the Grand Canyon and spend all their time taking pictures of it. Instead of getting as close to the edge of the outsized geologic maw as they dare, immersing themselves in its God-breathed enormity. Percy’s argument is as convincing now as it was prescient then. I spend my semi-bustling diurnal life teaching the literary arts, such as they are, to smart, artsy middle– and high-schoolers. I am convinced these smart, artsy teenagers live the world through a camera lens. It’s hard not to believe a significant portion of the human experience is lost in all that shutterbugging.

But.

I spent last night shutterbugging in rainy, chilly downtown Birmingham, and it taught me something. Something big. Actually several somethings big.

I took still shots and—wannabe Ricky Fitts that I am—I took moving ones as well. Both shared some secrets they held, about the city and about me, but it was especially the video—not just the sights but the sounds, too—that brought about the most significant nuggets of enlightenment for me:

Nugget of Enlightenment #1

Everything moves. Everything makes a noise. Still, silent places—and people—are never as still and silent as they seem. The sirens never stop sounding. The lights never stop blinking. A packed city bus or a solitary life speeds through the intersection of Nothing and Something.

Nugget of Enlightenment #2

A traffic signal is a story. Beginning. Middle. End. Inciting incident. Rising tension. Climax and resolution. I don’t mean that as a metaphor. You can see it very clearly through a camera lens, when you’re not the driver but the watcher. Pacing. Anticipation. The inexorable life force of Change followed by a resonant sense of closure and the sneaking suspicion of renewal associated therewith. Just like Aesop’s fables.

Nugget of Enlightenment #3

There is a whole Cosmos at work in our peripheral vision. Ghosts. Doppelgangers. Countless parallel realities filled with joy, suffering, weight and insignificance. We “know” they’re there without really knowing they’re there. Like pheromones or the sub-auditory hum of electromagnetic waves, they change our lives irrevocably.

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I’ve lived in the Birmingham metro area for coming up on seven years now and I have often tried in vain to understand why I feel at home here. I don’t share its history. I’m an ex-pat here. Of course, the writerly temperament lends itself to expatriation, and that could explain a lot of why I like it here. I can pretend I’m a stranger in a strange land—without having to learn a new language or eat strange foods or worry too much about being stolen by mercenaries.

Last night’s tooling and noodling around now has me thinking it’s more than just that. In fact, it might not be Birmingham’s otherness that attracts me. It might be that I’ve found a place that’s just as full of paradoxes as I am. Like me, Birmingham—Birmingham at night in particular—projects austerity whether it means to or not. A bare-bones ascetic quality. The hair-shirt kind of asceticism.

But there’s also a rich aesthetic transcendence embedded there too.

Yin. Yang.

To wit:

In the midst of all of last night’s hi-falutin’ navel-gazing and nobody-asked-you documentarianism, I stopped in at John’s City Café, a Birmingham fixture that has itself been recently revitalized by new management. I ate a big fat juicy cheeseburger, drank a stout, brown beer. Chased it with an impossible-to-finish monster slice of peanut butter pie. What was odd was that everywhere I looked, there seemed to be sets of twins (or something like it).

The they-don't-know-they're-pretty urbanite college co-eds with their parents in the booth adjacent to mine, talking about how the kids at whatever Midwestern school they go to all refer to soft drinks as “pop.” The wide-eyed tow-headed pig-tailed little girls who dutifully mind their manners as their First-Baptist Ozzie-and-Harriet young parents chat amiably about where to make the reservations for Easter brunch. Not to mention the two or three gay couples who, for whatever reason(s), have chosen to partner with someone who is more or less their spitting image.

So I suppose, last but not least, here comes…

Nugget of Enlightenment #4

Daytime Birmingham and nighttime Birmingham aren’t opposites; they’re twins. People forget that twins sometimes hate each other, but everyone knows they usually can’t live without each other.

And maybe-just-maybe that’s the source of my deeply felt identification with this city that isn’t really mine. There is the “me” who relishes the simple things I do to simply feed myself. Boil rolled oats. Soak dried beans. Chop onions, garlic, carrots, bell pepper. Unseal sardine tin. This is a “me” that doesn’t mind feeling just a little bit hungry all the time.

But then there is the “me” with the juice of a half-pound cheeseburger, a glorious shade of pink in the middle, dribbling down his chin. A big, broad grin on his inward face.

Both versions are as real and necessary as they are wholly separate, distinct. What’s more, both know—“know”—the other one’s there, like it or not. The resultant push-pull between them might mean that progress for the whole they share comes in maddening fits and starts, if at all. It definitely means we have to take our unexpected Enlightenments when and where we find them.

Luckily, last night I learned a secret truth about both me and Birmingham: we wouldn’t have it any other way. Even if we could.

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Note: Let's just say it's a little bit like when The Beatles went on Ed Sullivan here at Beitel-Blog, what with the multi-media Tom-Foolery and hijinks. In the words of one Tom Friedman: Holy. Cow. Gamechanger. More (and better) where that came from. Just you wait and see.

BBQ and Bands at Greencup Books Today!

Word on the street is that there's a Rock-and-Roll/BYOBBQ par-tay at Greencup Books in beautiful downtown Birmingham* starting in t-minus 9 minutes. Go!

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* Speaking of which, stay tuned for the write-up of last night's Magic City musings. It's gonna be bigger and badder than ever. Don't want to spoil the fun, but here's a hint: Two words...Media. Empire. That's all I'll say. It'll be up by 9 p.m. and you'll wanna be there when it happens.

Sunday Review of Links: 03.15.09

News & Opinion
...The King is dead! Long live the King!...Steven Johnson, media/culture critic extraordinaire, on the end of the newspaper as we know it (and he feels fine). An absolute must read. (stevenberlinjohnson.com)

...Water is the new oil. In Chile, unfettered regulation of water rights and the resultant speculation and corporate greed (sound familiar?) is leaving some people, literally, hanging out to dry. (NYT)

...Robert Reich pretends he's Paul Volcker (with a liberal [Pun?!] dash of Chicken Little [Pun #2: Get it? Reich's short! He even says so himself!!] thrown in for good measure) so he can blog what he would've said to 44 on Friday, when the real Volcker actually did have an audience with the Prez. The crux? "You suck! So does your Treasury Secretary!! Hey, I'm really tall now!!!" (robertreich.blogspot)

...Yesterday was Einstein's birthday. To celebrate, The Atlantic has recycled "Atomic War or Peace," an as-told-to he "penned" in its November 1947 issue. As you might guess, the upshot is "Atomic war, bad." But the fun part is where he says the UN ought to have nukes, as long as it promises not to use them. That's just like Al, all thinking outside the box all the time. (theatlantic.com)

...Let's see: dead newspapers. Water wars. Obama = Hoover. Nu-cue-lar war. How can today's links get any more grim? How about this: the HIV/AIDS rate in the nation's capital is higher than it is in W. Africa. Let that sink in. (WaPo)

...Okay, so we can't just leave it there. Let's perk this party up, shall we? Tom Friedman's got a potential "holy cow game-changer" for us: LASER BEAMS!!! (NYT)

Sports
...Looks like even the flagships of American sport -- the Cowboys and Yankees -- picked the wrong year to quit sniffing glue. Or to build billion dollar stadia. But if Jerry Jones and the Steinbrenners think they got it rough, they can think again. At least they're not trying to play hockey in Anaheim. Or keep LeBron in Cleveland. (si.com)

Books
...The National Book Critics Circle handed out its annual awards this past Thursday. WaPo's Ron Charles, who won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, has some thoughts about what (and how) book reviewers should be reviewing. That is, it's like Grandma Beitelman used to preach: if you ain't got nothing good to say...(PubWeekly)

Alabamiana
...Pastor Jim says charity's nice and all, but for truly intractable problems, it takes a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. So, says the preacherman, quit the disingenuous anti-government whining. (annistonstar.com)

Watch This!


Einstein makes the case for Beitel-Blog! The sound's spotty, so here's a transcript: "Now I will add a few words unprepared. [Laughter] A country becomes really a soul only in consciously serving the intellectual life, and in the case of our Jewish people it was really this endeavour, which conserved the Jewish people as a whole. We would not be in existence today, as a community of people, without this continued...activity* into learning and in thought and in literature." (YouTube)

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* He/she who slapped this up on YouTube has deciphered the text of Al's remarks, largely doing a good job of it. This is the only spot where I beg to differ with the transcription. Einstein stalls as he searches for the words "this continued activity." The transcriber sets that sequence down as "this continued, or discontinued ... ehh ... activity," but that doesn't make much sense. The guy was, obviously, a champion of relativity, but that's an either-or construction that renders the whole point moot, does it not? Methinks he was making like one of them stratospherically smart people who persevorate a little, repeating himself -- "this continued, uh, this continued, uh, activity" -- as he formulated exactly what he was trying to say. O' course, I could be all wet. If somebody can explain why "discontinued" makes sense there, the comments section cries out for your wisdom and insight!

The Beitel-Blog Read/Watch-Along Program!

You'll notice a snazzy new carousel-thingy over there in the righthand column. It's got books on it. It's got movies on it. (And if you hold down one of the arrow keys, it's sure to induce vertigo in no time!) What gives? you ask. Excellent question, my dears, but I would expect no less from the likes of you. You are Beitel-Blog readers and that means you are, each of you, possessed of keenly inquiring minds. Here's the scoop.

Seems that what this blog has to offer the world is a simple service, rarefied and esoteric as that service may be. Over the course of the last coupla years, we've honed what we do here at Team Beitel-Blog (Royal We!) to something on the order of cultural filtration.

Because, let's face it, who really has time to be a full-fledged North American intellectual?

You want to read Literature -- from antiquity to the uber-contemporary and back again. You want to read three newspapers. You want to watch indie documentaries and read poetry and listen to NPR. You want to know who Tzipi Livni is. Steven Johnson and Marla Olmstead, too. And you want to mull all the significance and synergies and scratch your chin in wonderment. But you also want to be a real human being. Who eats Twizzlers. And watches TV. And holds hands (et al) with other real human beings.

Beitel-Blog in general -- and the Read/Watch-Along Program in particular -- provides just the puzzle pieces to fill those odd-shaped cultural holes in your life. The carousel represents what I -- Your Humble Beitel-Blogger -- am currently reading and watching (in lieu of Twizzlers, TV, and holding hands). By implication, it represents what I think you, the Beitel-Blog Reader Who Need Not Be Humble, could be reading and watching too.

I'll update it weekly, along with a post that gives a little gloss of each new book or movie. Something strikes your fancy, you can click on the carousel-link to zoom on over to Amazon* or you can go to your favorite neighborhood brick-and-mortar bookstore. Read/watch along and, if the spirit moves you, slap up a pertinent comment. Just like a Paris salon in the 1920s. Except with way less drunk Hemingways yammering on about bullfighthing and such.

Think of the Read/Watch-Along Program as an ever-changing list of course texts for the on-going Humanities survey that is Life in the Industrialized World. A survey for which every day is the final exam.

Or not. You can just live vicariously through me, the aspiring -- non-Twizzler-eating/non-TV-watching(sorta)/non-hand-holding -- North American intellectual.

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* In the spirit of full disclosure, if you click the Amazon links on this site, a very small portion of Jeff Bezos's money will go to a certain Humble Beitel-Blogger to defray a tiny fraction of the sundry costs (tangible and otherwise) of his (that is to say, my) multifarious but admittedly difficult to quantify genius.

Cultural Writing On Demand (Redux!)

It worked pretty well last time, so let's try it again. Vote for this weekend's cultural writing topic! Over there to the right, pick your fave. The topic with the most votes gets a meaty essay by Sunday at 9:00 p.m CDT! This is the American democratic process at work here. Let the people's will be done!

Update/Results: Voting booths closed early this (Saturday [3/14]) morning, and the winner is..."Birmingham: An Empty American City on Any Old [Rainy:(] Saturday Night"!! Check back by 9 p.m. tomorrow night (Sunday [3/15]) for the resultant essay -- and, as always, thanks for playing along with the interactive democracy. ("You can't win if you don't play!!!" -- B. Obama)

Lama Don't Take No Guff

Don't let all the fancy colors and the filigree and the robes and the weird throat singing fool you: when it comes to the Dalai Lama, you mess with the bull, you get the horns. (Big hitter, the Lama.*) Watch to him lay down the law to the Chinese government today. Take that, Chairman Mao!

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*Carl Spackler on caddying for the Dalai Lama. (YouTube)

Harshing 44's Gig

First off, the Great Depression 2.0 now has an official logo!!! Awesome. There it is over there to the left. And here's a communist radio show about it. America with stars, plus some kind of plant-ish/green sorta thing. Plus cogs! Cogs are good, right? That means something's, like, working or...something. Yay! Man, I'm glad that's over. The Depression really sucked, right?

Okay, so seriously, though: why's everybody all Barry-sucks? What gives? The communists had one other thing on there tonight about how Barry's spinning too many plates -- so says Eric Cantor (R-VA) and David Brooks (must be true, right?).

Then ol' Howard Fineman of Newsweek says how the Washington Establishment is starting to sour on 44 because he's working too fast, trying too hard to steer things down the middle of the political road. Oh and plus he and his over their heads.

I'm all for holding everybody's feet to the fire, Barry's included. We are, however, on Day 50(ish). Prolly we should give the dude a break for now. Yeah, he's got a low-B average so far (word is yet ANOTHER appointee is backing out) but let's see how things are this time next year. I mean, we do have a cool new logo...

All's Quiet on the Western Front. And the Eastern Front. In Fact, It's Quiet Pretty Much Everywhere...

So this is good news: according to the good folks at the NBC News World Blog, absolutely nothing worth blogging about has happened in the entire world since Saturday. (Hence you get crazy inconsequential liveblogs of fancy NPR shows yesterday!) No news is good news, right? Unless there's been some highly orchestrated plot to kidnap all the NBC News World Bloggers simultaneously with ultimate designs on, uh, ah...whatever. All I'm saying is: Hey NBC News World Blog, how come you got no [posts] up on the wall?* ("You want posts on the wall?" says Andrea Mitchell. "Get your own blog, you can do what you wanna do." Uh, Andrea...duh: This is my blog. So there!)

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*Do the Right Thing - No Brothers On The Wall

Liveblogging This American Life!

As faithful readers of Beitel-Blog know, Ira Glass has me all a-Twitter. Therefore. A new feature: liveblogging (via Twitter feed) this week's installment of This American Life. Could suck. Could be the greatest thing on the internets since Craigslist. Who knows? Let's see what happens! 6:00 p.m. central daylight (!) time. That's less than thirty minutes from now!! Be there or be square...

Sunday Review of Links: 03.08.09

News & Opinion
...Wookin pa nub -- that looks familiar. Things are more multicultural than ever before, right? So ethnicity is less of a factor in dating and marriage, right? Uh, not exactly. Studies of U.S. Census figures show more and more children of immigrants are dating and marrying within their own ethnic groups. (WaPo)
...Saudi Arabian Graffiti? Bored young Saudis are tricking out their rides and turning to reckless driving as a salve for all manner of cultural ills. (NYT)
...Sign of the Apocalypse? MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Together again. On stage. In...Utah. Yeah...might wanna go ahead and break out the ammo and canned goods. Just in case. (Newsweek)
...Tom Friedman says 2008 will take its place -- among 1861, 1929, 1941, 1963, 1968, and so on -- in the Historical Markers Hall of Fame. But not for wars, assassinations, or great big crashes. No, it'll be because everybody everywhere (or darn close to it) woke up to a new mantra: Give me sustainable substance (economic, environmental, cultural, et al) or give me death. (NYT)

Sports
...Who can understand how soccer -- er, uh, "football" -- teams figure out who's on what team and why? For what it's worth, the David Beckham saga (will the hunky midfielder stay in the U.S. or won't he) has been resolved, for the time being, in Goldilocks fashion. (ESPN)

Books
...One literary agent is on a relentless campaign to accentuate the positive in the cratering publishing industry. (NathanBransford.blogspot.com)
...Steven Johnson, of Everything Bad Is Good for You fame, just got a new Kindle and -- predictably -- is pretty bullish. (StevenBerlinJohnson.com)

Alabamiana
...Pastor Jim calls on religious conservatives to put their moral money where their collective mouth is: gambling's bad for poor people but so is a regressive tax system. (AnnistonStar)
...Wade Kwon gets the inside scoop on the administrative comings and goings at Birmingham's Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival. (WadeonBirmingham.com)

[U Can't Touch] This!


Sign of the Apocalypse, Part II. At first blush, what we have here is grainy footage of the MC Hammer/Vanilla Ice show in Utah. Let's just say the energy in the arena is, uh, flagging. But take a gander at the foreground. A sea of Utahns stands stock-still. Look closely and you'll see that a majority of them are -- instead of dancing, giving themselves over to the kitschy moment -- capturing it all via their camera phones. So that they can upload it on YouTube. So that guys like me can slap it on their blogs and be snarky about it. A neverending feed-forward of questionable consumption. Sheesh. Okay, all together now: Give me sustainable substance or... (YouTube)

What Nick Hornby Thinks You Should Read

Nick Hornby -- of High Fidelity, About a Boy, etc fame -- makes me wish:

1) I was him.

2) I at least lived in London so I could...

3) meet him for coffee once a week and listen to him talk about stuff I should be reading, listening to, etc.

Here's his latest blog post, where he recommends about a gagillion books, including rationales for each. Call it the Nick Hornby PhD Reading List. Now that's a PhD that might actually be worth getting.

Bank "Bailouts" = Chemo?

First, a shout out to WaPo's Steven Pearlstein who, way back in April of last year, called the whole financial meltdown and pinned it not just on rogue bankers but on us, too. Consumers. Who borrowed and borrowed and borrowed some more, just to sustain lifestyles that -- while they weren't necessarily the fulfillment of champagne wishes and caviar dreams -- were unsustainable.

Okay. When folks call their shots like that, I give them some credence. And Pearlstein's now saying we have to pony up -- to the tune of something like two MORE trillion dollars -- to fully capitalize the banks and make everything kinda-sorta copacetic. Some folks are balking: we have to solve the debt debacle by going further into debt? Yeah, says Steve Pearlstein, and he makes a good analogy. It's like chemo. Chemo makes you sick as hell, but it also kills the cancer that's eating away at you. Same deal here. Until the dude's wrong, he's got my ear.

Toxic Assets 101

Speaking of Ira Glass: the bank debacle made easy on the most recent This American Life.*

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* On an unrelated note, I've decided what I want to be when I grow up. You guessed it: Ira Glass. Except I won't spread incendiary rumors about people's homelives. Unless it's completely warranted.

Robert Siegel Reads Beitel-Blog!

How else to explain this largely positive piece in this afternoon's ATC, all about the resurrection of Birmingham's Sloss Furnaces (see above) as a historical landmark and metalwork Mecca? You see, a couple of weeks ago your humble Beitel-Blogger whined about how ATC/NPR was all about pointing out all the crummy stuff Alabamians have endured, are enduring, and will likely endure for the foreseeable future. Oila! Squeeky wheel gets the grease, eh Robert? Now that I've got your attention, Ira Glass is spreading rumors that you've got two wives. I know this can't possibly be true, but...better to be safe than sorry, especially when it comes to Public Radio Demigods. Please feel free to respond, for the record, in the comments section. (And thanks for reading!)

Nick Hornby In Defense of Slumdog

Convincingly, I might add.

The Rise and Fall of Joaquin Phoenix and Its Implications for the Future of Contemporary Art

Photo by Matt Sayles/AP

The iconic American College Football Coach Paul W. “Bear” Bryant is credited with a gridiron truism: one of three things can happen when a team throws a forward pass—and two of them, said The Bear, are bad.

Something similar might be said of the curious case of Joaquin Phoenix, American Movie Star, who has grown himself an endtimes beard and taken to wearing outsized shades in all venues. If you are somehow unaware that River Phoenix's little brother has, as they say, gone rogue, avail yourself of this Newsweek interview. Much has been made of his recent bizarre appearance on Letterman, but the print interview has more words and is therefore more instructive.

But back to The Bear's truism. One of three things is happening to Mr. Phoenix (what a delicious coincidence of a name for someone who seems hell bent on incinerating what he has been only so that he can make a newer, sootier version of himself). But I think the ratio’s different. Only one of them is bad for sure. The other two could, to varying degrees, help us understand the role of art and artists in the contemporary workaday world. And that’s good, right?

To wit.

The Worst Case Scenario: JP the Brat

Let us start with the irredeemable. In this case, JP is merely acting out in an extravagant and (likely) drug-fueled frenzy of petulance. Too cool for school—or, more precisely, too cool for promoting his latest movie—JP could very well be sabotaging the marketing types who want him to do this, say that, again and again and again. This is bad because it isn’t very interesting. In this scenario, JP is a live-for-the-moment narcissist who couldn’t care less about “the role of art and artists in the contemporary workaday world” or whatever. That doesn’t make him evil necessarily; it just makes him boring.

The Next Best Case: JP the Anti-Establishment Emo Kid Brandishing the Blunt Instrument of Self-Destruction

Now we move on to the second possibility, and while it is likely that this scenario ends the ugliest, there is a certain potential for transcendence in it regardless.

I have to get somewhat roundabout here and reference Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. (Click here for Malcolm Gladwell's cogent overview/review of the book.) Johnson’s thesis is that as popular culture—particularly popular media—has gotten more complex over the last fifty or sixty years, it has served to make people in the industrialized world “smarter”—better at solving open-ended problems, more able to thread multiple related narratives together, more comfortable in a continual state of not-knowing. In short, it has made us more intellectually supple.

Johnson uses the example of video games to illustrate his point. Video games are hard, Johnson argues. Gamers are invariably plopped into a world that is not of their own creation and they are required to go on an intricate, time-consuming seeker’s quest to master this peculiar, flashy otherworld, a place where someone else has dreamed up all sorts of pitfalls and pratfalls for them and where failures far outnumber successes. Gamers often spend gobs of time, effort, and energy in pursuit of that tantalizing and rarefied success. Those that achieve it get the ultimate gamer’s reward: a moment of self-actualization, the redemption that comes from closure and accomplishment. Whether he beats the game or not, sooner or later, with or without this sense of achievement, the gamer moves on to the next game—and/or multiple-choice test—armed with an enhanced set of problem solving skills.

That’s all well and good if you want to spend a life solving problems other people have dreamed up for you. It’s probably less useful in helping folks to develop their own individuated sense(s) of creative autonomy, and then to dream up worlds all their own.

If I had to guess, I’d say the pursuit of American Movie Stardom is not unlike giving yourself over, heart and soul, to a video game. It requires the ability to work within various and shifting sets of rules—someone else’s rules: screenwriters, agents, directors, producers, casting agents, fans, other actors. Etc. And it’s o-so-hard to figure out what’s real and what’s not.

Joaquin Phoenix is an American Movie Star. A good one. By any standard, he has mastered the American Movie Star game. Taken it to the umpteenth level and slain the proverbial dragon. Some gamers who’ve mastered the game just hit reset and start all over again. They’re satisfied with an endless string of victory laps that last long after they should’ve shut the game off and turned their attention to something—anything—else. (See Cruise, Tom.)

But others want to find a new game to master and maybe that’s what’s happened to JP. The American Movie Star game was fun, but now he’s ready to go do something else. The only trouble is it’s not as easy as all that. Lots and lots of people have lots and lots (money, time, escapist fantasies of all stripes) invested in the idea of “Joaquin Phoenix, American Movie Star.” “Joaquin Phoenix, American Movie Star” is a part of someone else’s diversionary amusement. Lots of someone-elses. He’s not allowed to leave the game. Not without a fight.

So he grows a beard and he sticks his gum on Letterman’s desk and falls off stages in Vegas. In short, he does his dead-level best to convince us he’s lost his marbles. And maybe he has.

If this is what’s going on, the best JP can hope for is banishment and a whole lotta Tsk-tsk, he used to be so good at what he did. Whatever happened to him anyway? As long as he doesn’t use all that free time (and excess cash) to find some new zealotry to champion, (see Stevens, Cat and Kaczynski, Ted), he’ll get at least a semblance of the blissful obscurity he seems to want. As for us, well, we’ll get at least one half-baked head-scratcher of a blog post out of the deal.

The Third Way: JP, the New Millenium Andy Kaufman

But then there’s one truly happy scenario in which the joke’s on us, and JP emerges as a kind of smirking guru. I’m referring, of course, to the Andy Kaufman scenario.

When Kaufman pulled his drawn-out shenanigans with professional wrestler Jerry Lawler in the 1980s, it wasn’t just to get a laugh. In fact, he carried it out so far, so long, it stopped being funny and became an extended rumination about what’s real and what’s not. In a culture where Entertainment reigns, is it more entertaining or less entertaining if it’s real? And what happens when that entertainment value is gone? When do someone’s public antics become impolite and downright off-putting. More important, when do the people who can’t avert their eyes start to question their own role in the whole charade? Like any good performance artist, Kaufman was trying to make things uncomfortable for his audience. He was trying to agitate and thereby provoke thought. To what end? Well, I don’t know, art? Enlightenment? Maybe somewhere in between?

There’s a chance that’s what JP and his buddy, Casey Affleck, are up to as they document all of this on film. Maybe they will someday show it back to us and, without having to wink or nudge or even say a word, help us understand that nothing on a silver screen is as real as real can be.

As most everybody these days is starving for not just "Reality" but some honest-to-goodness Truth in the public sphere, that would be quite the artistic gift indeed.

Sunday Review of Links: 03.01.09

News & Opinion
...Need more proof that Mitt Romney is a mutant space alien robot? Look no further than his C-PAC resurrection. He. Will. Not. Be. Stopped. (NYT)
...The resurgence of the Italian Mafia points to a silver lining in all this economic kablooey: no more gray area. Now you know from the very beginning that the people lending you money are criminals. (WaPo)
...Tom Friedman defends Hill's penchant for delegation at State. (PS...Mexico's the new Pakistan!) (NYT)
...What with all this inexorable marching toward healthcare reform, you'd think insurance companies would be crying foul already. And you'd be wrong. (The New Republic)
...You think the Great Depression 2.0 is your biggest worry? Think again. Monster Nicaraguan bats!! (Time)

Sports
...Don't look now, but the NBA is running on fumes. (The Sportsguy)

Books
...Whatever happened to slow, sad short stories full of good old angsty suburban ennui, with a spot of alcoholic self pity thrown in for good measure? In other words: Where have you gone, John Cheever? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. (Newsweek)

Alabamiana
...Snow!
...Pastor Jim would rather not preach to a congregation full of folks packing heat, thank you very much. (Anniston Star)

Watch This!


"Reunions" by John Cheever as read by Richard "Don't Call Me John" Ford. (YouTube by way of The New Yorker)