Stimulihttp://www.good.is/A collection of essays on the newest trends in culture.Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:58:18 -0800CakePHPhourly1en-us <![CDATA[Music for the Recession]]> http://www.good.is/post/music-for-the-recession/ http://www.good.is/post/music-for-the-recession/

Chuck Eddy on why there isn't a modern soundtrack to our economic woes.

When American Graffiti, revolving around a 1962 radio station's "oldies weekend," hit theaters in 1973, the pop hits of the 1950s-all newer then than the first Beastie Boys album is now-seemed ancient, as if dropped from some alternate universe. But over the past quarter-century, as songs of the 20th century's early decades have rematerialized first on vinyl reissues, and then on CD box sets, and have eventually become ubiquitous everywhere from movie soundtracks to Starbucks to MP3s available at split-second notice, the music has managed to lose its remoteness. Somehow, technology has the effect of compressing time.

So maybe it shouldn't come as a shock that now, as we scarily slump our way into an economic downturn destined to put Carter/Reagan-era stagflation to shame, music that came out around the Great Depression is feeling curiously current. In 1998, the venerable reissue label Yazoo Records compiled 46 songs of bank failure, credit collapse, rent inflation, joblessness, and panhandling, on a two-volume set entitled Hard Times Come Again No More; five years later, the Sony/RCA imprint Bluebird Jazz gathered up 24 such performances on a disc called Poor Man's Heaven. When these collections were released, they didn't receive much media attention, maybe partly because their themes still seemed distant. But since then, history has flipped, and now, it's impossible to hear these old 78s without thinking about what you read in the business section this morning.

What's weirder still is that it's hard to think of any new music released in recent years that you can say that about. The best examples from 2008 might be mere coincidences of title, like Young Jeezy's keep-on-grinding hip-hop cycle The Recession and Jamey Johnson's druglife-recovery country dirge "The High Cost of Living." "Spend Spend Spend," a miraculous and universally ignored 2008 track by Brit metal matrons Girlschool, comes closer ("Getting hard to borrow, pay the bills tomorrow"), but it's technically about England. Shouldn't working-class hero Kid Rock have done something on Detroit's autopocalypse by now? Especially when Poor Man's Heaven opens with a monologue called "Eddie Cantor's Tips On the Stock Market," in which the old Borscht Belter jokes about everybody getting a bad break except his uncle, who died in September: "Poor fellow had diabetes at 45. That's nothing, I had Chrysler at 110." Ba-dum bum.

The Cantor routine is actually one of two Poor's Man Heaven tracks that aren't songs; the other, a lilting church sermon from Atlanta Baptist preacher and sometime gospel vocalist Rev J.M. Gates, is called "President Roosevelt Is Everybody's Friend." But this year, when you hear Gates praise "our president," FDR might not be the one who comes to mind. For the urbane stage-musical selections toward the beginning, the most successful formula pits upbeat rhythms against downbeat melodies, and sets them to darkly comic words about lost prosperity; that's certainly what's going on in Leo Reisman's epochal rendition of "Brother Can You Spare A Dime?" and George Hall's similarly themed "Remember My Forgotten Man"-the latter recorded for Gold Diggers of 1933 and seemingly referencing World War I vets demonstrating in Washington, D.C. in 1932. "Poor Man's Heaven" itself, credited to country duo Bud Billings and Carson Robison, goes so far as to fantasize violent revolution: "We'll own all the banks / And shoot all the cranks / And won't give a durn who we hurt." Later, a Texan named Joe Pullum does a high-pitched piano blues about how Roosevelt's Civil Works Administration helped him not need his woman anymore. The oldest song, and one of the most familiar, is hobo-turned-labor organizer Harry "Mac" McClintock's work-spurning "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," a revamped public-domain ditty published by the Wobblies in 1908 but revived as the title song of an Al Jolson movie in 1933.

Unlike the frequently upper-class-slumming Poor Man's Heaven, the often deliriously raucous "early American rural songs of hard times and hardship" on Yazoo's Hard Times Come Again No More almost exclusively reside along an as-yet-undemarcated crossroads between impending blues and hillbilly music, occasionally reaching back to minstrel shows and Celtic ballads for inspiration. Certain specifics-boll weevils destroying crops, dust storms blowing Okies west, train-hopping tramps killed on the rails, tenant farmers bleeding sharecroppers dry-are necessarily tied to their time. But "Wreck Of the Tennessee Gravy Train" by Uncle Dave Macon and Sam McGee directly addresses a catastrophic 1930 bank failure, hardly a esoteric situation in this season of bankruptcies and bailouts. And the songs' overriding preoccupations-middle classes losing their footing, loans and eventually meals getting tougher to come by-are as pertinent now as when the lyrics were written, or soon will be.

Several titles actually contain the phrase "hard times"; it's no wonder the late Studs Terkel gave that name to his indispensable 1970 oral history of the Depression. But here's something just as interesting: A half-century after the 1929 Wall Street crash, as an oil-shock recession dragged the 1970s into 1980s and hip-hop was first mapping out its place in the world, both Kurtis Blow and Run-D.M.C. recorded "Hard Times" raps. Country neo-traditionalist John Anderson opened his 1980 debut with a song called "Havin' Hard Times" as well. So where are the hard-times songs now? Right around the corner, I fear.

Further listening:
Down In The Basement: Joe Bussard's Treasure Trove Of Vintage 78s, 1926-1937 (Old Hat, 2002) In a record collector's Maryland cellar, string bands still hoot and holler about greenback dollars.

Good For What Ails You: Music Of The Medicine Shows, 1926-1937 (Old Hat, 2005) Under a tent at the outskirts of town, blackface hucksters keep an 19th-century tradition alive, peddling wizard-oil cure-alls on the side.

The Music Of Prohibition: The Soundtrack To The A&E Special Presentation (Columbia/Legacy, 1997) Sir Duke, Satchmo, Cab Calloway, and more, honoring bootleggers and low-down hoochie-coochers before the 21st Amendment made drunks honest again.

Shake Your Wicked Knees: Rent Parties and Good Times: Classic Piano Rags, Blues & Stomps, 1928-43 (Yazoo, 1998) Pinetop professors barrelhouse all night long, to keep the landlord at bay.

White Country Blues: 1926-1938 A Lighter Shade Of Blue (Columbia/Legacy, 1993) Down-and-out banjo daddies and drunk-and-nutty brother duos cross the racial line, decades before Elvis had a chance.]]>

Chuck Eddy on why there isn't a modern soundtrack to our economic woes.

When American Graffiti, revolving around a 1962 radio station's "oldies weekend," hit theaters in 1973, the pop hits of the 1950s-all newer then than the first Beastie Boys album is now-seemed ancient, as if dropped from some alternate universe. But over the past quarter-century, as songs of the 20th century's early decades have rematerialized first on vinyl reissues, and then on CD box sets, and have eventually become ubiquitous everywhere from movie soundtracks to Starbucks to MP3s available at split-second notice, the music has managed to lose its remoteness. Somehow, technology has the effect of compressing time.

So maybe it shouldn't come as a shock that now, as we scarily slump our way into an economic downturn destined to put Carter/Reagan-era stagflation to shame, music that came out around the Great Depression is feeling curiously current. In 1998, the venerable reissue label Yazoo Records compiled 46 songs of bank failure, credit collapse, rent inflation, joblessness, and panhandling, on a two-volume set entitled Hard Times Come Again No More; five years later, the Sony/RCA imprint Bluebird Jazz gathered up 24 such performances on a disc called Poor Man's Heaven. When these collections were released, they didn't receive much media attention, maybe partly because their themes still seemed distant. But since then, history has flipped, and now, it's impossible to hear these old 78s without thinking about what you read in the business section this morning.

What's weirder still is that it's hard to think of any new music released in recent years that you can say that about. The best examples from 2008 might be mere coincidences of title, like Young Jeezy's keep-on-grinding hip-hop cycle The Recession and Jamey Johnson's druglife-recovery country dirge "The High Cost of Living." "Spend Spend Spend," a miraculous and universally ignored 2008 track by Brit metal matrons Girlschool, comes closer ("Getting hard to borrow, pay the bills tomorrow"), but it's technically about England. Shouldn't working-class hero Kid Rock have done something on Detroit's autopocalypse by now? Especially when Poor Man's Heaven opens with a monologue called "Eddie Cantor's Tips On the Stock Market," in which the old Borscht Belter jokes about everybody getting a bad break except his uncle, who died in September: "Poor fellow had diabetes at 45. That's nothing, I had Chrysler at 110." Ba-dum bum.

The Cantor routine is actually one of two Poor's Man Heaven tracks that aren't songs; the other, a lilting church sermon from Atlanta Baptist preacher and sometime gospel vocalist Rev J.M. Gates, is called "President Roosevelt Is Everybody's Friend." But this year, when you hear Gates praise "our president," FDR might not be the one who comes to mind. For the urbane stage-musical selections toward the beginning, the most successful formula pits upbeat rhythms against downbeat melodies, and sets them to darkly comic words about lost prosperity; that's certainly what's going on in Leo Reisman's epochal rendition of "Brother Can You Spare A Dime?" and George Hall's similarly themed "Remember My Forgotten Man"-the latter recorded for Gold Diggers of 1933 and seemingly referencing World War I vets demonstrating in Washington, D.C. in 1932. "Poor Man's Heaven" itself, credited to country duo Bud Billings and Carson Robison, goes so far as to fantasize violent revolution: "We'll own all the banks / And shoot all the cranks / And won't give a durn who we hurt." Later, a Texan named Joe Pullum does a high-pitched piano blues about how Roosevelt's Civil Works Administration helped him not need his woman anymore. The oldest song, and one of the most familiar, is hobo-turned-labor organizer Harry "Mac" McClintock's work-spurning "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," a revamped public-domain ditty published by the Wobblies in 1908 but revived as the title song of an Al Jolson movie in 1933.

Unlike the frequently upper-class-slumming Poor Man's Heaven, the often deliriously raucous "early American rural songs of hard times and hardship" on Yazoo's Hard Times Come Again No More almost exclusively reside along an as-yet-undemarcated crossroads between impending blues and hillbilly music, occasionally reaching back to minstrel shows and Celtic ballads for inspiration. Certain specifics-boll weevils destroying crops, dust storms blowing Okies west, train-hopping tramps killed on the rails, tenant farmers bleeding sharecroppers dry-are necessarily tied to their time. But "Wreck Of the Tennessee Gravy Train" by Uncle Dave Macon and Sam McGee directly addresses a catastrophic 1930 bank failure, hardly a esoteric situation in this season of bankruptcies and bailouts. And the songs' overriding preoccupations-middle classes losing their footing, loans and eventually meals getting tougher to come by-are as pertinent now as when the lyrics were written, or soon will be.

Several titles actually contain the phrase "hard times"; it's no wonder the late Studs Terkel gave that name to his indispensable 1970 oral history of the Depression. But here's something just as interesting: A half-century after the 1929 Wall Street crash, as an oil-shock recession dragged the 1970s into 1980s and hip-hop was first mapping out its place in the world, both Kurtis Blow and Run-D.M.C. recorded "Hard Times" raps. Country neo-traditionalist John Anderson opened his 1980 debut with a song called "Havin' Hard Times" as well. So where are the hard-times songs now? Right around the corner, I fear.

Further listening:
Down In The Basement: Joe Bussard's Treasure Trove Of Vintage 78s, 1926-1937 (Old Hat, 2002) In a record collector's Maryland cellar, string bands still hoot and holler about greenback dollars.

Good For What Ails You: Music Of The Medicine Shows, 1926-1937 (Old Hat, 2005) Under a tent at the outskirts of town, blackface hucksters keep an 19th-century tradition alive, peddling wizard-oil cure-alls on the side.

The Music Of Prohibition: The Soundtrack To The A&E Special Presentation (Columbia/Legacy, 1997) Sir Duke, Satchmo, Cab Calloway, and more, honoring bootleggers and low-down hoochie-coochers before the 21st Amendment made drunks honest again.

Shake Your Wicked Knees: Rent Parties and Good Times: Classic Piano Rags, Blues & Stomps, 1928-43 (Yazoo, 1998) Pinetop professors barrelhouse all night long, to keep the landlord at bay.

White Country Blues: 1926-1938 A Lighter Shade Of Blue (Columbia/Legacy, 1993) Down-and-out banjo daddies and drunk-and-nutty brother duos cross the racial line, decades before Elvis had a chance.]]> GOOD Mon, 2 Mar 2009 09:20:32 PST <![CDATA[Jaime Wolf on Filmmaker Chris Marker]]> http://www.good.is/post/jaime-wolf-on-filmmaker-chris-marker/ http://www.good.is/post/jaime-wolf-on-filmmaker-chris-marker/ "May you live in interesting times," that sly curse, reputed to come from ancient China, is actually apocryphal, no more Chinese than the fortune cookies it shows up in; than Robert Kennedy, who quoted it in a 1966 speech at Cape Town University; or than Chris Marker, the elusive French filmmaker who sometimes claims to have been born in Mongolia. As much as anyone fated to live in these interesting times, however, Marker, who turned 87 this past summer, has succeeded in chronicling, questioning, and illuminating them in extraordinary ways.

Marker rose to prominence in the early 1960s alongside brainiac New Wave provocateurs like Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda. His films elude easy categorization: Neither fiction nor documentary, they're more like cinematic essays, ranging kaleidoscopically and drolly across politics, anthropology, history, and observations on daily life. Yet they remain yoked to a strong and compelling storyteller's impulse. Refusing personal appearances and foregoing interviews-when asked for a photo, he sends a picture of his cat-Marker has acquired a devoted cult that counts David Bowie, Wim Wenders, and the late Susan Sontag among its members.

Before sampling and before blogs, Marker cultivated an aesthetic based on referentiality and visual and literary quotation. But to watch Sans Soleil-a collection of dispatches from Tokyo, Iceland, Guinea-Bissau, and San Francisco-and to learn that Marker also shot in North Korea in 1958, in Cuba following Castro's ascension, and in Soviet Russia, is to feel he has been everywhere and knows everyone. Like Jorge Luis Borges, Marker is encyclopedic yet self-deprecating, projecting the kind of welcoming intelligence that invariably leaves you feeling smarter from the encounter.

If you've seen a Marker film, chances are it is La Jetée, a 28-minute mindfuck composed almost entirely of still photographs, made in 1962. The film is set in a devastated post-World War III Paris and tells the story of a man whose attachment to a scene remembered from childhood proves key to a time-travel experiment that saves the human race from extinction. (Terry Gilliam would later use it as the basis for 12 Monkeys.) The film is also a meditation on memory, temporality, loss, and the meaning and resonance of photographic images-subjects that underlie all of Marker's work.

From the furious lyricism of La Jetée, and of 1983's Sans Soleil, Marker's second most available film, it's easy to think of Marker primarily as an aesthete. Sans Soleil invites comparisons to lapidary travel writers like Bruce Chatwin and Pico Iyer. But Marker has always been equally committed to documenting social struggle: His early films depict the French response to the Algerian War and Cuban life after Castro's takeover. In 1967, when more than 100,000 people marched on the Pentagon, Marker and his camera were there to capture it. Each of these episodes has furnished material for individual films, but A Grin Without a Cat, his three-hour consideration of 1960s and 1970s political currents in France, the United States, Latin America, Russia, Vietnam, and China, is indispensable viewing. Here, Marker dispassionately sorts through party politics, revolutionary rhetoric, and deadly propaganda to come to terms with what he has characterized as "the utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth."

Equally essential is The Last Bolshevik, about the Russian filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, through whom we see the tragic failure of Soviet communism. Progressive without being programmatic, Marker has written: "If I ever had a passion in the field of politics, it's a passion for understanding. Understanding how people manage to live on a planet like ours. Understanding how they seek, how they try, how they make mistakes, how they get over them, how they learn, how they lose their way. … That immediately put me on the side of the people who seek and make mistakes, as opposed to those who seek nothing, except to conserve, defend themselves, and deny all the rest."

Marker's restless Whitmanesque ability to witness-to observe and catalog people and events-adds an undeniable gravity to his reflections and pronouncements. What's equally remarkable, however, is his buoyancy. He shows that there is as much to learn from Fidel Castro's nervous habit of adjusting the microphone while making speeches, the trope in Russian cinema involving tractor breakdowns, and the mysterious appearance in Paris of Cheshire cat graffiti as from the politics and history surrounding them. Unhampered by jargon or academic obscurity, Marker effortlessly reads the signs and symbols of culture in revelatory ways. And if anyone can make semiotics seem unpretentious, if anyone can also justify cute cat photos, it's him.

























Sans Soleil/La Jetée (1983)
Two masterpieces on a single DVD. Sans Soleil's early 1980s Japanese sections are astonishingly prescient, showing how the collision of ancient and ritual practice with technological innovation would come to define our postmodern world.
A Grin Without A Cat (1977)
An epic history of progressive politics between 1967 and 1977. Analyzing party factionalism and revolutionary mythology (spotlighting neglected icons like Regis DeBray and Douglas Bravo), its tone is mournful without indulging sentimentality.
Immemory (1998)
Marker's personal archive, a CD-ROM version of a 1997 Pompidou Centre exhibition.  Containing hours of stills, texts, film clips, and digital art and music, it brilliantly fulfills the nonlinear potential of Marker's films.
Staring Back (2007)
A collection of photographs spanning 1952 through 2006.  Where La Jetée was a film made from still photos, the stills in "Staring Back" consist of frame enlargements isolated from Marker's films and videos.
Remembrance Of Things To Come (2001)
Sifting through the 1930s work of photojournalist Denise Bellon, Marker discovers "the moment when postwar became pre-war": an issue of Paris Match which included Bellon's pictures of a Gypsy wedding alongside excerpts from Mein Kampf.
The Last Bolshevik (1992)
A dazzling examination of Alexander Medvedkin, the Russian filmmaker who set out across Russia to capture farmers and factory workers in their attempts to build a new country, and then instigated auto-critique by showing them the footage on-site.

Jamie Wolf, a journalist and screenwriter living in New York, is a regular contributor to GOOD. He wrote about the U.S. Olympic table-tennis team in GOOD 010.]]> "May you live in interesting times," that sly curse, reputed to come from ancient China, is actually apocryphal, no more Chinese than the fortune cookies it shows up in; than Robert Kennedy, who quoted it in a 1966 speech at Cape Town University; or than Chris Marker, the elusive French filmmaker who sometimes claims to have been born in Mongolia. As much as anyone fated to live in these interesting times, however, Marker, who turned 87 this past summer, has succeeded in chronicling, questioning, and illuminating them in extraordinary ways.

Marker rose to prominence in the early 1960s alongside brainiac New Wave provocateurs like Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda. His films elude easy categorization: Neither fiction nor documentary, they're more like cinematic essays, ranging kaleidoscopically and drolly across politics, anthropology, history, and observations on daily life. Yet they remain yoked to a strong and compelling storyteller's impulse. Refusing personal appearances and foregoing interviews-when asked for a photo, he sends a picture of his cat-Marker has acquired a devoted cult that counts David Bowie, Wim Wenders, and the late Susan Sontag among its members.

Before sampling and before blogs, Marker cultivated an aesthetic based on referentiality and visual and literary quotation. But to watch Sans Soleil-a collection of dispatches from Tokyo, Iceland, Guinea-Bissau, and San Francisco-and to learn that Marker also shot in North Korea in 1958, in Cuba following Castro's ascension, and in Soviet Russia, is to feel he has been everywhere and knows everyone. Like Jorge Luis Borges, Marker is encyclopedic yet self-deprecating, projecting the kind of welcoming intelligence that invariably leaves you feeling smarter from the encounter.

If you've seen a Marker film, chances are it is La Jetée, a 28-minute mindfuck composed almost entirely of still photographs, made in 1962. The film is set in a devastated post-World War III Paris and tells the story of a man whose attachment to a scene remembered from childhood proves key to a time-travel experiment that saves the human race from extinction. (Terry Gilliam would later use it as the basis for 12 Monkeys.) The film is also a meditation on memory, temporality, loss, and the meaning and resonance of photographic images-subjects that underlie all of Marker's work.

From the furious lyricism of La Jetée, and of 1983's Sans Soleil, Marker's second most available film, it's easy to think of Marker primarily as an aesthete. Sans Soleil invites comparisons to lapidary travel writers like Bruce Chatwin and Pico Iyer. But Marker has always been equally committed to documenting social struggle: His early films depict the French response to the Algerian War and Cuban life after Castro's takeover. In 1967, when more than 100,000 people marched on the Pentagon, Marker and his camera were there to capture it. Each of these episodes has furnished material for individual films, but A Grin Without a Cat, his three-hour consideration of 1960s and 1970s political currents in France, the United States, Latin America, Russia, Vietnam, and China, is indispensable viewing. Here, Marker dispassionately sorts through party politics, revolutionary rhetoric, and deadly propaganda to come to terms with what he has characterized as "the utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth."

Equally essential is The Last Bolshevik, about the Russian filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, through whom we see the tragic failure of Soviet communism. Progressive without being programmatic, Marker has written: "If I ever had a passion in the field of politics, it's a passion for understanding. Understanding how people manage to live on a planet like ours. Understanding how they seek, how they try, how they make mistakes, how they get over them, how they learn, how they lose their way. … That immediately put me on the side of the people who seek and make mistakes, as opposed to those who seek nothing, except to conserve, defend themselves, and deny all the rest."

Marker's restless Whitmanesque ability to witness-to observe and catalog people and events-adds an undeniable gravity to his reflections and pronouncements. What's equally remarkable, however, is his buoyancy. He shows that there is as much to learn from Fidel Castro's nervous habit of adjusting the microphone while making speeches, the trope in Russian cinema involving tractor breakdowns, and the mysterious appearance in Paris of Cheshire cat graffiti as from the politics and history surrounding them. Unhampered by jargon or academic obscurity, Marker effortlessly reads the signs and symbols of culture in revelatory ways. And if anyone can make semiotics seem unpretentious, if anyone can also justify cute cat photos, it's him.

























Sans Soleil/La Jetée (1983)
Two masterpieces on a single DVD. Sans Soleil's early 1980s Japanese sections are astonishingly prescient, showing how the collision of ancient and ritual practice with technological innovation would come to define our postmodern world.
A Grin Without A Cat (1977)
An epic history of progressive politics between 1967 and 1977. Analyzing party factionalism and revolutionary mythology (spotlighting neglected icons like Regis DeBray and Douglas Bravo), its tone is mournful without indulging sentimentality.
Immemory (1998)
Marker's personal archive, a CD-ROM version of a 1997 Pompidou Centre exhibition.  Containing hours of stills, texts, film clips, and digital art and music, it brilliantly fulfills the nonlinear potential of Marker's films.
Staring Back (2007)
A collection of photographs spanning 1952 through 2006.  Where La Jetée was a film made from still photos, the stills in "Staring Back" consist of frame enlargements isolated from Marker's films and videos.
Remembrance Of Things To Come (2001)
Sifting through the 1930s work of photojournalist Denise Bellon, Marker discovers "the moment when postwar became pre-war": an issue of Paris Match which included Bellon's pictures of a Gypsy wedding alongside excerpts from Mein Kampf.
The Last Bolshevik (1992)
A dazzling examination of Alexander Medvedkin, the Russian filmmaker who set out across Russia to capture farmers and factory workers in their attempts to build a new country, and then instigated auto-critique by showing them the footage on-site.

Jamie Wolf, a journalist and screenwriter living in New York, is a regular contributor to GOOD. He wrote about the U.S. Olympic table-tennis team in GOOD 010.]]> Jaime Wolf Thu, 4 Dec 2008 17:53:00 PST <![CDATA[Mark Peters on War Slang]]> http://www.good.is/post/mark-peters-on-war-slang/ http://www.good.is/post/mark-peters-on-war-slang/ A recent recruiting commercial for the Army says, "There is a type of strength that doesn't require words." Now, I'm in no position to question any aspect of soldier strength (my biggest daily challenges are dictionary-flipping, sentence-making, editor-harassing, and coffee-slurping), but as a confirmed wordmonger, I think this slogan sells the Army short. In fact, one of the more compelling contributions of the military is in the form of words: Soldier slang is an ongoing enrichment of our language, a vibrant lexicon that's a prolific byproduct of war.

Without war, no one would ever undermine, skedaddle, or triumph, and it would be impossible to go ballistic about fubars and snafus. In addition to other common words with military origins, there are thousands of terms that never penetrated popular culture. A quick flip through a portion of J.E. Lighter's Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang provides a taste of the numerous and colorful older terms, such as "hell-jelly" (napalm), "hens and chickens" (lice), "hell-on-the-Hudson" (the U.S. military academy in West Point, New York.), "Ho Chi Minh's revenge" (dysentery or diarrhea), and "horizontal engineering" (sleep). And that's just in H.

The trend continues, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are producing a mountain of slang that will keep lexicographers busy for decades. Whether soldiers are shortening words (by turning interpreter and interrogator into the more efficient "terp" and "gator"), appropriating words ("death blossom" is borrowed from the 1984 sci-fi film The Last Starfighter), mocking policy (by calling the "surge" the "splurge"), or injecting official names with black humor (Iraq's Camp Anaconda becomes "Camp Bombaconda"), these creative words and expressions show a brainy side of soldiers that's perennial yet underpublicized.

Slang has always been hard to define, but in the introduction to his dictionary, Lighter nails one of its key elements: "[The] use of slang undermines the dignity of verbal exchange and charges discourse with an unrefined and often aggressive informality. It pops the balloon of pretence." In some cases, it's easy to tell slang (like "buttmunch") from jargon (like "periorbital ecchymosis," doctor talk for a black eye), but in military lingo, the difference is often blurred. Is "battle rattle"-the term for a soldier's gear, including helmet, Kevlar vest, and gloves-slang or jargon? It's surely job-related, but the rhyme makes it sound slangy, informal, and somewhat balloon-of-pretence-popping.

The second characteristic of slang is its social function. Slang bonds groups, separates "us" from "them," and establishes subgroups, too. Over time, there's been a boatload of insults for non-combatants who have it easier than other soldiers, including "hangar pilot," "battalion stallion," and Vietnam's "rear-echelon motherfucker." The most recent and successful word of this type is "fobbit," a blend of hobbit and FOB (Forward Operating Base), for a comfy, base-bound soldier who sees little action.



War slang also points at larger problems with the Iraq war. For example, the lack of protection for soldiers is reflected in several terms, including "pope glass"-a jerry-rigged, cocoon-like shielding reminiscent of the Popemobile. Pope glass is a form of "up-armoring," a word in the redundant spirit of "pre-boarding" and "pre-heating." If your vehicle needs to be up-armored, it needs to be armored, period. Active soldiers aren't known for their war protests, but these terms shine a critical light on dangerous conditions that shouldn't exist.

Much war slang acts as a kind of rebellion-against shoddy protection, annoying fobbits, predatory Jodys (see sidebar), and danger. But one expression sums up the whole enchilada in a mix of wit, sarcasm, and acceptance: embrace the suck. Colonel Austin Bay, who used the expression as the title of his book on war slang, defines "embrace the suck" thusly: "The situation is bad, but deal with it." This mantra is also the subtitle of the war blog Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal, in which it's pseudonymous author Lt. G writes about "living in the suck," and discusses older veterans of "other sucks."

"Embrace the suck" is a good example of how war slang overlaps with other slang and nonslang. "Suck" has been slangily used since at least 1971, according to the OED. When soldiers say they're "in the suck," it's reminiscent of the older "in the shit." As an idiom, "embrace the suck" brings to mind "embrace the moment" and "seize the day," with a decidedly less corny sentiment. The exact origin isn't known, but Wayne Glowka's "Among the New Words" column in American Speech suggests that this 2007 San Diego Union-Tribune quote points the way: "Robinson and Rogoni said combat-hardened Marines embrace the ‘suck it up and drive on' mentality even as they endure second and third deployments in some of Iraq's worst war zones."

Of all the recent slang, this vivid expression seems custom-made for colloquial use, à la "gung ho." No civilian suck can compare to "the suck," though experts agree that suckishness is as common as oxygen. But if you do use this idiom, take a minute to think about soldiers-and the strength that may not require words but produces a metric crapload of them.

More soldier slang, old and new:


man dress


A term for traditional Muslim dishdasha is part of a broader word trend. Propelled by changes in gender roles and popular examples like Seinfeld's "man purse," "man" has been a productive prefix in recent years, spawning "man-cation," "man-boobs," "man-cave," "manny," and many other testosterone-coated words.

death blossom


Like "fobbit," this is a pop-culture reference, though the source is a bit more obscure: In The Last Starfighter, the death blossom was a weapon that enabled a single ship to kill off an entire armada. In Iraq, the death blossom is an overreaction-to put it mildly-of Iraq security forces to insurgent fire.

Jody


Michael Lubinski, who served in Iraq, defines Jody as "the guy doing your girl when you are gone." The term dates back at least as far as the 1944 marching song: "Ain't no use in goin' home / Joady's got your girl and gone… Gonna get a three-day pass / Just to kick old Joady's ass." Soldier blogger Lt. G confirms that the much-hated Jody still roams the home front.

Camp Bombaconda/Mortaritaville


These two terms for any oft-attacked base show the black humor of war slang, where wordplay and danger merge. The play of "Mortaritaville" is one of many examples of soldier slang dipping into popular culture.

the wire


Dating back to 1979 and commonly used today, the wire has been defined as a "fence establishing the perimeter of a military base." But there's far more to this term: More broadly, "inside the wire" is associated with safety, while "outside the wire" is similar to being "in the suck"-you're off the reservation, out of the boat, and in true danger.

Mark Peters lives in Chicago and has written about language for Esquire, The Funny Times, New Scientist, and Psychology Today. He wrote about eggcorns in GOOD 010.

Illustrations by Elliot Ward]]> A recent recruiting commercial for the Army says, "There is a type of strength that doesn't require words." Now, I'm in no position to question any aspect of soldier strength (my biggest daily challenges are dictionary-flipping, sentence-making, editor-harassing, and coffee-slurping), but as a confirmed wordmonger, I think this slogan sells the Army short. In fact, one of the more compelling contributions of the military is in the form of words: Soldier slang is an ongoing enrichment of our language, a vibrant lexicon that's a prolific byproduct of war.

Without war, no one would ever undermine, skedaddle, or triumph, and it would be impossible to go ballistic about fubars and snafus. In addition to other common words with military origins, there are thousands of terms that never penetrated popular culture. A quick flip through a portion of J.E. Lighter's Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang provides a taste of the numerous and colorful older terms, such as "hell-jelly" (napalm), "hens and chickens" (lice), "hell-on-the-Hudson" (the U.S. military academy in West Point, New York.), "Ho Chi Minh's revenge" (dysentery or diarrhea), and "horizontal engineering" (sleep). And that's just in H.

The trend continues, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are producing a mountain of slang that will keep lexicographers busy for decades. Whether soldiers are shortening words (by turning interpreter and interrogator into the more efficient "terp" and "gator"), appropriating words ("death blossom" is borrowed from the 1984 sci-fi film The Last Starfighter), mocking policy (by calling the "surge" the "splurge"), or injecting official names with black humor (Iraq's Camp Anaconda becomes "Camp Bombaconda"), these creative words and expressions show a brainy side of soldiers that's perennial yet underpublicized.

Slang has always been hard to define, but in the introduction to his dictionary, Lighter nails one of its key elements: "[The] use of slang undermines the dignity of verbal exchange and charges discourse with an unrefined and often aggressive informality. It pops the balloon of pretence." In some cases, it's easy to tell slang (like "buttmunch") from jargon (like "periorbital ecchymosis," doctor talk for a black eye), but in military lingo, the difference is often blurred. Is "battle rattle"-the term for a soldier's gear, including helmet, Kevlar vest, and gloves-slang or jargon? It's surely job-related, but the rhyme makes it sound slangy, informal, and somewhat balloon-of-pretence-popping.

The second characteristic of slang is its social function. Slang bonds groups, separates "us" from "them," and establishes subgroups, too. Over time, there's been a boatload of insults for non-combatants who have it easier than other soldiers, including "hangar pilot," "battalion stallion," and Vietnam's "rear-echelon motherfucker." The most recent and successful word of this type is "fobbit," a blend of hobbit and FOB (Forward Operating Base), for a comfy, base-bound soldier who sees little action.



War slang also points at larger problems with the Iraq war. For example, the lack of protection for soldiers is reflected in several terms, including "pope glass"-a jerry-rigged, cocoon-like shielding reminiscent of the Popemobile. Pope glass is a form of "up-armoring," a word in the redundant spirit of "pre-boarding" and "pre-heating." If your vehicle needs to be up-armored, it needs to be armored, period. Active soldiers aren't known for their war protests, but these terms shine a critical light on dangerous conditions that shouldn't exist.

Much war slang acts as a kind of rebellion-against shoddy protection, annoying fobbits, predatory Jodys (see sidebar), and danger. But one expression sums up the whole enchilada in a mix of wit, sarcasm, and acceptance: embrace the suck. Colonel Austin Bay, who used the expression as the title of his book on war slang, defines "embrace the suck" thusly: "The situation is bad, but deal with it." This mantra is also the subtitle of the war blog Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal, in which it's pseudonymous author Lt. G writes about "living in the suck," and discusses older veterans of "other sucks."

"Embrace the suck" is a good example of how war slang overlaps with other slang and nonslang. "Suck" has been slangily used since at least 1971, according to the OED. When soldiers say they're "in the suck," it's reminiscent of the older "in the shit." As an idiom, "embrace the suck" brings to mind "embrace the moment" and "seize the day," with a decidedly less corny sentiment. The exact origin isn't known, but Wayne Glowka's "Among the New Words" column in American Speech suggests that this 2007 San Diego Union-Tribune quote points the way: "Robinson and Rogoni said combat-hardened Marines embrace the ‘suck it up and drive on' mentality even as they endure second and third deployments in some of Iraq's worst war zones."

Of all the recent slang, this vivid expression seems custom-made for colloquial use, à la "gung ho." No civilian suck can compare to "the suck," though experts agree that suckishness is as common as oxygen. But if you do use this idiom, take a minute to think about soldiers-and the strength that may not require words but produces a metric crapload of them.

More soldier slang, old and new:


man dress


A term for traditional Muslim dishdasha is part of a broader word trend. Propelled by changes in gender roles and popular examples like Seinfeld's "man purse," "man" has been a productive prefix in recent years, spawning "man-cation," "man-boobs," "man-cave," "manny," and many other testosterone-coated words.

death blossom


Like "fobbit," this is a pop-culture reference, though the source is a bit more obscure: In The Last Starfighter, the death blossom was a weapon that enabled a single ship to kill off an entire armada. In Iraq, the death blossom is an overreaction-to put it mildly-of Iraq security forces to insurgent fire.

Jody


Michael Lubinski, who served in Iraq, defines Jody as "the guy doing your girl when you are gone." The term dates back at least as far as the 1944 marching song: "Ain't no use in goin' home / Joady's got your girl and gone… Gonna get a three-day pass / Just to kick old Joady's ass." Soldier blogger Lt. G confirms that the much-hated Jody still roams the home front.

Camp Bombaconda/Mortaritaville


These two terms for any oft-attacked base show the black humor of war slang, where wordplay and danger merge. The play of "Mortaritaville" is one of many examples of soldier slang dipping into popular culture.

the wire


Dating back to 1979 and commonly used today, the wire has been defined as a "fence establishing the perimeter of a military base." But there's far more to this term: More broadly, "inside the wire" is associated with safety, while "outside the wire" is similar to being "in the suck"-you're off the reservation, out of the boat, and in true danger.

Mark Peters lives in Chicago and has written about language for Esquire, The Funny Times, New Scientist, and Psychology Today. He wrote about eggcorns in GOOD 010.

Illustrations by Elliot Ward]]> Mark Peters Tue, 4 Nov 2008 13:58:41 PST <![CDATA[Michelangelo Matos on Going Forward into the Past]]> http://www.good.is/post/michelangelo-matos-on-going-forward-into-the-past/ http://www.good.is/post/michelangelo-matos-on-going-forward-into-the-past/ To trace the story of pop music's use of nostalgia is, in some ways, to trace the story of pop music. Of course all musicians recycle what came before by remaking it, reimagining it, or sampling it. Take Amy Winehouse: no major contemporary artist relies more heavily on retro style, both visually and musically. Which brings us to the age-old question, "Is recreating the past merely dressing it up without adding anything to it?"

My knee-jerk response is, "Of course." It's hard not to think of all deliberate retro as being as empty as the late-1990s' so-called "swing revival," which felt faddish and generic, particularly following the 1996 film Swingers. (The music of the revival's biggest bands-Squirrel Nut Zippers, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy-didn't help.) But sometimes it takes a familiar setting to see or hear why something, or someone, sounds utterly new-like Winehouse's Back to Black, one of the most acclaimed albums of recent years. Still, much as I love songs like "Rehab" and "You Know I'm No Good," it's Winehouse's guest spot on "Valerie," from producer Mark Ronson's uneven second album, Version, where she really delivers the goods.

"Valerie" was originally sung by the Zutons, one of those countless British rock bands most Americans have (rightly) never heard of. But Ronson's remake goes beyond the original. Ronson's arrangement is pure Merseyside-does-Motown-mod-era British R&B à la the early Dusty Springfield records. Winehouse threatens at first to drown in her own mannerisms, but soon she's in utter control. Her utterance of the line "Did you get a good law-y-y-yer?" alone is worth the download. Until I'd heard "Valerie," I had mostly kept Winehouse at arm's length, figuring there might not be music to match the persona. As soon as it stopped playing, the adulation made perfect sense-maybe because the arrangement, which took off to the skies from a bass line nicked from the Supremes's "You Can't Hurry Love," was so obvious from the get-go.

Much of the music on Version features the Dap-Kings, a Brooklyn band that has also toured with Winehouse and played on Back to Black. They're best known for backing Sharon Jones, a pint-sized 57-year-old who had sung in wedding bands for decades. The Dap-Kings expertly reproduce the sound and feel of southern soul and funk from the 1960s and 1970s, and they also play with it, tongues firmly in cheek. On a standout track from the band's 2002 debut, Dap-Dippin' With …, Jones booms out over a Latin-inflected R&B groove sounding wounded, cutting, and defiant. Then the drums and horns slip into a higher register, and the chorus hits: "What! Have you done for me lately?" Of course it's familiar: it's Janet Jackson's old hit, arranged and recorded like something James Brown would have made for his troupe of female singers.

That's the trick of retro. When it works, it can radically recontextualize the present, by packaging it in a timeless way. An even better trick is to come up with something timeless of your own. While Jones and the Dap-Kings' recent 100 Days, 100 Nights has a few sharp tunes, their best album to date remains 2005's Naturally. How Long Do I Have to Wait for You is a classic R&B heartbreaker, from the guitar line to the snapping horns to Jones's touching vocal, and it stands up to any of the records that inspired it.

The same is true of the string of singles issued since 2006 by the Brooklyn live-funk band Escort. One reason the group's first single, "Starlight," was my favorite of 2006 is that it hewed to an era traditionally ignored by revivalists: synthy early-1980s rollerskating funk. Sure, zillions of people have sampled Taana Gardner's "Heartbeat" and Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love," but few people in the past 15 years have gone completely out of their way to sound like them. Escort may traffic in replicas, but at this juncture, they also feel timeless.

That works in rock music as well. A lot of critics cited LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" as their favorite song of 2007, and it was mine, too-but not the LCD Soundsystem version. The band commissioned a pair of cover versions of the song for European B-sides. One version, recorded by John Cale, broods nicely, but it was Franz Ferdinand's effort that knocked me over. LCD is indebted to early-1980s dance-meets-punk; Franz Ferdinand works the other side of the street, playing funk-inflected punk-pop songs. So when Franz does "All My Friends," it sounds like a rocked-up early New Order. LCD Soundsystem's somewhat astringent arrangement sealed the song off for me; Franz Ferdinand's lusty look back opened up and kept me. It married the past to the present so effectively that you couldn't tell where one began and the other ended-which is exactly what good retro needs.

Historical rock revivals:




Late 1960s
Bored, or just worn out on psychedelia, rock's front line went back to its roots. Bob Dylan led the charge with the folky John Wesley Harding, an instant rebuke to the tie-dyed influx. Soon the Beatles and the Stones scaled back to simpler arrangements, and the Byrds went country.



Early 1970s
The rock-and-roll revival: packaged shows of 1950s' stars sell out big venues. A few even have number one hits in 1972: Elvis Presley's "Burning Love," Chuck Berry's "My Ding-a-Ling," and Rick Nelson's "Garden Party," a bittersweet ode to the oldies TV shows.



Early-mid 1980s
Taking its cues (and duds) from the late 1960s, Los Angeles's new psychedelic Paisley Underground movement spawned the Bangles, the Rain Parade, and Opal. Down in Athens, Georgia, bands led by R.E.M. mutated the Byrds's sound into new shapes and became models for college-rock hopefuls everywhere.



Mid 1980s
Over in England, the Jesus and Mary Chain reduced rock to variations on the early, feedback-heavy sound of the Velvet Underground. Many, many other groups quickly followed suit.]]> To trace the story of pop music's use of nostalgia is, in some ways, to trace the story of pop music. Of course all musicians recycle what came before by remaking it, reimagining it, or sampling it. Take Amy Winehouse: no major contemporary artist relies more heavily on retro style, both visually and musically. Which brings us to the age-old question, "Is recreating the past merely dressing it up without adding anything to it?"

My knee-jerk response is, "Of course." It's hard not to think of all deliberate retro as being as empty as the late-1990s' so-called "swing revival," which felt faddish and generic, particularly following the 1996 film Swingers. (The music of the revival's biggest bands-Squirrel Nut Zippers, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy-didn't help.) But sometimes it takes a familiar setting to see or hear why something, or someone, sounds utterly new-like Winehouse's Back to Black, one of the most acclaimed albums of recent years. Still, much as I love songs like "Rehab" and "You Know I'm No Good," it's Winehouse's guest spot on "Valerie," from producer Mark Ronson's uneven second album, Version, where she really delivers the goods.

"Valerie" was originally sung by the Zutons, one of those countless British rock bands most Americans have (rightly) never heard of. But Ronson's remake goes beyond the original. Ronson's arrangement is pure Merseyside-does-Motown-mod-era British R&B à la the early Dusty Springfield records. Winehouse threatens at first to drown in her own mannerisms, but soon she's in utter control. Her utterance of the line "Did you get a good law-y-y-yer?" alone is worth the download. Until I'd heard "Valerie," I had mostly kept Winehouse at arm's length, figuring there might not be music to match the persona. As soon as it stopped playing, the adulation made perfect sense-maybe because the arrangement, which took off to the skies from a bass line nicked from the Supremes's "You Can't Hurry Love," was so obvious from the get-go.

Much of the music on Version features the Dap-Kings, a Brooklyn band that has also toured with Winehouse and played on Back to Black. They're best known for backing Sharon Jones, a pint-sized 57-year-old who had sung in wedding bands for decades. The Dap-Kings expertly reproduce the sound and feel of southern soul and funk from the 1960s and 1970s, and they also play with it, tongues firmly in cheek. On a standout track from the band's 2002 debut, Dap-Dippin' With …, Jones booms out over a Latin-inflected R&B groove sounding wounded, cutting, and defiant. Then the drums and horns slip into a higher register, and the chorus hits: "What! Have you done for me lately?" Of course it's familiar: it's Janet Jackson's old hit, arranged and recorded like something James Brown would have made for his troupe of female singers.

That's the trick of retro. When it works, it can radically recontextualize the present, by packaging it in a timeless way. An even better trick is to come up with something timeless of your own. While Jones and the Dap-Kings' recent 100 Days, 100 Nights has a few sharp tunes, their best album to date remains 2005's Naturally. How Long Do I Have to Wait for You is a classic R&B heartbreaker, from the guitar line to the snapping horns to Jones's touching vocal, and it stands up to any of the records that inspired it.

The same is true of the string of singles issued since 2006 by the Brooklyn live-funk band Escort. One reason the group's first single, "Starlight," was my favorite of 2006 is that it hewed to an era traditionally ignored by revivalists: synthy early-1980s rollerskating funk. Sure, zillions of people have sampled Taana Gardner's "Heartbeat" and Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love," but few people in the past 15 years have gone completely out of their way to sound like them. Escort may traffic in replicas, but at this juncture, they also feel timeless.

That works in rock music as well. A lot of critics cited LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" as their favorite song of 2007, and it was mine, too-but not the LCD Soundsystem version. The band commissioned a pair of cover versions of the song for European B-sides. One version, recorded by John Cale, broods nicely, but it was Franz Ferdinand's effort that knocked me over. LCD is indebted to early-1980s dance-meets-punk; Franz Ferdinand works the other side of the street, playing funk-inflected punk-pop songs. So when Franz does "All My Friends," it sounds like a rocked-up early New Order. LCD Soundsystem's somewhat astringent arrangement sealed the song off for me; Franz Ferdinand's lusty look back opened up and kept me. It married the past to the present so effectively that you couldn't tell where one began and the other ended-which is exactly what good retro needs.

Historical rock revivals:




Late 1960s
Bored, or just worn out on psychedelia, rock's front line went back to its roots. Bob Dylan led the charge with the folky John Wesley Harding, an instant rebuke to the tie-dyed influx. Soon the Beatles and the Stones scaled back to simpler arrangements, and the Byrds went country.



Early 1970s
The rock-and-roll revival: packaged shows of 1950s' stars sell out big venues. A few even have number one hits in 1972: Elvis Presley's "Burning Love," Chuck Berry's "My Ding-a-Ling," and Rick Nelson's "Garden Party," a bittersweet ode to the oldies TV shows.



Early-mid 1980s
Taking its cues (and duds) from the late 1960s, Los Angeles's new psychedelic Paisley Underground movement spawned the Bangles, the Rain Parade, and Opal. Down in Athens, Georgia, bands led by R.E.M. mutated the Byrds's sound into new shapes and became models for college-rock hopefuls everywhere.



Mid 1980s
Over in England, the Jesus and Mary Chain reduced rock to variations on the early, feedback-heavy sound of the Velvet Underground. Many, many other groups quickly followed suit.]]> Michaelangelo Matos Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:55:00 PDT <![CDATA[Stop Teaching Catcher in the Rye]]> http://www.good.is/post/stop-teaching-catcher-in-the-rye/ http://www.good.is/post/stop-teaching-catcher-in-the-rye/

Why is The Catcher in the Rye still a rite of high school English? Sure, J.D. Salinger's novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. But that was 50 years ago. Today, Salinger's novel lacks the currency or shock value it once had, and has lost some of its critical cachet. But it is still ubiquitously taught even though many newer novels of adolescence are available.

To this day, The Catcher in the Rye remains one of the most referred-to books on back-cover blurbs. Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing is, "as a coming of age story … one of the best since Catcher in the Rye"; Douglas Coupland's Generation X is "a modern-day Catcher in the Rye"; David Sedaris's Barrel Fever is "a caustic mix of J. D. Salinger and John Waters." Indeed, there are many tales of adolescent angst out there, and they all, it seems, need a wink to Salinger to claim a place in this genre. But Salinger's novel no longer deserves the top spot in contemporary coming-of-age literature, even if most would still agree that it firmly occupies the X spot in the "X meets Y" publishing pitch ("It's Catcher in the Rye meets Blood Diamonds"; "It's Catcher in the Rye for gay teenagers").

High school teachers got on the Catcher bandwagon in the early 1960s, in an effort to update their hoary reading lists. When it was first assigned, Catcher's purpose in the curriculum was to offer students a contemporary, cool alternative to, say, something lengthy and dense like David Copperfield. Salinger had a prescient sense of his hero's eventual cultural role: Holden starts his story by telling us he is not going to rehearse "all that David Copperfield kind of crap," because it bores him.

If Salinger needed to acknowledge Dickens in 1951, today any new adolescent coming-of-age tale must go through "all that Holden Caulfield crap." In the 19th century, a bildungsroman showed the growing maturity and self-awareness of a young person. That remains more or less true, but now the equation for the modern bildungsroman is more like, as a friend puts it: "Horny plus bored minus transportation divided by the whole of one's interior life, multiplied by an inverse ratio of miles to a city or a place where there is anything at all to do."

The publication of Catcher helped launch a "Salinger Industry," as George Steiner described the phenomenon in a 1959 article for The Nation. Released in the summer of 1951 by a 32-year-old writer with a modest reputation as a short-story writer, Catcher was a mid-summer Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and by fall it was fourth on The New York Times Best-Seller list. A scant eight years later, the critic Granville Hicks thought twice about including Catcher on his New York University Contemporary American Literature syllabus, because 18-year-olds had already read it.

One reason for Catcher's instant-classic status was that is was-to employ that overused neologism-"relatable" to those who had the power to write about it. In 1961, The New York Times Book Review credited the popularity of Catcher with the "shock and thrill of recognition" it gave readers: "Many of my friends and this writer himself identified completely with Holden." Those few well-known critics who did not look like Holden tended to have a different perspective: Joan Didion, who thought Salinger's work slight, mocked the "relatability factor" of Salinger's novel in a 1961 essay, in which she describes a "stunningly predictable Sarah Lawrence girl" who declared Salinger "the single person in the world capable of understanding her." Like Didion, Steiner considered Catcher of minor literary merit. Its main appeal to students, he argued, is simply that the young like to read about the young, prefer short books, and ones without too many references to other books. Salinger, he says, "flatters [their] very ignorance and moral shallowness." And it helped English professors get promoted, Steiner grumbled, since writing about Catcher
American criticism may have been in trouble in the 1950s, but it is in even worse shape now. Today, there is far less overlap between what teachers, scholars, and the public read. Rare is a combination of scholar, public intellectual, and pedagogue who publishes-as did Steiner, or Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson-across our increasingly specialized publications. And rarer still is the common reader (say, a high school teacher) who peruses scholarly journals, educational publications, and general-audience magazines alike.

Despite critics' disapproval, Catcher is now canonical. It is a part of literary history. Holden is our contemporary American David Copperfield, our 20th-century Huck Finn. He's part of our common conversation, our cultural literacy. You have to admire the guy.

Still, after half a century of new, equally "relatable" coming-of-age-stories, don't some of Holden's younger siblings deserve the end-of-the-year spot in sophomore English? Since a syllabus is a zero-sum game, adding means knocking something off the list ("Scarlet Letter!" yell my undergraduates). But not to worry: Given that a higher population of Americans now attend college than they did in the 1950s, most will be forced to read the old classics a few years later.


A revised syllabus:




Freaks and Geeks (1999)
NBC's series, produced by Judd Apatow, deftly portrayed the tenderness and anxiety of high school.



Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson (1999)
Anderson's Speak tells the story of Melinda, a high school freshman and teenage outcast whose struggles with adolescence cause her to fall mute.



Drown, Junot Díaz (1996)
This book of short stories (by this year's Pulitzer Prize winner) is told from the perspective of Dominican adolescents struggling with family, sexuality, and identity. The lyrical, inventive prose makes their stories all the more memorable.



Project X, Jim Shepard (2004)
Shepard's bold novel tells the story of two eighth-graders in a Columbine-style school massacre. Shepard tackles one of the scariest aspects of 21st-century adolescence.



American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang (2007)
This graphic novel tells that age-old story of trying to accept who you are. Taking up Asian-American themes, Yang breaks new bildungsroman ground.



Old School, Tobias Wolff (2003)
Set in a prep school in the early 1960s, a scholarship boy with literary ambitions tries to find his voice. Wolff reworks Salinger's terrain without sentimentality.



The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)
The first novel by the author of Middlesex plays with the horror genre, and tells us that not all is at it appears in suburbia. Unflinching and masterfully written, Suicides is not easy, but that's the point.



Anywhere But Here, Mona Simpson (1986)
A mother-daughter story about life on the road and a child's desire to be rooted. Simpson reminds us that sometimes a teenager's rebellion against a parent is warranted.]]>

Why is The Catcher in the Rye still a rite of high school English? Sure, J.D. Salinger's novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. But that was 50 years ago. Today, Salinger's novel lacks the currency or shock value it once had, and has lost some of its critical cachet. But it is still ubiquitously taught even though many newer novels of adolescence are available.

To this day, The Catcher in the Rye remains one of the most referred-to books on back-cover blurbs. Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing is, "as a coming of age story … one of the best since Catcher in the Rye"; Douglas Coupland's Generation X is "a modern-day Catcher in the Rye"; David Sedaris's Barrel Fever is "a caustic mix of J. D. Salinger and John Waters." Indeed, there are many tales of adolescent angst out there, and they all, it seems, need a wink to Salinger to claim a place in this genre. But Salinger's novel no longer deserves the top spot in contemporary coming-of-age literature, even if most would still agree that it firmly occupies the X spot in the "X meets Y" publishing pitch ("It's Catcher in the Rye meets Blood Diamonds"; "It's Catcher in the Rye for gay teenagers").

High school teachers got on the Catcher bandwagon in the early 1960s, in an effort to update their hoary reading lists. When it was first assigned, Catcher's purpose in the curriculum was to offer students a contemporary, cool alternative to, say, something lengthy and dense like David Copperfield. Salinger had a prescient sense of his hero's eventual cultural role: Holden starts his story by telling us he is not going to rehearse "all that David Copperfield kind of crap," because it bores him.

If Salinger needed to acknowledge Dickens in 1951, today any new adolescent coming-of-age tale must go through "all that Holden Caulfield crap." In the 19th century, a bildungsroman showed the growing maturity and self-awareness of a young person. That remains more or less true, but now the equation for the modern bildungsroman is more like, as a friend puts it: "Horny plus bored minus transportation divided by the whole of one's interior life, multiplied by an inverse ratio of miles to a city or a place where there is anything at all to do."

The publication of Catcher helped launch a "Salinger Industry," as George Steiner described the phenomenon in a 1959 article for The Nation. Released in the summer of 1951 by a 32-year-old writer with a modest reputation as a short-story writer, Catcher was a mid-summer Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and by fall it was fourth on The New York Times Best-Seller list. A scant eight years later, the critic Granville Hicks thought twice about including Catcher on his New York University Contemporary American Literature syllabus, because 18-year-olds had already read it.

One reason for Catcher's instant-classic status was that is was-to employ that overused neologism-"relatable" to those who had the power to write about it. In 1961, The New York Times Book Review credited the popularity of Catcher with the "shock and thrill of recognition" it gave readers: "Many of my friends and this writer himself identified completely with Holden." Those few well-known critics who did not look like Holden tended to have a different perspective: Joan Didion, who thought Salinger's work slight, mocked the "relatability factor" of Salinger's novel in a 1961 essay, in which she describes a "stunningly predictable Sarah Lawrence girl" who declared Salinger "the single person in the world capable of understanding her." Like Didion, Steiner considered Catcher of minor literary merit. Its main appeal to students, he argued, is simply that the young like to read about the young, prefer short books, and ones without too many references to other books. Salinger, he says, "flatters [their] very ignorance and moral shallowness." And it helped English professors get promoted, Steiner grumbled, since writing about Catcher
American criticism may have been in trouble in the 1950s, but it is in even worse shape now. Today, there is far less overlap between what teachers, scholars, and the public read. Rare is a combination of scholar, public intellectual, and pedagogue who publishes-as did Steiner, or Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson-across our increasingly specialized publications. And rarer still is the common reader (say, a high school teacher) who peruses scholarly journals, educational publications, and general-audience magazines alike.

Despite critics' disapproval, Catcher is now canonical. It is a part of literary history. Holden is our contemporary American David Copperfield, our 20th-century Huck Finn. He's part of our common conversation, our cultural literacy. You have to admire the guy.

Still, after half a century of new, equally "relatable" coming-of-age-stories, don't some of Holden's younger siblings deserve the end-of-the-year spot in sophomore English? Since a syllabus is a zero-sum game, adding means knocking something off the list ("Scarlet Letter!" yell my undergraduates). But not to worry: Given that a higher population of Americans now attend college than they did in the 1950s, most will be forced to read the old classics a few years later.


A revised syllabus:




Freaks and Geeks (1999)
NBC's series, produced by Judd Apatow, deftly portrayed the tenderness and anxiety of high school.



Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson (1999)
Anderson's Speak tells the story of Melinda, a high school freshman and teenage outcast whose struggles with adolescence cause her to fall mute.



Drown, Junot Díaz (1996)
This book of short stories (by this year's Pulitzer Prize winner) is told from the perspective of Dominican adolescents struggling with family, sexuality, and identity. The lyrical, inventive prose makes their stories all the more memorable.



Project X, Jim Shepard (2004)
Shepard's bold novel tells the story of two eighth-graders in a Columbine-style school massacre. Shepard tackles one of the scariest aspects of 21st-century adolescence.



American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang (2007)
This graphic novel tells that age-old story of trying to accept who you are. Taking up Asian-American themes, Yang breaks new bildungsroman ground.



Old School, Tobias Wolff (2003)
Set in a prep school in the early 1960s, a scholarship boy with literary ambitions tries to find his voice. Wolff reworks Salinger's terrain without sentimentality.



The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)
The first novel by the author of Middlesex plays with the horror genre, and tells us that not all is at it appears in suburbia. Unflinching and masterfully written, Suicides is not easy, but that's the point.



Anywhere But Here, Mona Simpson (1986)
A mother-daughter story about life on the road and a child's desire to be rooted. Simpson reminds us that sometimes a teenager's rebellion against a parent is warranted.]]> Anne Trubek Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:53:53 PDT <![CDATA[Adam Spangler on 21st-century Jazz]]> http://www.good.is/post/adam_spangler_on_21st-century_jazz/ http://www.good.is/post/adam_spangler_on_21st-century_jazz/

Bob Dylan once made his way from Minnesota to New York in search of himself and, so the myth goes, to find his musical hero on his deathbed. In his poem "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie," Dylan concludes, "You'll find God in the church of your choice / You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital… You'll find them both in the Grand Canyon / At sundown." Meaning, whatever it is we are looking for on this journey called life, many of us find it in church, more find it in music, and Bob Dylan found it in folk troubadour Woody Guthrie. Maybe you find it in Marilyn Manson or Britney Spears. Me? I find it in jazz-instrumental jazz, where words don't complicate the emotion. Jazz was the reason I wanted to go to New York.

I've seen the pianist Jason Moran, my preferred jazz musician, too many times to count. My wife calls me a stalker; others like to say I'm on the jamo tour. While my college friends, following in the infinite steps laid in front of them by Deadheads, used to hit the road to follow Phish, I traveled to see jazz in New York. Ten years later, my tour continues.

After years of concerts, it finally dawned on me as I surveyed a crowd one evening: It's not jazz that is dying-clearly there are musicians worth seeing, producing music worth buying-it's the audience that's on life support. As the filmmaker Ken Burns recently explained while promoting his latest documentary, on World War II, if he didn't make the film now he never could, because in five to 10 years, all the war's veterans will be dead. While they may not be dead, jazz fans seem more likely to be members of AARP.

But it's not that simple. Certain artists, of course, draw certain crowds. That fact was laid bare at a recent concert at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium, where Moran shared the bill with the Bad Plus, whose improvised cover songs and merchandise booths attract the college-aged jam-band crowd. Moran, on the other hand, tends toward the more traditional jazz fan-older, intellectual, and preferring a white button-down to a band T-shirt. The juxtaposition was startling, and confusing for some: The majority of elder patrons thought the Bad Plus was the band playing behind Moran, not after him.

While artists obviously dictate the fans more than any other factor, a venue can also have an impact. Depending on the setting, the same artist can draw a wildly different crowd. As happened this year, one evening might find Moran debuting a program to hundreds at Duke University. The next, he's playing solo piano over a cappella Ghostface Killah rhymes in front of a handful of people in a nonprofit artists' space tucked away in Manhattan's East Village.

These days, if you're under the age of 35, odds are you're not a jazz fan. Which doesn't mean you don't like jazz music-some of your favorite music likely takes samples or at least inspiration from jazz. It just means that you aren't actively seeking it out, and that

it isn't being marketed to you. Think about it. Have you heard about Moran? Maybe. Troy Andrews, also known as Trombone Shorty? Doubtful. The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble? Probably not, but you no doubt know one of their clients, Mos Def, who hired the musicians as his backing band for recent tours where they continually stole the show. Jazz, beyond the backing band or hip-hop sample, just isn't out there with today's pop music.

Just because jazz isn't marketed doesn't mean it doesn't exist or isn't thriving. It does mean, however, that expectations for success have to be tempered. Moran's last album, Artist in Residence, for example, sold about 3,000 copies. The merchandise-minded Bad Plus can sell upwards of 100,000-still a far cry from is-that-jazz superstars like Norah Jones, who outsell all jazz labelmates on the order of millions of copies.

You won't find a platinum record on the wall of Moran's Harlem apartment, but neither is Norah Jones being offered a United States Artists fellowship or a teaching position at the Manhattan School of Music (both of which Moran recently received). Indeed, jazz is different-it's a cultural institution, which may in fact hurt its popularity. But musicians can still earn a livelihood through a mix of recording, performing, teaching, and patronage-a unique formula used for decades to support the genre and one that will ensure its survival.

Even in a culture where any nobody can become a famous somebody, the chances of jazz returning to center stage are probably gone. "I definitely don't think it's popular," Moran told me one evening. "Nor do I think it will ever become popular again. That time is gone." Now it's Britney's world; Moran is just living in it.


More 21st-century jazz:




Hypnotic Brass Ensemble
hypnoticbrass.blogspot.com
Once a hip-hop group called Wolf Pack, these eight brothers now blow brass beats on the streets of New York. Hypnotic's albums are all self-published and hard to find, so the best way to hear them is live (luckily, they tour extensively). Part marching band, part rap group, these boys could hold the key to a mainstream future for jazz.



Troy Andrews
trombone shorty.com
Wynton Marsalis says he's Andrews's biggest fan. Allen Toussaint says, "He is just better." The 22-year-old New Orleans native (better known as Trombone Shorty) is a horn player breathing life back into the post-Katrina jazz scene. The virtuoso has played with everyone from the jam band the String Cheese Incident to Lenny Kravitz.


Where to stock up:


Dusty Groove
dustygroove.com
You wouldn't know it by visiting this hole-in-the-wall Chicago record store, but its website is the be-all and end-all for jazz and reggae fiends looking for used vinyl and new CDs. Limited-edition Hypnotic Brass 12"? Nate Morgan live in Santa Barbara? CTI All-Stars? They've got it all.

Blue Note
bluenote.com
Blue Note has been releasing music from the world's best jazz artists since 1939. But it has just entered the 21st century with a website complete with free streaming music from its enormous catalogue, purchasable downloads coming soon, and, of course, the iconic photography of founder Francis Wolff.

DOWNLOADS The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble's albums are available on iTunes, as is most of the Blue Note catalog.]]>

Bob Dylan once made his way from Minnesota to New York in search of himself and, so the myth goes, to find his musical hero on his deathbed. In his poem "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie," Dylan concludes, "You'll find God in the church of your choice / You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital… You'll find them both in the Grand Canyon / At sundown." Meaning, whatever it is we are looking for on this journey called life, many of us find it in church, more find it in music, and Bob Dylan found it in folk troubadour Woody Guthrie. Maybe you find it in Marilyn Manson or Britney Spears. Me? I find it in jazz-instrumental jazz, where words don't complicate the emotion. Jazz was the reason I wanted to go to New York.

I've seen the pianist Jason Moran, my preferred jazz musician, too many times to count. My wife calls me a stalker; others like to say I'm on the jamo tour. While my college friends, following in the infinite steps laid in front of them by Deadheads, used to hit the road to follow Phish, I traveled to see jazz in New York. Ten years later, my tour continues.

After years of concerts, it finally dawned on me as I surveyed a crowd one evening: It's not jazz that is dying-clearly there are musicians worth seeing, producing music worth buying-it's the audience that's on life support. As the filmmaker Ken Burns recently explained while promoting his latest documentary, on World War II, if he didn't make the film now he never could, because in five to 10 years, all the war's veterans will be dead. While they may not be dead, jazz fans seem more likely to be members of AARP.

But it's not that simple. Certain artists, of course, draw certain crowds. That fact was laid bare at a recent concert at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium, where Moran shared the bill with the Bad Plus, whose improvised cover songs and merchandise booths attract the college-aged jam-band crowd. Moran, on the other hand, tends toward the more traditional jazz fan-older, intellectual, and preferring a white button-down to a band T-shirt. The juxtaposition was startling, and confusing for some: The majority of elder patrons thought the Bad Plus was the band playing behind Moran, not after him.

While artists obviously dictate the fans more than any other factor, a venue can also have an impact. Depending on the setting, the same artist can draw a wildly different crowd. As happened this year, one evening might find Moran debuting a program to hundreds at Duke University. The next, he's playing solo piano over a cappella Ghostface Killah rhymes in front of a handful of people in a nonprofit artists' space tucked away in Manhattan's East Village.

These days, if you're under the age of 35, odds are you're not a jazz fan. Which doesn't mean you don't like jazz music-some of your favorite music likely takes samples or at least inspiration from jazz. It just means that you aren't actively seeking it out, and that

it isn't being marketed to you. Think about it. Have you heard about Moran? Maybe. Troy Andrews, also known as Trombone Shorty? Doubtful. The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble? Probably not, but you no doubt know one of their clients, Mos Def, who hired the musicians as his backing band for recent tours where they continually stole the show. Jazz, beyond the backing band or hip-hop sample, just isn't out there with today's pop music.

Just because jazz isn't marketed doesn't mean it doesn't exist or isn't thriving. It does mean, however, that expectations for success have to be tempered. Moran's last album, Artist in Residence, for example, sold about 3,000 copies. The merchandise-minded Bad Plus can sell upwards of 100,000-still a far cry from is-that-jazz superstars like Norah Jones, who outsell all jazz labelmates on the order of millions of copies.

You won't find a platinum record on the wall of Moran's Harlem apartment, but neither is Norah Jones being offered a United States Artists fellowship or a teaching position at the Manhattan School of Music (both of which Moran recently received). Indeed, jazz is different-it's a cultural institution, which may in fact hurt its popularity. But musicians can still earn a livelihood through a mix of recording, performing, teaching, and patronage-a unique formula used for decades to support the genre and one that will ensure its survival.

Even in a culture where any nobody can become a famous somebody, the chances of jazz returning to center stage are probably gone. "I definitely don't think it's popular," Moran told me one evening. "Nor do I think it will ever become popular again. That time is gone." Now it's Britney's world; Moran is just living in it.


More 21st-century jazz:




Hypnotic Brass Ensemble
hypnoticbrass.blogspot.com
Once a hip-hop group called Wolf Pack, these eight brothers now blow brass beats on the streets of New York. Hypnotic's albums are all self-published and hard to find, so the best way to hear them is live (luckily, they tour extensively). Part marching band, part rap group, these boys could hold the key to a mainstream future for jazz.



Troy Andrews
trombone shorty.com
Wynton Marsalis says he's Andrews's biggest fan. Allen Toussaint says, "He is just better." The 22-year-old New Orleans native (better known as Trombone Shorty) is a horn player breathing life back into the post-Katrina jazz scene. The virtuoso has played with everyone from the jam band the String Cheese Incident to Lenny Kravitz.


Where to stock up:


Dusty Groove
dustygroove.com
You wouldn't know it by visiting this hole-in-the-wall Chicago record store, but its website is the be-all and end-all for jazz and reggae fiends looking for used vinyl and new CDs. Limited-edition Hypnotic Brass 12"? Nate Morgan live in Santa Barbara? CTI All-Stars? They've got it all.

Blue Note
bluenote.com
Blue Note has been releasing music from the world's best jazz artists since 1939. But it has just entered the 21st century with a website complete with free streaming music from its enormous catalogue, purchasable downloads coming soon, and, of course, the iconic photography of founder Francis Wolff.

DOWNLOADS The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble's albums are available on iTunes, as is most of the Blue Note catalog.]]> Adam Spangler Wed, 4 Jun 2008 21:41:29 PDT <![CDATA[William Bostwick on the Life and Death of Green Design]]> http://www.good.is/post/william_bostwick_on_the_life_and_death_of_green_design/ http://www.good.is/post/william_bostwick_on_the_life_and_death_of_green_design/

Renzo Piano's New York Times building in midtown Manhattan is a glass-skinned tribute to one of the oldest and most prestigious newspapers in the world. It's also a thousand-foot-tall middle finger to the environmentally-friendly-design establishment. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-you probably know it as LEED-sets the official standard for sustainable architecture. For most of today's high-profile projects, like the new Bank of America skyscraper going up a few blocks away from the Times building, certification is de rigueur. But Piano and the Times didn't bother, and they're not alone. More and more architects have realized that the old standby for certification, with its checklist approach to what's good for the environment and what's not, rewards rule-following and ignores the kind of big thinking that makes architecture worth caring about. Not only that, many architects have an alternative-one that scraps LEED altogether in favor of a holistic approach to sustainable design.

Eight years ago, when LEED began, the reaction was different. While the federal government twiddled its thumbs, a small nonprofit group called the U.S. Green Building Council set out to define "green" design by creating the LEED standards. Architects and environmentalists thought LEED would make sustainable design easier. But the odds were stacked against it. You thought your neighbor's Hummer was bad? Buildings eat up 72 percent of our electricity and 31 percent of our natural gas, and spit out 38 percent of our greenhouse gases. Just one American house releases 26,000 pounds of greenhouse gases each year. LEED promised a solution.

LEED is like a standardized test. Architects start by registering their building-technically an optional step, but one that gives access to study guides that can help decode some of the test's stickier questions. Plus, there's a marketing incentive: Even if a firm doesn't go through the whole certification, it can still tout a "LEED-registered" building. (Condos sometimes do this so that they can sell apartments long before the building is ever examined.) The test has 69 questions about things like materials (are they locally made? Recycled?) and energy use (does the building run on renewable power?). For fulfilling 26 criteria, a building gets certified. Do better, and your building can be Silver, Gold, or, for 52 correct answers, Platinum.

It sounds simple enough, but since 2000, only about a thousand buildings have made the cut. Why? Certification is expensive. It can cost tens of thousands of dollars to jump all the hurdles, from registration and energy modeling to hiring inspectors. A new industry of LEED specialists has appeared just to make sense of the notoriously tricky paperwork. The environmental news website Grist.org reported that certification usually adds the equivalent of 1 percent to 5 percent of the budget to a building's total cost. When a project's cost runs into the millions of dollars, that's a lot of dough. And LEED encourages that spending, asking architects to go through the process again after the building has been up for a while. This has been good business for the Council. A Fast Company investigation found that the USGBC earns 95% of its $50 million annual budget through its programs-one of which is LEED-unlike other nonprofits which rely heavily on grants and donations. Still, many feel that the USGBC's success hasn't made life any easier for designers. The program is still cumbersome. Some even say it's fundamentally flawed.

The problem is the checklist. All 69 items on the list are measured equally, so things like nonsmoking policies have the same ultimate value as a costly and complicated green roof or solar-panel system. That means that, if you do it right, you can slap on attributes to your building like bike racks or a non-irrigated lawn and have LEED call you green without really thinking seriously-or creatively-about the environment. It promotes, in other words, a piecemeal, buffet-style attitude toward sustainable design-a little of this, a little of that-rather than a holistic rethinking of the design process.

But things are changing. First of all, LEED is up for review this fall, and the USGBC is expected to incorporate new factors like local climate and the building's performance over time. Separate rating systems are also gaining momentum. The Green Buildings Initiative's Green Globes system is more user-friendly than LEED, without the mountains of paperwork, and Energy Star, known for certifying products like washing machines and computer monitors, is expanding into the big world of architecture. Then there's the American Institute of Architects' 2030 plan, which aims at cutting fossil fuel use by U.S. buildings in half by 2010 and making all buildings carbon neutral by 2030. The 2030 plan is promising, but LEED is not going to get us there. Like any standardized test, LEED works best as a measurement tool, not a paradigm shifter. Change has to come from the architects themselves.

That's why Piano's New York Times building matters. The project is sustainable in ways that are hard to quantify because Piano incorporated environmental solutions into the fundamental fabric of the design. A 70-by-40-foot skylight and an interior courtyard-garden allow natural light into the tower's offices, lowering electricity use but also defining the look and feel of the whole building. What to LEED is just a single attribute, to Piano is an integral part of the design. This is a radical and innovative idea, and it picks up where LEED left off, moving greenness from a privileged subset of design into a basic design strategy-not a prize, but a process.

The onus, then, is on the architects, and they're responding by forgetting about LEED and rethinking sustainable architecture. They're turning the standardized test into an essay question that asks of green design the same things we ask of all good design: Does it have a unifying theme? Does it make a statement? Does it inspire? In the end, what's good for the planet is good for architecture in general, and so perhaps it's best to leave "green" undefined and unquantifiable, transforming it from a supplementary title into a fundamental way of thinking. Green architecture is dead. Long live green architecture.


Other projects forgoing LEED:




Loblolly House, 2007
by Kieran Timberlake Associates
Taylors Island, Maryland
The Loblolly House marks a sea change in prefab design. Prefab is more efficient than traditional construction, but Kieran Timberlake took it further, rethinking the whole process. It used only local materials and manufactured piece of houses that can be taken apart and reused or recycled.



228 East Third Street, 2004
by Chris Benedict,
New York
While multimillion-dollar luxury LEED-registered condos sprout up all over Manhattan, Benedict eschewed snazzy add-ons in favor of low-cost, high-impact sustainable design. Running hot-water pipes under the floors heats rooms gently without big, energy-sucking fans, and rearranging insulation layers keeps that heat where it belongs.



Ballard Library, 2005
by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson,
Seattle
The Ballard Library's huge sail of a roof is actually a giant garden with more than 18,000 plants. The roof insulates the building, keeps rainwater from flooding storm drains, and focuses the overall design. Tours of the roof as well as skylights and periscopes in the rooms below mean it's always the center of attention.]]>

Renzo Piano's New York Times building in midtown Manhattan is a glass-skinned tribute to one of the oldest and most prestigious newspapers in the world. It's also a thousand-foot-tall middle finger to the environmentally-friendly-design establishment. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-you probably know it as LEED-sets the official standard for sustainable architecture. For most of today's high-profile projects, like the new Bank of America skyscraper going up a few blocks away from the Times building, certification is de rigueur. But Piano and the Times didn't bother, and they're not alone. More and more architects have realized that the old standby for certification, with its checklist approach to what's good for the environment and what's not, rewards rule-following and ignores the kind of big thinking that makes architecture worth caring about. Not only that, many architects have an alternative-one that scraps LEED altogether in favor of a holistic approach to sustainable design.

Eight years ago, when LEED began, the reaction was different. While the federal government twiddled its thumbs, a small nonprofit group called the U.S. Green Building Council set out to define "green" design by creating the LEED standards. Architects and environmentalists thought LEED would make sustainable design easier. But the odds were stacked against it. You thought your neighbor's Hummer was bad? Buildings eat up 72 percent of our electricity and 31 percent of our natural gas, and spit out 38 percent of our greenhouse gases. Just one American house releases 26,000 pounds of greenhouse gases each year. LEED promised a solution.

LEED is like a standardized test. Architects start by registering their building-technically an optional step, but one that gives access to study guides that can help decode some of the test's stickier questions. Plus, there's a marketing incentive: Even if a firm doesn't go through the whole certification, it can still tout a "LEED-registered" building. (Condos sometimes do this so that they can sell apartments long before the building is ever examined.) The test has 69 questions about things like materials (are they locally made? Recycled?) and energy use (does the building run on renewable power?). For fulfilling 26 criteria, a building gets certified. Do better, and your building can be Silver, Gold, or, for 52 correct answers, Platinum.

It sounds simple enough, but since 2000, only about a thousand buildings have made the cut. Why? Certification is expensive. It can cost tens of thousands of dollars to jump all the hurdles, from registration and energy modeling to hiring inspectors. A new industry of LEED specialists has appeared just to make sense of the notoriously tricky paperwork. The environmental news website Grist.org reported that certification usually adds the equivalent of 1 percent to 5 percent of the budget to a building's total cost. When a project's cost runs into the millions of dollars, that's a lot of dough. And LEED encourages that spending, asking architects to go through the process again after the building has been up for a while. This has been good business for the Council. A Fast Company investigation found that the USGBC earns 95% of its $50 million annual budget through its programs-one of which is LEED-unlike other nonprofits which rely heavily on grants and donations. Still, many feel that the USGBC's success hasn't made life any easier for designers. The program is still cumbersome. Some even say it's fundamentally flawed.

The problem is the checklist. All 69 items on the list are measured equally, so things like nonsmoking policies have the same ultimate value as a costly and complicated green roof or solar-panel system. That means that, if you do it right, you can slap on attributes to your building like bike racks or a non-irrigated lawn and have LEED call you green without really thinking seriously-or creatively-about the environment. It promotes, in other words, a piecemeal, buffet-style attitude toward sustainable design-a little of this, a little of that-rather than a holistic rethinking of the design process.

But things are changing. First of all, LEED is up for review this fall, and the USGBC is expected to incorporate new factors like local climate and the building's performance over time. Separate rating systems are also gaining momentum. The Green Buildings Initiative's Green Globes system is more user-friendly than LEED, without the mountains of paperwork, and Energy Star, known for certifying products like washing machines and computer monitors, is expanding into the big world of architecture. Then there's the American Institute of Architects' 2030 plan, which aims at cutting fossil fuel use by U.S. buildings in half by 2010 and making all buildings carbon neutral by 2030. The 2030 plan is promising, but LEED is not going to get us there. Like any standardized test, LEED works best as a measurement tool, not a paradigm shifter. Change has to come from the architects themselves.

That's why Piano's New York Times building matters. The project is sustainable in ways that are hard to quantify because Piano incorporated environmental solutions into the fundamental fabric of the design. A 70-by-40-foot skylight and an interior courtyard-garden allow natural light into the tower's offices, lowering electricity use but also defining the look and feel of the whole building. What to LEED is just a single attribute, to Piano is an integral part of the design. This is a radical and innovative idea, and it picks up where LEED left off, moving greenness from a privileged subset of design into a basic design strategy-not a prize, but a process.

The onus, then, is on the architects, and they're responding by forgetting about LEED and rethinking sustainable architecture. They're turning the standardized test into an essay question that asks of green design the same things we ask of all good design: Does it have a unifying theme? Does it make a statement? Does it inspire? In the end, what's good for the planet is good for architecture in general, and so perhaps it's best to leave "green" undefined and unquantifiable, transforming it from a supplementary title into a fundamental way of thinking. Green architecture is dead. Long live green architecture.


Other projects forgoing LEED:




Loblolly House, 2007
by Kieran Timberlake Associates
Taylors Island, Maryland
The Loblolly House marks a sea change in prefab design. Prefab is more efficient than traditional construction, but Kieran Timberlake took it further, rethinking the whole process. It used only local materials and manufactured piece of houses that can be taken apart and reused or recycled.



228 East Third Street, 2004
by Chris Benedict,
New York
While multimillion-dollar luxury LEED-registered condos sprout up all over Manhattan, Benedict eschewed snazzy add-ons in favor of low-cost, high-impact sustainable design. Running hot-water pipes under the floors heats rooms gently without big, energy-sucking fans, and rearranging insulation layers keeps that heat where it belongs.



Ballard Library, 2005
by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson,
Seattle
The Ballard Library's huge sail of a roof is actually a giant garden with more than 18,000 plants. The roof insulates the building, keeps rainwater from flooding storm drains, and focuses the overall design. Tours of the roof as well as skylights and periscopes in the rooms below mean it's always the center of attention.]]> William Bostwick Wed, 4 Jun 2008 21:10:37 PDT <![CDATA[Mark Peters on Eggcorns]]> http://www.good.is/post/mark-peters-on-eggcorns/ http://www.good.is/post/mark-peters-on-eggcorns/

If you saw Blades of Glory last year, you may have chuckled when Will Ferrell used the word "mind-bottling," which he defined as "when your thoughts get so twisted up it's like they're trapped in a bottle." Or maybe you have a friend who likes to email about "jar-dropping" events in "lame man's terms."

"Mind-bottling," "jar-dropping," and "lame man's terms" are all eggcorns-a type of common and somewhat logical language goof named after a misspelling of "acorn." Eggcorns have garnered quite a following on the web, where they were first discussed on the popular linguistics blog Language Log in 2003. If you can answer yes to any of the following questions, then you may have to check your own nest for eggcorns: When you really care about a cause, do you try to strum up support? Are you a perfectionist who hates to do things half-hazardly? Do complex moral issues fill you with a paralyzing cognitive dissidence? And finally, are you tired of paying exuberant prices?

Linguists-like Language Log's Mark Liberman, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Arnold Zwicky-insist that eggcorns aren't eggcorns unless they make at least a little bit of sense: "Strum up support" fits the bill because the meaning is so close to the correct "drum"-one musical metaphor is (almost) as logical as another. When we experience cognitive dissonance, it sometimes feels as if obstinate hemispheres of our brain are dissenting. "Half-hazard" is an apt, though unintentional, synonym for "haphazard," and though exorbitant prices cause little exuberance in shoppers, high prices and high moods are probably linked in the minds of the eggcorners.

As a language columnist, writing teacher, and rabid word nut, I hunt for eggcorns in all seasons but have no immunity to laying my own: Though I rarely have occasion to party hearty in my tighty whities, I did used to write "party hardy" and "tidy whities." (Sadly, I just had to revise that last sentence to put the eggcorns and the originals in the right spots, and I plan on quintuple-checking it before publication.)

The website Eggcorn Database has catalogued more than 500 of these errors, including "cease the opportunity" (seize the opportunity), "whoa is me" (woe is me), "girdle one's loins" (gird one's loins), "financial heartship" (financial hardship), "throngs of passion" (throes of passion), "mute point" (moot point), and "without further adieu" (without further ado). I think my favorite is "lack toast and tolerant," a dietary problem that makes lactose intolerance seem like a pleasant alternative to a barren, toastless existence. Giggles aside, the point of eggcorn-collecting isn't to make fun but to shed light: on the ways people-including you and I-make meaning out of stuff we know and stuff we've heard. As Pullum has written on Language Log, "it would be so easy to dismiss eggcorns as signs of illiteracy and stupidity, but they are nothing of the sort. They are imaginative attempts at relating something heard to material already known. One could say that people should look things up in dictionaries, but what should they look up? If you look up eggcorn, you'll find it isn't there. Now what?"

Eggcorns aren't necessarily errors at all. Instead, they are a type of language evolution, and they are being closely monitored by the people who make our dictionaries; even if you can't find your eggcorn there right now, you might soon. The seemingly impossible mission of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, is to record the entire history of the English language. The OED uses something called the Oxford English Corpus to get a handle on current usage. The Corpus-a constantly evolving collection of texts including novels, newspapers, blogs, and chat rooms-contains 2 billion English words (though almost 100 million of those words are "the") and gives the OED the best possible look at how people are using language. It also shows how common some eggcorns are, beating out the original ("correct") terms in countless incidents. The adoption of these eggcorns indicates that eventually they won't be considered errors at all, and many are already accepted variants.

So next time you see an eggcorn, don't curse the heavens. Refrain from removing your eyeballs with a spork. Please don't start a blog about kids these days and how they're spilling Red Bull all over our nice dictionaries. These mind-bottling, jar-dropping mistakes show people are smart-not stupid-and this process of the masses' getting it wrong until it becomes right is common, ongoing, and unstoppable.




Eggcorns that became (or are becoming) accepted words:




scavenger's daughter:
This torture device, which painfully compressed the body, was named "Skevington's daughter" for the lieutenant at the Tower of London who invented it. It's not known what mix of black humor and misunderstanding led to the name change, but "scavenger" had a nasty enough sound to catch on.

Jerusalem artichoke:
Previously known as the "girasole artichoke," the name changed sometime in the 17th century after years of being misheard and misrepeated. It does not grow anywhere near Jerusalem.

piggyback:
This word has been spelled an astounding number of ways, but the first was "a pick pack," as used in 1564. From there, it morphed into "pick-a-pack," "pick-back," "picky-back," "pig-a-back," and "pig back," before settling down as the word we all know today.

cockroach:
Foreign words are particularly prone to eggcorning, so Captain John Smith needn't feel bad about the fact that in 1624 he misspelled the Spanish "cucaracha" as "cacarootch," leading to the current spelling.

proud flesh:
The Dictionary of American Regional English shows that this medical term for unsightly, excess tissue has been misunderstood as "plowed flesh," "plowed flush," "prod flesh," "proud flush,"
and "proud fresh"-errors that are all somewhat logical and all totally gross.

soup up/supe up:
These phrases demonstrate well the seductive logic of eggcorns. Soup is for colds, not cars, right? But language isn't so logical, and the original expression is indeed "souped up."

minuscule/miniscule:
According to Zimmer and the Oxford English Corpus, uses of "miniscule" outnumber those of "minuscule," but it's close. "Minuscule" is related to "minus," but the word people actually remember is "mini." Words like "miniature" and "mini-me" have had a greater influence, leading to this miniscule spelling change.

rife/ripe with:
"Rife" is rarely used and means little to us these days, so "ripe" is catching on, even in The New York Times. The association with smell makes sense in many contexts: anything ripe with corruption or injustice certainly stinks.

coming down the pike/pipe:
Since at least 1901, people have been coming down the pike, but when the object became obsolete, people started coming down the pipe. It's successful because many folks wouldn't know a turnpike from a head-on-a-pike, but pipes are commonplace.

free reign/rein, reins/reigns of power:
Except for those lucky cops who get their own horses, most people know very little of reins-but they do know something about the reigns of residents, dictators, champions, and other royalish types.]]>

If you saw Blades of Glory last year, you may have chuckled when Will Ferrell used the word "mind-bottling," which he defined as "when your thoughts get so twisted up it's like they're trapped in a bottle." Or maybe you have a friend who likes to email about "jar-dropping" events in "lame man's terms."

"Mind-bottling," "jar-dropping," and "lame man's terms" are all eggcorns-a type of common and somewhat logical language goof named after a misspelling of "acorn." Eggcorns have garnered quite a following on the web, where they were first discussed on the popular linguistics blog Language Log in 2003. If you can answer yes to any of the following questions, then you may have to check your own nest for eggcorns: When you really care about a cause, do you try to strum up support? Are you a perfectionist who hates to do things half-hazardly? Do complex moral issues fill you with a paralyzing cognitive dissidence? And finally, are you tired of paying exuberant prices?

Linguists-like Language Log's Mark Liberman, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Arnold Zwicky-insist that eggcorns aren't eggcorns unless they make at least a little bit of sense: "Strum up support" fits the bill because the meaning is so close to the correct "drum"-one musical metaphor is (almost) as logical as another. When we experience cognitive dissonance, it sometimes feels as if obstinate hemispheres of our brain are dissenting. "Half-hazard" is an apt, though unintentional, synonym for "haphazard," and though exorbitant prices cause little exuberance in shoppers, high prices and high moods are probably linked in the minds of the eggcorners.

As a language columnist, writing teacher, and rabid word nut, I hunt for eggcorns in all seasons but have no immunity to laying my own: Though I rarely have occasion to party hearty in my tighty whities, I did used to write "party hardy" and "tidy whities." (Sadly, I just had to revise that last sentence to put the eggcorns and the originals in the right spots, and I plan on quintuple-checking it before publication.)

The website Eggcorn Database has catalogued more than 500 of these errors, including "cease the opportunity" (seize the opportunity), "whoa is me" (woe is me), "girdle one's loins" (gird one's loins), "financial heartship" (financial hardship), "throngs of passion" (throes of passion), "mute point" (moot point), and "without further adieu" (without further ado). I think my favorite is "lack toast and tolerant," a dietary problem that makes lactose intolerance seem like a pleasant alternative to a barren, toastless existence. Giggles aside, the point of eggcorn-collecting isn't to make fun but to shed light: on the ways people-including you and I-make meaning out of stuff we know and stuff we've heard. As Pullum has written on Language Log, "it would be so easy to dismiss eggcorns as signs of illiteracy and stupidity, but they are nothing of the sort. They are imaginative attempts at relating something heard to material already known. One could say that people should look things up in dictionaries, but what should they look up? If you look up eggcorn, you'll find it isn't there. Now what?"

Eggcorns aren't necessarily errors at all. Instead, they are a type of language evolution, and they are being closely monitored by the people who make our dictionaries; even if you can't find your eggcorn there right now, you might soon. The seemingly impossible mission of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, is to record the entire history of the English language. The OED uses something called the Oxford English Corpus to get a handle on current usage. The Corpus-a constantly evolving collection of texts including novels, newspapers, blogs, and chat rooms-contains 2 billion English words (though almost 100 million of those words are "the") and gives the OED the best possible look at how people are using language. It also shows how common some eggcorns are, beating out the original ("correct") terms in countless incidents. The adoption of these eggcorns indicates that eventually they won't be considered errors at all, and many are already accepted variants.

So next time you see an eggcorn, don't curse the heavens. Refrain from removing your eyeballs with a spork. Please don't start a blog about kids these days and how they're spilling Red Bull all over our nice dictionaries. These mind-bottling, jar-dropping mistakes show people are smart-not stupid-and this process of the masses' getting it wrong until it becomes right is common, ongoing, and unstoppable.




Eggcorns that became (or are becoming) accepted words:




scavenger's daughter:
This torture device, which painfully compressed the body, was named "Skevington's daughter" for the lieutenant at the Tower of London who invented it. It's not known what mix of black humor and misunderstanding led to the name change, but "scavenger" had a nasty enough sound to catch on.

Jerusalem artichoke:
Previously known as the "girasole artichoke," the name changed sometime in the 17th century after years of being misheard and misrepeated. It does not grow anywhere near Jerusalem.

piggyback:
This word has been spelled an astounding number of ways, but the first was "a pick pack," as used in 1564. From there, it morphed into "pick-a-pack," "pick-back," "picky-back," "pig-a-back," and "pig back," before settling down as the word we all know today.

cockroach:
Foreign words are particularly prone to eggcorning, so Captain John Smith needn't feel bad about the fact that in 1624 he misspelled the Spanish "cucaracha" as "cacarootch," leading to the current spelling.

proud flesh:
The Dictionary of American Regional English shows that this medical term for unsightly, excess tissue has been misunderstood as "plowed flesh," "plowed flush," "prod flesh," "proud flush,"
and "proud fresh"-errors that are all somewhat logical and all totally gross.

soup up/supe up:
These phrases demonstrate well the seductive logic of eggcorns. Soup is for colds, not cars, right? But language isn't so logical, and the original expression is indeed "souped up."

minuscule/miniscule:
According to Zimmer and the Oxford English Corpus, uses of "miniscule" outnumber those of "minuscule," but it's close. "Minuscule" is related to "minus," but the word people actually remember is "mini." Words like "miniature" and "mini-me" have had a greater influence, leading to this miniscule spelling change.

rife/ripe with:
"Rife" is rarely used and means little to us these days, so "ripe" is catching on, even in The New York Times. The association with smell makes sense in many contexts: anything ripe with corruption or injustice certainly stinks.

coming down the pike/pipe:
Since at least 1901, people have been coming down the pike, but when the object became obsolete, people started coming down the pipe. It's successful because many folks wouldn't know a turnpike from a head-on-a-pike, but pipes are commonplace.

free reign/rein, reins/reigns of power:
Except for those lucky cops who get their own horses, most people know very little of reins-but they do know something about the reigns of residents, dictators, champions, and other royalish types.]]> Mark Peters Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:54:33 PDT <![CDATA[Chris Ladd on Consumer Justice Online]]> http://www.good.is/post/chris_ladd_on_consumer_justice_online/ http://www.good.is/post/chris_ladd_on_consumer_justice_online/

There are a lot of people getting screwed out there in this great nation of ours. Ten years ago, I would never have known how many. But now I know, for instance, that it took one guy nearly three months to get Verizon to install his DSL service. I know that another took his iPhone to Europe and came back to find a $3,000 bill waiting for him. Yet another had to ask AOL to cancel his account 14 times before they acquiesced.

Getting screwed by large corporations is a kind of street battle, with the companies bringing guns to what you thought was a knife fight. If there isn't a threat of corporate lawyers getting involved, then it's "Hold please," "I'm sorry, sir, it's company policy," or "There's nothing I can do."

But that battle is changing. The Consumerist, a Gawker Media-backed blog read by 2 million people every month, is one of the weapons behind this phenomenon of digital consumer justice. To understand companies, argues The Consumerist's editor, Ben Popken, we should think of them as forces of nature, governed not by the laws of physics but by profit and loss. These are as absolute as gravity. If addressing your complaint is the cheapest or easiest thing to do, they will. If not, then they're very sorry-they value your business, but there's nothing they can do. "They're not making emotional decisions," Popken says. "They're making a balance-sheet decision."

There is, of course, nothing new to this. The difference today is that the internet has mobilized an army of consumers dedicated to dodging ridiculous company policies and hurdling script-reading customer-service representatives. With their sheer weight, they are driving a sort of revolution, pushing case after case from one column to another.

Dave Stolte, the guy with the $3,000 iPhone bill, struck out dealing with AT&T's service representative. Stolte would have to pay, they said, or AT&T would shut off his phone-and his wife's. Desperate, he sent letters both to AT&T's CEO and to Apple's, neither of whom responded. He then sent the same letter to tech-blog extraordinaire BoingBoing, which posted it immediately. Within three hours, a high-level service rep called Stolte, apologized, and waived the entire $3,000 balance.

This kind of thing is happening often enough that many companies, Popken says, have developed "blog outreach teams," which are "basically like firefighters," stepping in to stamp out any bad press in the blogosphere. Usually they do this by giving people like Dave Stolte exactly what they want. Problem solved for Customer Y. Good press for Company X. It's a win-win. When I called AT&T, a spokesperson told me that the company takes a customer's problem just as seriously if "you simply call us to tell us about it, or write us about it, as we do if someone puts it on a blog."

That sounds very much like something I would tell a writer working on a story such as this one. It also sounds very difficult to believe, especially in circumstances such as Stolte's, involving a blog that has three times as many subscribers as the daily circulation of The New York Times. Let's be generous-perhaps the exposure Stolte gained on BoingBoing and the other sites that picked up his story brought his case to the eyes of someone who gave a damn. But perhaps his was a case of triage.

Others take their fights directly to the boardroom. There is what Consumerist calls the Executive Email Carpet Bomb, wherein creative googling yields both a company's email formula (firstname.lastname@facelesscorp.com) and a list of corporate officers, which, when combined, often result in speedy referrals to someone who wants very much to make such carpet-bombing go away. There is also the well-written letter of complaint to a friendly CEO, which, if you're lucky, is then passed down to underlings more eager to do his or her bidding than yours. In a variation, one fellow called Verizon's corporate switchboard, asked for the CEO's office, and in less than three days, his DSL service, for which he'd been waiting for three months, was up and running. In each sortie, intelligence is gained, distributed, and discussed. Tactics are honed. The battalion of consumers grows stronger.

And then there is pure catharsis, that instinct to gain satisfaction from nothing more than broadcasting the indignity to which you've been subjected. Vincent Ferrari had heard how difficult canceling AOL's service could be, so when he wanted to cancel his, in June, 2006, he took the precaution of recording the phone call. In a now-infamous four-minute-and-57 second recording of customer-service hell, Ferrari asks an astounding 14 times for the representative to cancel his account and, despite being 30 years old at the time, was asked to put his father on the line. In the following week, Ferrari's personal website crashed anew with each link from heavy hitters like the Consumerist, MetaFilter, Fark, and BoingBoing, and again as the story ricocheted through the traditional media, making appearances in The New York Times, the New York Post, CNBC, the Today show, and Nightline. Ferrari had created for AOL a very large digital black eye, seen by millions.

To be sure, these stories evoke roughly equal parts commiseration and schadenfreude. For companies, though, the stakes can only get higher. Pissing off customers gets more expensive when each has millions of potential cheerleaders, and each of those cheerleaders is a potential customer. Would it be nice if corporations had purer motives? Sure. But for consumers on the front lines, the very best they can hope for is that someone in some position of influence comes to care what happens to them. In the end, why that happens doesn't much matter.


Blogger's revenge:


Thomas Hawk vs.



In one of the first big blogger takedowns, Thomas Hawk exposed PriceRitePhoto.com for baiting and switching a high-end camera. The manager threatened he would "never be able to place an order on the internet again." After appearances of the story on Slashdot and MetaFilter and in The New York Times, it's PriceRitePhoto having order trouble.



Michael Whitford vs.



Michael Whitford said he didn't spill anything on his MacBook. Apple says he did. After pleading his case to an AppleCare manager, Whitford took out his anger via YouTube, where he uploaded a video of himself taking a sledgehammer to said MacBook. Three hundred thousand views later, Apple reconsidered and offered him a new one.



Allan Wood vs.



Superfan Allan Wood happily spent $280.45 to download the telecasts of 71 games from the official baseball site, MLB.com. But then Major League Baseball changed its video format, rendering all previously purchased games unwatchable. After being told he had no recourse, Wood posted a tirade on his blog, which was then picked up by Wired News, TechDirt, and The Washington Post. The league caved, granting free replacement vids to all.



Krystyl Baldwin vs.



Krystyl Baldwin was pretty sure her $14,062.27 bill from Sprint was a mistake. So she filed a complaint. And? Nothing. It took a high-traffic YouTube video to clear up the mess. After being shared with 40,000 friendly viewers, her complaint was fixed.


Brian Finkelstein vs.



Brian Finkelstein's internet service was spotty, so Comcast sent a repair technician to swap his router. When the technician fell asleep on his couch and failed to fix the problem, Finklestein filmed it all, then uploaded the video to his blog. Gizmodo and MSNBC carried the story, and within 48 hours a team of Comcast repairmen arrived and worked from 7 p.m. until midnight to fix the problem.]]>

There are a lot of people getting screwed out there in this great nation of ours. Ten years ago, I would never have known how many. But now I know, for instance, that it took one guy nearly three months to get Verizon to install his DSL service. I know that another took his iPhone to Europe and came back to find a $3,000 bill waiting for him. Yet another had to ask AOL to cancel his account 14 times before they acquiesced.

Getting screwed by large corporations is a kind of street battle, with the companies bringing guns to what you thought was a knife fight. If there isn't a threat of corporate lawyers getting involved, then it's "Hold please," "I'm sorry, sir, it's company policy," or "There's nothing I can do."

But that battle is changing. The Consumerist, a Gawker Media-backed blog read by 2 million people every month, is one of the weapons behind this phenomenon of digital consumer justice. To understand companies, argues The Consumerist's editor, Ben Popken, we should think of them as forces of nature, governed not by the laws of physics but by profit and loss. These are as absolute as gravity. If addressing your complaint is the cheapest or easiest thing to do, they will. If not, then they're very sorry-they value your business, but there's nothing they can do. "They're not making emotional decisions," Popken says. "They're making a balance-sheet decision."

There is, of course, nothing new to this. The difference today is that the internet has mobilized an army of consumers dedicated to dodging ridiculous company policies and hurdling script-reading customer-service representatives. With their sheer weight, they are driving a sort of revolution, pushing case after case from one column to another.

Dave Stolte, the guy with the $3,000 iPhone bill, struck out dealing with AT&T's service representative. Stolte would have to pay, they said, or AT&T would shut off his phone-and his wife's. Desperate, he sent letters both to AT&T's CEO and to Apple's, neither of whom responded. He then sent the same letter to tech-blog extraordinaire BoingBoing, which posted it immediately. Within three hours, a high-level service rep called Stolte, apologized, and waived the entire $3,000 balance.

This kind of thing is happening often enough that many companies, Popken says, have developed "blog outreach teams," which are "basically like firefighters," stepping in to stamp out any bad press in the blogosphere. Usually they do this by giving people like Dave Stolte exactly what they want. Problem solved for Customer Y. Good press for Company X. It's a win-win. When I called AT&T, a spokesperson told me that the company takes a customer's problem just as seriously if "you simply call us to tell us about it, or write us about it, as we do if someone puts it on a blog."

That sounds very much like something I would tell a writer working on a story such as this one. It also sounds very difficult to believe, especially in circumstances such as Stolte's, involving a blog that has three times as many subscribers as the daily circulation of The New York Times. Let's be generous-perhaps the exposure Stolte gained on BoingBoing and the other sites that picked up his story brought his case to the eyes of someone who gave a damn. But perhaps his was a case of triage.

Others take their fights directly to the boardroom. There is what Consumerist calls the Executive Email Carpet Bomb, wherein creative googling yields both a company's email formula (firstname.lastname@facelesscorp.com) and a list of corporate officers, which, when combined, often result in speedy referrals to someone who wants very much to make such carpet-bombing go away. There is also the well-written letter of complaint to a friendly CEO, which, if you're lucky, is then passed down to underlings more eager to do his or her bidding than yours. In a variation, one fellow called Verizon's corporate switchboard, asked for the CEO's office, and in less than three days, his DSL service, for which he'd been waiting for three months, was up and running. In each sortie, intelligence is gained, distributed, and discussed. Tactics are honed. The battalion of consumers grows stronger.

And then there is pure catharsis, that instinct to gain satisfaction from nothing more than broadcasting the indignity to which you've been subjected. Vincent Ferrari had heard how difficult canceling AOL's service could be, so when he wanted to cancel his, in June, 2006, he took the precaution of recording the phone call. In a now-infamous four-minute-and-57 second recording of customer-service hell, Ferrari asks an astounding 14 times for the representative to cancel his account and, despite being 30 years old at the time, was asked to put his father on the line. In the following week, Ferrari's personal website crashed anew with each link from heavy hitters like the Consumerist, MetaFilter, Fark, and BoingBoing, and again as the story ricocheted through the traditional media, making appearances in The New York Times, the New York Post, CNBC, the Today show, and Nightline. Ferrari had created for AOL a very large digital black eye, seen by millions.

To be sure, these stories evoke roughly equal parts commiseration and schadenfreude. For companies, though, the stakes can only get higher. Pissing off customers gets more expensive when each has millions of potential cheerleaders, and each of those cheerleaders is a potential customer. Would it be nice if corporations had purer motives? Sure. But for consumers on the front lines, the very best they can hope for is that someone in some position of influence comes to care what happens to them. In the end, why that happens doesn't much matter.


Blogger's revenge:


Thomas Hawk vs.



In one of the first big blogger takedowns, Thomas Hawk exposed PriceRitePhoto.com for baiting and switching a high-end camera. The manager threatened he would "never be able to place an order on the internet again." After appearances of the story on Slashdot and MetaFilter and in The New York Times, it's PriceRitePhoto having order trouble.



Michael Whitford vs.



Michael Whitford said he didn't spill anything on his MacBook. Apple says he did. After pleading his case to an AppleCare manager, Whitford took out his anger via YouTube, where he uploaded a video of himself taking a sledgehammer to said MacBook. Three hundred thousand views later, Apple reconsidered and offered him a new one.



Allan Wood vs.



Superfan Allan Wood happily spent $280.45 to download the telecasts of 71 games from the official baseball site, MLB.com. But then Major League Baseball changed its video format, rendering all previously purchased games unwatchable. After being told he had no recourse, Wood posted a tirade on his blog, which was then picked up by Wired News, TechDirt, and The Washington Post. The league caved, granting free replacement vids to all.



Krystyl Baldwin vs.



Krystyl Baldwin was pretty sure her $14,062.27 bill from Sprint was a mistake. So she filed a complaint. And? Nothing. It took a high-traffic YouTube video to clear up the mess. After being shared with 40,000 friendly viewers, her complaint was fixed.


Brian Finkelstein vs.



Brian Finkelstein's internet service was spotty, so Comcast sent a repair technician to swap his router. When the technician fell asleep on his couch and failed to fix the problem, Finklestein filmed it all, then uploaded the video to his blog. Gizmodo and MSNBC carried the story, and within 48 hours a team of Comcast repairmen arrived and worked from 7 p.m. until midnight to fix the problem.]]> Chris Ladd Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:02:13 PDT <![CDATA[Matt Barone on Handheld Horror Movies]]> http://www.good.is/post/matt_barone_on_handheld_horror_movies/ http://www.good.is/post/matt_barone_on_handheld_horror_movies/

Wine is flowing as attractive, well-dressed 20-somethings mingle in a swanky Manhattan loft, toasting "We love you, man," on the eve of a friend's departure. Considering such an extravagant farewell, it's hard to imagine why young Rob Hawkins would want to be anywhere else. But the fun quickly turns to fear, as an earthquake-like eruption rattles the building. A handheld camera follows the partygoers to the roof, where the shaky footage reveals a flaming mushroom cloud in the distance. Racing down a staircase, the camera drops to the floor, lying sideways until someone helps our cameraman up. Once out on the street, his increasingly erratic footage captures a giant object crashing into the frame. It's the Statue of Liberty's head, landing just inches from his feet.

January's Cloverfield is the latest movie made with an infrequently employed but truly terrifying approach to onscreen horror. With an anemic budget, the director, Matt Reeves, captures the intensity of a monster movie using only a handheld camera, putting the viewer right into the action, in what feels like real time. There are very few transitions or scene setups and little editing; what you see is what has happened. And the J.J. Abrams–produced monster mash is a visionary 2008 trend-sparker. In its wake, prepare for a year of movies just like it.

At their best, horror movies can scar you for life. Take Stanley Kubrick's 1980 masterpiece The Shining; sure, Jack Nicholson's naturally unhinged presence helps, but what truly gives you the willies is its striking, off-kilter score, which matches the unbearable claustrophobia of the Overlook Hotel. Cloverfield doesn't have these luxuries. No soundtrack, no tactical editing, no creepy apparitions of little girls inviting you to come play with them. With Cloverfield, you see only whatever our cameraman catches.

The best example of the brilliance of handheld horror remains 1999's The Blair Witch Project, the subgenre's most successful entry. Made with a budget of roughly $25,000, the film grossed nearly $250 million. The unexpected smash was propelled by a daring marketing campaign that tricked moviegoers into thinking the footage was real. The implied menace of the "witch," whom you never see, produces an escalating dread that culminates with an off-screen attack, signified by the camera suddenly dropping to the ground.

Many of these films are not just subverting the horror genre as a whole, but specifically recalling some of its classics. In Cloverfield, as the monster's wrath is shown in all of its catastrophic glory, the metropolitan nightmare calls to mind Godzilla as much as it evokes the horror of 9/11. The Poughkeepsie Tapes, another faux-true-story slasher, is made up of "uncovered" tapes shot by the killer himself, who captures his "torture porn" without the annoying rapid camera cuts and electronica music of the Saw franchise. Or look at the indie Diary of the Dead, the fifth installment of the iconic George Romero's zombie series, also shot with a handheld. Consider it Romero's "fuck you" to major studio interference. Even Poltergeist and The Haunting are tapped as inspiration for Paranormal Activity, which uses surveillance-camera footage of a couple's ghost-ridden bedroom.

Post-Cloverfield, the most highly anticipated film of the subgenre is [REC], a Spanish spin on 28 Days Later, in which a news station's cameraman, trapped inside an infested apartment building, broadcasts footage of rabid, bloodthirsty humans. [REC] is a comment on our unending obsession with reality programming. What's the difference between watching real people endure heartbreak or humiliation and seeing fake real people get attacked by ravenous flesh-eaters? Both dig into our desire to witness harshness from the comfort of our couches.

Horror buffs are rejoicing. This moment in film is a welcome respite from the genre's unimaginative, shameful dependence on remakes. The studios, too, are ecstatic. For them, the heftiest part of the film's price tag-expensive actors-is erased. In true Hollywood form, studios are jumping on the bandwagon, investing in the trend before its gains can be measured. Call it a vote of confidence that before the original has even arrived Stateside, Sony's Screen Gems has begun production on a remake of [REC], titled Quarantined. Its choice for director? The director of The Poughkeepsie Tapes, John Erick Dowdle.

Think of these movies a new kind of horror for the YouTube generation. Remember December, 2006, when the grainy video of Saddam Hussein's "closed-door" hanging circulated online? Countless people logged on to see the execution. It was an extreme example of the growing voyeurism of our society. Imagine if footage of the Godzilla-like destruction of a major city surfaced on television and computer screens. Everyone would watch.


Handheld genre films through the ages:





Peeping Tom (1960)

English auteur Michael Powell's inventive serial-killer flick is the granddaddy of handheld horror. A tormented photographer impales women with a blade concealed in his camera's tripod, and then immortalizes his victim's terrified, helpless expressions on film. Beneath its repulsive surface, the film is an allegory of the genre itself-where offing innocent victims for visual stimulation is the modus operandi.




Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

Shot in the Amazon jungle, this exploitation film from Italy pieces together "recovered footage" from four documentarians, who had been studying indigenous tribes. The lost tapes depict animal slaughter, dismemberment, and the removal of an unborn fetus from its mother, making it one of the most visceral films ever made. The carnage looks so authentic that, after its release, director Ruggero Deodato faced murder charges for its staged homicides.




Man Bites Dog (1992)

Shifting from black comedy to horror, this NC-17 film follows three cameramen as they trail a serial killer through a series of cold-blooded murders punctuated by vicious post-crime commentary. In time, the cameramen become accomplices, disposing of the killer's corpses and participating in a gang rape, all before being executed on camera. Uncompromisingly brutal, this Belgian, black-and-white gem makes Natural Born Killers seem soft-core.




The Last Horror Movie (2003)

In this straight-to-DVD chiller, the dialogue is between a serial killer ("Max Parry," a wedding videographer with blood-spilling extracurricular activities) and you, the viewer. Cleverly interactive, the horror is heightened by Parry's taunts and down-talk, pointing out how the viewer has become his accomplice. At one point, he even asks, "Why are you still watching?" Imagining that Parry is flat-lining your ex-lover or dreadful employer would be a suitable response.




S&Man (2006)

Better suited for private, closed-door viewings, handheld fetish films are possibly cinema's most taboo genre. In J.T. Petty's documentary, however, watching strangers get raped and murdered in faux snuff films is intriguingly compared to a more pedestrian entertainment: watching horror films. It's hardly a groundbreaking idea, but when seen side by side with simulated snuff footage, clips from staples like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre feel uncomfortably dirty.
]]>

Wine is flowing as attractive, well-dressed 20-somethings mingle in a swanky Manhattan loft, toasting "We love you, man," on the eve of a friend's departure. Considering such an extravagant farewell, it's hard to imagine why young Rob Hawkins would want to be anywhere else. But the fun quickly turns to fear, as an earthquake-like eruption rattles the building. A handheld camera follows the partygoers to the roof, where the shaky footage reveals a flaming mushroom cloud in the distance. Racing down a staircase, the camera drops to the floor, lying sideways until someone helps our cameraman up. Once out on the street, his increasingly erratic footage captures a giant object crashing into the frame. It's the Statue of Liberty's head, landing just inches from his feet.

January's Cloverfield is the latest movie made with an infrequently employed but truly terrifying approach to onscreen horror. With an anemic budget, the director, Matt Reeves, captures the intensity of a monster movie using only a handheld camera, putting the viewer right into the action, in what feels like real time. There are very few transitions or scene setups and little editing; what you see is what has happened. And the J.J. Abrams–produced monster mash is a visionary 2008 trend-sparker. In its wake, prepare for a year of movies just like it.

At their best, horror movies can scar you for life. Take Stanley Kubrick's 1980 masterpiece The Shining; sure, Jack Nicholson's naturally unhinged presence helps, but what truly gives you the willies is its striking, off-kilter score, which matches the unbearable claustrophobia of the Overlook Hotel. Cloverfield doesn't have these luxuries. No soundtrack, no tactical editing, no creepy apparitions of little girls inviting you to come play with them. With Cloverfield, you see only whatever our cameraman catches.

The best example of the brilliance of handheld horror remains 1999's The Blair Witch Project, the subgenre's most successful entry. Made with a budget of roughly $25,000, the film grossed nearly $250 million. The unexpected smash was propelled by a daring marketing campaign that tricked moviegoers into thinking the footage was real. The implied menace of the "witch," whom you never see, produces an escalating dread that culminates with an off-screen attack, signified by the camera suddenly dropping to the ground.

Many of these films are not just subverting the horror genre as a whole, but specifically recalling some of its classics. In Cloverfield, as the monster's wrath is shown in all of its catastrophic glory, the metropolitan nightmare calls to mind Godzilla as much as it evokes the horror of 9/11. The Poughkeepsie Tapes, another faux-true-story slasher, is made up of "uncovered" tapes shot by the killer himself, who captures his "torture porn" without the annoying rapid camera cuts and electronica music of the Saw franchise. Or look at the indie Diary of the Dead, the fifth installment of the iconic George Romero's zombie series, also shot with a handheld. Consider it Romero's "fuck you" to major studio interference. Even Poltergeist and The Haunting are tapped as inspiration for Paranormal Activity, which uses surveillance-camera footage of a couple's ghost-ridden bedroom.

Post-Cloverfield, the most highly anticipated film of the subgenre is [REC], a Spanish spin on 28 Days Later, in which a news station's cameraman, trapped inside an infested apartment building, broadcasts footage of rabid, bloodthirsty humans. [REC] is a comment on our unending obsession with reality programming. What's the difference between watching real people endure heartbreak or humiliation and seeing fake real people get attacked by ravenous flesh-eaters? Both dig into our desire to witness harshness from the comfort of our couches.

Horror buffs are rejoicing. This moment in film is a welcome respite from the genre's unimaginative, shameful dependence on remakes. The studios, too, are ecstatic. For them, the heftiest part of the film's price tag-expensive actors-is erased. In true Hollywood form, studios are jumping on the bandwagon, investing in the trend before its gains can be measured. Call it a vote of confidence that before the original has even arrived Stateside, Sony's Screen Gems has begun production on a remake of [REC], titled Quarantined. Its choice for director? The director of The Poughkeepsie Tapes, John Erick Dowdle.

Think of these movies a new kind of horror for the YouTube generation. Remember December, 2006, when the grainy video of Saddam Hussein's "closed-door" hanging circulated online? Countless people logged on to see the execution. It was an extreme example of the growing voyeurism of our society. Imagine if footage of the Godzilla-like destruction of a major city surfaced on television and computer screens. Everyone would watch.


Handheld genre films through the ages:





Peeping Tom (1960)

English auteur Michael Powell's inventive serial-killer flick is the granddaddy of handheld horror. A tormented photographer impales women with a blade concealed in his camera's tripod, and then immortalizes his victim's terrified, helpless expressions on film. Beneath its repulsive surface, the film is an allegory of the genre itself-where offing innocent victims for visual stimulation is the modus operandi.




Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

Shot in the Amazon jungle, this exploitation film from Italy pieces together "recovered footage" from four documentarians, who had been studying indigenous tribes. The lost tapes depict animal slaughter, dismemberment, and the removal of an unborn fetus from its mother, making it one of the most visceral films ever made. The carnage looks so authentic that, after its release, director Ruggero Deodato faced murder charges for its staged homicides.




Man Bites Dog (1992)

Shifting from black comedy to horror, this NC-17 film follows three cameramen as they trail a serial killer through a series of cold-blooded murders punctuated by vicious post-crime commentary. In time, the cameramen become accomplices, disposing of the killer's corpses and participating in a gang rape, all before being executed on camera. Uncompromisingly brutal, this Belgian, black-and-white gem makes Natural Born Killers seem soft-core.




The Last Horror Movie (2003)

In this straight-to-DVD chiller, the dialogue is between a serial killer ("Max Parry," a wedding videographer with blood-spilling extracurricular activities) and you, the viewer. Cleverly interactive, the horror is heightened by Parry's taunts and down-talk, pointing out how the viewer has become his accomplice. At one point, he even asks, "Why are you still watching?" Imagining that Parry is flat-lining your ex-lover or dreadful employer would be a suitable response.




S&Man (2006)

Better suited for private, closed-door viewings, handheld fetish films are possibly cinema's most taboo genre. In J.T. Petty's documentary, however, watching strangers get raped and murdered in faux snuff films is intriguingly compared to a more pedestrian entertainment: watching horror films. It's hardly a groundbreaking idea, but when seen side by side with simulated snuff footage, clips from staples like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre feel uncomfortably dirty.
]]> Matt Barone Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:46:41 PST <![CDATA[Ligaya Mishan on Speakeasy Restaurants]]> http://www.good.is/post/ligaya_mishan_on_speakeasy_restaurants/ http://www.good.is/post/ligaya_mishan_on_speakeasy_restaurants/

They say that in the early 1990s there was a secret restaurant in Manhattan, in an apartment on the 31st floor of a Hell's Kitchen building whose lobby was accessible only through a porn video store. The makeshift eatery-no license, no health inspection-specialized in authentic Sri Lankan cuisine and had all the allure of urban myth: grungy milieu; a whiff of the illicit; the cachet of an address divulged to few.

In other countries, secret restaurants have flourished for years: In Cuba, mom-and-pop paladares are an alternative to state-run eateries; in Hong Kong, si fang cai offer elaborate home-cooked meals. Recently the phenomenon has taken off in America, with under-the-radar establishments popping up in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Boston. Operated out of people's homes, by enthusiasts with no professional cooking experience or by chefs moonlighting from their regular gigs, these secret restaurants aren't terribly secret. A bit of creative googling will lead you quickly to outposts like Underground Inc. in Des Moines, Iowa, or Shady's Cafe in Penland, North Carolina. Still, they form a rapidly expanding and important ad hoc culinary underground.

Not too long ago, I ventured to a former factory on the Williamsburg waterfront, in Brooklyn, to check out the Whisk and Ladle, a "supper club" founded in 2006 by an eclectic group of roommates with day jobs-a lawyer, a college instructor, a bartender, and someone who works at Google. Once a week, they open their loft to about 20 guests for a classic five-course meal: appetizers, soup, entrée, salad, dessert. Arriving at 8 o'clock, as instructed, I was greeted cheerfully by my hosts, then plied with liquor, including a startling shot of homemade peanut-infused vodka. (No tab-the meal was all-inclusive.) An hour or so later, when the food appeared, most of the guests were pleasantly buzzed, comfortable sitting so close to one another at the communal tables.

In the same way that punk and indie rock emerged as a response to the corporate-driven homogenization of popular music in the 1980s, secret restaurants prefer the unique to the ubiquitous, the rough edges of the handmade over the polish of the commercial. Speakeasies helmed by untrained, self-taught chefs celebrate a democratic D.I.Y. ethic espousing the idea that anyone can cook. The fare being served is hardly cutting-edge-ingredients like liquid nitrogen and agar remain the province of truly high-end restaurants; instead, the emphasis tends to be on authenticity and bold, hearty flavors.

When I spoke to Mark, one of the chefs behind the Whisk and Ladle who requested anonymity in the interest of preserving his mystique, he was up front about his intent: "This is not about the food. I can tell you lots of places with better food." And while the meal itself-carrot-ginger soup, maple pulled pork with lemon-thyme risotto, heirloom-tomato salad, cayenne chocolate cake-was satisfying, the signal achievement of such places is the mix of people they attract. These days, too many good restaurants have become notches on the belts of conspicuous consumers, and the best speakeasy restaurants succeed in presenting an attitude, ambience, and total experience that's refreshingly low-key.

Given that speakeasies violate numerous health codes and zoning laws, it's not surprising that the people who run them are leery of letting in just anybody. (The Chowhound website won't even allow discussions of secret restaurants on its message boards, for fear of getting them shut down.) Mark is more likely to offer a seat to the person who emails about fears of a life doomed to eating boxed macaroni and cheese than to someone who simply requests a reservation for two; the online application for Studiofeast, another Brooklyn-based speakeasy, asks applicants to describe their ideal last meal. Through word of mouth and aggressive filtration of potential diners, these hidden kitchens strive to create the perfect dinner party.

Because it's far from an organized movement, the scene varies across the country. Pacific Northwest speakeasies appear to be in the vanguard, dishing up artsy clandestine dinners staged in glass-blowing studios while videos are projected on the walls. A Duke University senior's experiments in molecular gastronomy, conducted for students and curious diners in his campus apartment, have been chronicled in The New York Times and earned him the unwanted attention of the local Durham authorities. But even on the foodie end of the spectrum, the impulse is essentially indie: Like movie stars seeking more challenging roles in low-budget films, name chefs pursue projects on the side, looking for the opportunity to cook whatever they want, for whomever they want.

Michael Hebberoy is a chef who started out hosting secret dinners in Portland, Oregon, moved into the legal restaurant business, went bust, and is now back to his old tricks, serving off-the-books meals in Seattle. Lately, he's been working on a manifesto with the title "Kill the Restaurant." The danger in such enterprises is always that a cooler-than-thou mentality threatens to take over; but if, at their worst, speakeasies replicate the kind of velvet-rope exclusionism of annoying nightclubs, at best they can offer a genuine respite from the anonymity, rigidity, and expense of dining out; a chance to pause and savor the old-time pleasures of slow cooking and talking late into the night, long after dinner is over.



Five (sort of) secret restaurants revealed:




4 Course Vegan
Brooklyn, New York
4coursevegan.com
A menu from last December offered winter vegetable chowder, blood-orange-and-fennel salad, black-eyed pea fritters with collard greens and smoked carrot purée, and Mexican chocolate torte with white chocolate anglaise and raspberry coulis-all for 40 bucks.

Caché
Seattle
cacheseattle.com
This Sunday-night happening-launched by an architect and a food writer who met and fell in love on the food-discussion website eGullet-offers seats for 12 guests. Theme menus have included a "Yes, we're trying to kill you" dinner: bacon-wrapped pork belly, foie-gras custard with truffled wild mushrooms, and duck-confit pie.

One Pot
Seattle
onepot.org
Chef Michael Hebberoy heads up a dinner series staged in rock clubs and dive bars, with musical performances and readings. Designed as an open-source franchise, One Pot events are reportedly spreading as far as Mexico and Slovenia.

Mamasan's Bistro
San Francisco
no website
One of the country's oldest speakeasies, Mamasan's was started eight years ago by a DJ-vocalist and her mother who specialize in a fusion cuisine (accompanied by hip-hop beats), inspired by their native country, Guam.

Ghetto Gourmet
Nationwide
theghet.com
Originally a basement-apartment operation in Oakland, California, Ghetto Gourmet is now a nomadic series of one-night-only food events, often with live entertainment (belly dancers, fire eaters). Offerings include black-eyed-pea falafel with house-made smoked catfish, Gulf prawns with organic grits, quail with butternut squash, and homemade tasso hash.]]>

They say that in the early 1990s there was a secret restaurant in Manhattan, in an apartment on the 31st floor of a Hell's Kitchen building whose lobby was accessible only through a porn video store. The makeshift eatery-no license, no health inspection-specialized in authentic Sri Lankan cuisine and had all the allure of urban myth: grungy milieu; a whiff of the illicit; the cachet of an address divulged to few.

In other countries, secret restaurants have flourished for years: In Cuba, mom-and-pop paladares are an alternative to state-run eateries; in Hong Kong, si fang cai offer elaborate home-cooked meals. Recently the phenomenon has taken off in America, with under-the-radar establishments popping up in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Boston. Operated out of people's homes, by enthusiasts with no professional cooking experience or by chefs moonlighting from their regular gigs, these secret restaurants aren't terribly secret. A bit of creative googling will lead you quickly to outposts like Underground Inc. in Des Moines, Iowa, or Shady's Cafe in Penland, North Carolina. Still, they form a rapidly expanding and important ad hoc culinary underground.

Not too long ago, I ventured to a former factory on the Williamsburg waterfront, in Brooklyn, to check out the Whisk and Ladle, a "supper club" founded in 2006 by an eclectic group of roommates with day jobs-a lawyer, a college instructor, a bartender, and someone who works at Google. Once a week, they open their loft to about 20 guests for a classic five-course meal: appetizers, soup, entrée, salad, dessert. Arriving at 8 o'clock, as instructed, I was greeted cheerfully by my hosts, then plied with liquor, including a startling shot of homemade peanut-infused vodka. (No tab-the meal was all-inclusive.) An hour or so later, when the food appeared, most of the guests were pleasantly buzzed, comfortable sitting so close to one another at the communal tables.

In the same way that punk and indie rock emerged as a response to the corporate-driven homogenization of popular music in the 1980s, secret restaurants prefer the unique to the ubiquitous, the rough edges of the handmade over the polish of the commercial. Speakeasies helmed by untrained, self-taught chefs celebrate a democratic D.I.Y. ethic espousing the idea that anyone can cook. The fare being served is hardly cutting-edge-ingredients like liquid nitrogen and agar remain the province of truly high-end restaurants; instead, the emphasis tends to be on authenticity and bold, hearty flavors.

When I spoke to Mark, one of the chefs behind the Whisk and Ladle who requested anonymity in the interest of preserving his mystique, he was up front about his intent: "This is not about the food. I can tell you lots of places with better food." And while the meal itself-carrot-ginger soup, maple pulled pork with lemon-thyme risotto, heirloom-tomato salad, cayenne chocolate cake-was satisfying, the signal achievement of such places is the mix of people they attract. These days, too many good restaurants have become notches on the belts of conspicuous consumers, and the best speakeasy restaurants succeed in presenting an attitude, ambience, and total experience that's refreshingly low-key.

Given that speakeasies violate numerous health codes and zoning laws, it's not surprising that the people who run them are leery of letting in just anybody. (The Chowhound website won't even allow discussions of secret restaurants on its message boards, for fear of getting them shut down.) Mark is more likely to offer a seat to the person who emails about fears of a life doomed to eating boxed macaroni and cheese than to someone who simply requests a reservation for two; the online application for Studiofeast, another Brooklyn-based speakeasy, asks applicants to describe their ideal last meal. Through word of mouth and aggressive filtration of potential diners, these hidden kitchens strive to create the perfect dinner party.

Because it's far from an organized movement, the scene varies across the country. Pacific Northwest speakeasies appear to be in the vanguard, dishing up artsy clandestine dinners staged in glass-blowing studios while videos are projected on the walls. A Duke University senior's experiments in molecular gastronomy, conducted for students and curious diners in his campus apartment, have been chronicled in The New York Times and earned him the unwanted attention of the local Durham authorities. But even on the foodie end of the spectrum, the impulse is essentially indie: Like movie stars seeking more challenging roles in low-budget films, name chefs pursue projects on the side, looking for the opportunity to cook whatever they want, for whomever they want.

Michael Hebberoy is a chef who started out hosting secret dinners in Portland, Oregon, moved into the legal restaurant business, went bust, and is now back to his old tricks, serving off-the-books meals in Seattle. Lately, he's been working on a manifesto with the title "Kill the Restaurant." The danger in such enterprises is always that a cooler-than-thou mentality threatens to take over; but if, at their worst, speakeasies replicate the kind of velvet-rope exclusionism of annoying nightclubs, at best they can offer a genuine respite from the anonymity, rigidity, and expense of dining out; a chance to pause and savor the old-time pleasures of slow cooking and talking late into the night, long after dinner is over.



Five (sort of) secret restaurants revealed:




4 Course Vegan
Brooklyn, New York
4coursevegan.com
A menu from last December offered winter vegetable chowder, blood-orange-and-fennel salad, black-eyed pea fritters with collard greens and smoked carrot purée, and Mexican chocolate torte with white chocolate anglaise and raspberry coulis-all for 40 bucks.

Caché
Seattle
cacheseattle.com
This Sunday-night happening-launched by an architect and a food writer who met and fell in love on the food-discussion website eGullet-offers seats for 12 guests. Theme menus have included a "Yes, we're trying to kill you" dinner: bacon-wrapped pork belly, foie-gras custard with truffled wild mushrooms, and duck-confit pie.

One Pot
Seattle
onepot.org
Chef Michael Hebberoy heads up a dinner series staged in rock clubs and dive bars, with musical performances and readings. Designed as an open-source franchise, One Pot events are reportedly spreading as far as Mexico and Slovenia.

Mamasan's Bistro
San Francisco
no website
One of the country's oldest speakeasies, Mamasan's was started eight years ago by a DJ-vocalist and her mother who specialize in a fusion cuisine (accompanied by hip-hop beats), inspired by their native country, Guam.

Ghetto Gourmet
Nationwide
theghet.com
Originally a basement-apartment operation in Oakland, California, Ghetto Gourmet is now a nomadic series of one-night-only food events, often with live entertainment (belly dancers, fire eaters). Offerings include black-eyed-pea falafel with house-made smoked catfish, Gulf prawns with organic grits, quail with butternut squash, and homemade tasso hash.]]> Ligaya Mishan Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:17:05 PST <![CDATA[Michaelangelo Matos on the Sophomore Slump]]> http://www.good.is/post/michaelangelo_matos_on_the_sophomore_slump/ http://www.good.is/post/michaelangelo_matos_on_the_sophomore_slump/

Earlier this year, the advance scuttlebutt on M.I.A.'s second album, Kala, had begun, and a good deal of it boiled down to a variation on "We didn't think she could do it again"-the "again" referring to her stunning 2005 debut, Arular. My instinctive response was a simple, Why not? The answer, it seems, is one of those critical assumptions that pops up all the time: the Sophomore Slump. The same thing happened two years ago when Kanye West got ready to release Late Registration. It's hard to remember in light of Graduation, his massively hyped and gushingly reviewed third album which debuted at number one in September, but at the time more than a few reviewers expressed surprise that the producer and rapper was able to match his brilliant 2004 debut, The College Dropout. If such a thing as the slump exists-and everyone seems to agree it does-it's worth examining why.

The idea of a follow-up that doesn't match a debut seems to be as old as the marketplace. Reasons differ. There's hubris: In film we can think of Michael Cimino, who followed The Deer Hunter with Heaven's Gate and went from a Best Picture Oscar to one of the biggest flops in movie history. Or a great first work can induce anxiety in a creator: After Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison never finished his decades-in-the-making second novel.

The old pop-music cliché is that you have your entire life to write your debut album and only a year to come up with your second, but it's a little more complicated than that. In the 1960s, bands were contractually bound to make two or more albums a year. By the 1970s, the model had changed: an album a year, all or mostly self-written. Sly and the Family Stone shot out four albums in less than three years in the 1960s, and then spent two years on 1971's There's a Riot Goin' On-an unheard-of amount of time back then. As the 1970s progressed, though, this became the superstar norm.

Michael Jackson's Thriller (1982) went even further: Seven of its nine cuts charted, amping up the pressure on others to stuff albums with hits, a feat that is predicated on wide-scale marketing campaigns that could take years to complete. (Jackson didn't bring out his follow-up, Bad, for five years.) To some degree, this model still holds-even in the niche-marketed indie-rock world, bands average a new album every other year. (Indie bands tend to spend longer on the road behind a single album, since touring is generally more profitable than album sales for artists with mid-sized audiences.) Especially in a precarious financial time for musicians, the slow-building major-label career arc is a thing of the past. If you want some muscle behind your work, you either deliver or you can find the door. Some majors are even offering singles deals to new artists now, rather than album deals. In that sense, the Sophomore Slump is a higher-stakes game than it has been at any other time.

But let's leave behind business for a second. What about artistically? This is where my skepticism about the slump's validity rises again. After all, isn't the primary appeal of great artists that they have something interesting to say, that their music is bursting with ideas and fresh approaches, that they seem like people who can keep doing it for a long time? What about them indicates that they won't create excellent second albums?

This is a question critics ask themselves all the time, and since their job is dependent on being validated by history, it can be embarrassing to have backed the wrong horse-ask anyone who thought Cypress Hill, on the strength of its amazing debut, would become a relevant force in hip hop instead of the weed-and-guns self-parody it essentially turned into. Ditto Portishead, which in 1994 created a sinuous trip-hop classic with Dummy, but whose 1997 self-titled album was more of the same-only a lot less interesting-followed by a decade spent crafting a third album that still hasn't arrived. Expect more of the same when it does.

Often, what both makes and breaks a band is the taint of novelty: it gets people's attention the first time out, but can feel like mere shtick the second. That's certainly true of M.I.A.: her Sri Lankan upbringing, blood ties to the terrorist group the Tamil Tigers, and an album that spanned a wide, yet cohesive range of styles that worked as a sampler of hip-hop's global offspring as well as a collection of beat-driven club-oriented pop. Kanye West tweaked an old stereotype, the producer who raps, by layering it with another: the ambitious, talented middle-class kid ambivalent about his own motives-commonplace enough in literature, but unique in hip-hop.

What gives M.I.A. legs is the fact that a growth curve is embedded in her blueprint, allowing her-like West before her-to make a second album that actually tops her debut. Though she collaborates with other producers (primarily Diplo on Arular and Switch on Kala, among others), M.I.A. is clearly the guiding force. And while some writers are unimpressed with her sample-platter aesthetic, her DJ's curiosity about new sounds transfers into tracks that consistently grab you the way they grabbed her: impulsive and raw, however hard she works to make them that way. (Pretty hard, I'd wager.) West did the opposite on Late Registration, going for baroque, layered arrangements that reveal new shades with the umpteenth listen.

Ultimately, M.I.A., like West, is a charismatic artist who seems savvy enough to have mapped out her future in advance-not planning everything to the last detail, just being farsighted and flexible. That's a quality you'd want from all artists, however many albums into their career they may be.


Ten great sophomore albums of the 21st century:





The Streets A Grand Don't Come for Free

How to follow 2002's "day in the life of a geezer" classic? Easy: a concept album about money and relationships lost and found.



Ghostface Killah Supreme Clientele

He'd done plenty since 1996's Ironman, but here's where the Wu-Tang Clan's finest MC cemented his rep for good.



The Hold Steady Separation Sunday

After proving themselves the best bar band in the world, here they got ambitious, channeling Born to Run through a modern teenage wasteland.



Basement Jaxx Rooty

Where 1999's Remedy summarized house music's dot-com excesses, this Brixton, England, duo's hard left turn condensed them.



The New Pornographers Electric Version

The same giddy rush as 2000's Mass Romantic, only cleaner, brighter, and pushed harder.



Daft Punk Discovery

A luxurious pop move, adding dimension to the huge house beats of 1997's Homework.



Dizzee Rascal Showtime

The London grime MC smoothes out the sharp corners of 2004's Boy In da Corner but loses nothing in translation.



D'Angelo Voodoo

The R&B renaissance man cast a sinuous spell five years after a well-loved debut; we're still waiting for part three.



The White Stripes De Stijl

After a promising self-titled debut, Jack and Meg made good on their feral noise.



Kanye West Late Registration

"Jay's favorite line: ‘Dog, in due time'/Now he look at me, like ‘Damn, dog, you where I am.'"
]]>

Earlier this year, the advance scuttlebutt on M.I.A.'s second album, Kala, had begun, and a good deal of it boiled down to a variation on "We didn't think she could do it again"-the "again" referring to her stunning 2005 debut, Arular. My instinctive response was a simple, Why not? The answer, it seems, is one of those critical assumptions that pops up all the time: the Sophomore Slump. The same thing happened two years ago when Kanye West got ready to release Late Registration. It's hard to remember in light of Graduation, his massively hyped and gushingly reviewed third album which debuted at number one in September, but at the time more than a few reviewers expressed surprise that the producer and rapper was able to match his brilliant 2004 debut, The College Dropout. If such a thing as the slump exists-and everyone seems to agree it does-it's worth examining why.

The idea of a follow-up that doesn't match a debut seems to be as old as the marketplace. Reasons differ. There's hubris: In film we can think of Michael Cimino, who followed The Deer Hunter with Heaven's Gate and went from a Best Picture Oscar to one of the biggest flops in movie history. Or a great first work can induce anxiety in a creator: After Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison never finished his decades-in-the-making second novel.

The old pop-music cliché is that you have your entire life to write your debut album and only a year to come up with your second, but it's a little more complicated than that. In the 1960s, bands were contractually bound to make two or more albums a year. By the 1970s, the model had changed: an album a year, all or mostly self-written. Sly and the Family Stone shot out four albums in less than three years in the 1960s, and then spent two years on 1971's There's a Riot Goin' On-an unheard-of amount of time back then. As the 1970s progressed, though, this became the superstar norm.

Michael Jackson's Thriller (1982) went even further: Seven of its nine cuts charted, amping up the pressure on others to stuff albums with hits, a feat that is predicated on wide-scale marketing campaigns that could take years to complete. (Jackson didn't bring out his follow-up, Bad, for five years.) To some degree, this model still holds-even in the niche-marketed indie-rock world, bands average a new album every other year. (Indie bands tend to spend longer on the road behind a single album, since touring is generally more profitable than album sales for artists with mid-sized audiences.) Especially in a precarious financial time for musicians, the slow-building major-label career arc is a thing of the past. If you want some muscle behind your work, you either deliver or you can find the door. Some majors are even offering singles deals to new artists now, rather than album deals. In that sense, the Sophomore Slump is a higher-stakes game than it has been at any other time.

But let's leave behind business for a second. What about artistically? This is where my skepticism about the slump's validity rises again. After all, isn't the primary appeal of great artists that they have something interesting to say, that their music is bursting with ideas and fresh approaches, that they seem like people who can keep doing it for a long time? What about them indicates that they won't create excellent second albums?

This is a question critics ask themselves all the time, and since their job is dependent on being validated by history, it can be embarrassing to have backed the wrong horse-ask anyone who thought Cypress Hill, on the strength of its amazing debut, would become a relevant force in hip hop instead of the weed-and-guns self-parody it essentially turned into. Ditto Portishead, which in 1994 created a sinuous trip-hop classic with Dummy, but whose 1997 self-titled album was more of the same-only a lot less interesting-followed by a decade spent crafting a third album that still hasn't arrived. Expect more of the same when it does.

Often, what both makes and breaks a band is the taint of novelty: it gets people's attention the first time out, but can feel like mere shtick the second. That's certainly true of M.I.A.: her Sri Lankan upbringing, blood ties to the terrorist group the Tamil Tigers, and an album that spanned a wide, yet cohesive range of styles that worked as a sampler of hip-hop's global offspring as well as a collection of beat-driven club-oriented pop. Kanye West tweaked an old stereotype, the producer who raps, by layering it with another: the ambitious, talented middle-class kid ambivalent about his own motives-commonplace enough in literature, but unique in hip-hop.

What gives M.I.A. legs is the fact that a growth curve is embedded in her blueprint, allowing her-like West before her-to make a second album that actually tops her debut. Though she collaborates with other producers (primarily Diplo on Arular and Switch on Kala, among others), M.I.A. is clearly the guiding force. And while some writers are unimpressed with her sample-platter aesthetic, her DJ's curiosity about new sounds transfers into tracks that consistently grab you the way they grabbed her: impulsive and raw, however hard she works to make them that way. (Pretty hard, I'd wager.) West did the opposite on Late Registration, going for baroque, layered arrangements that reveal new shades with the umpteenth listen.

Ultimately, M.I.A., like West, is a charismatic artist who seems savvy enough to have mapped out her future in advance-not planning everything to the last detail, just being farsighted and flexible. That's a quality you'd want from all artists, however many albums into their career they may be.


Ten great sophomore albums of the 21st century:





The Streets A Grand Don't Come for Free

How to follow 2002's "day in the life of a geezer" classic? Easy: a concept album about money and relationships lost and found.



Ghostface Killah Supreme Clientele

He'd done plenty since 1996's Ironman, but here's where the Wu-Tang Clan's finest MC cemented his rep for good.



The Hold Steady Separation Sunday

After proving themselves the best bar band in the world, here they got ambitious, channeling Born to Run through a modern teenage wasteland.



Basement Jaxx Rooty

Where 1999's Remedy summarized house music's dot-com excesses, this Brixton, England, duo's hard left turn condensed them.



The New Pornographers Electric Version

The same giddy rush as 2000's Mass Romantic, only cleaner, brighter, and pushed harder.



Daft Punk Discovery

A luxurious pop move, adding dimension to the huge house beats of 1997's Homework.



Dizzee Rascal Showtime

The London grime MC smoothes out the sharp corners of 2004's Boy In da Corner but loses nothing in translation.



D'Angelo Voodoo

The R&B renaissance man cast a sinuous spell five years after a well-loved debut; we're still waiting for part three.



The White Stripes De Stijl

After a promising self-titled debut, Jack and Meg made good on their feral noise.



Kanye West Late Registration

"Jay's favorite line: ‘Dog, in due time'/Now he look at me, like ‘Damn, dog, you where I am.'"
]]> Michaelangelo Matos Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:45:27 PST <![CDATA[Jaime Wolf on Mumblecore]]> http://www.good.is/post/jaime_wolf_on_mumblecore/ http://www.good.is/post/jaime_wolf_on_mumblecore/

Mumblecore-the label attached to the current wave of lo-fi, micro-budget American indie films about 20-somethings-is a somewhat misleading term. Hearing it, one thinks of Marlon Brando in The Wild One, or Michael Stipe, interring comprehensibility deep in the mix on R.E.M.'s first records. But mumblecore movies are actually quite voluble, their soundtracks a series of halting announcements, doubtful questions, proclamations fueled by false confidence, drunken blurtations, and sad confessions. Making eloquent use of inarticulacy, films like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Mutual Appreciation happen to be precise (and to the extent of their precision, thrilling) depictions of post-collegiate flailing. They are set in a world populated by overeducated, unaccomplished, chronically ambivalent people who are starting to take grown-up jobs but still need a roommate to pay the rent; whose unfocused ambition and vague sense of artistic integrity propel them to pursue creative endeavors, even as they remain mystified by how a book might actually get published or a CD get made.

It's rare to watch a movie and believe it could have been made by one of the characters in it, but mumblecore films have a documentary intimacy and rawness, a level of self-examination that feels new.They're products of the thinner art/life membrane that affordable digital production tools have made possible, and which the imperatives of self-presentation on Facebook, blogs, and MySpace have made ubiquitous. Of course, it's not all new. The dialogue in J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey is pure mumblecore; so are the conversational erotics in Eric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's and the characters' ditherings in his Boyfriends and Girlfriends; the perpetual hangout milieu of Richard Linklater's Slacker; and the diaristic songs chronicling Liz Phair's sexual, emotional, and relationship crises on her album Exile In Guyville.

The handful of young directors actively cultivating this aesthetic have accumulated buzz on the festival circuit, but the selection earlier this year of Hannah Takes the Stairs, the third feature by the prolific 26-year-old Chicago auteur Joe Swanberg, for national distribution (as part of IFC's First Take series, which offered the film via OnDemand parallel to its art-house run in selected cities), represents a breakthrough moment. A small miracle of close observation, Hannah follows its title character-played by the New York-based playwright Greta Gerwig in an effervescent star-making performance reminiscent of the young, Woody Allen era Diane Keaton-as she makes her way through three different boyfriends over the course of a summer.

Swanberg and the 29-year-old, Boston-based Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation, Funny Ha Ha) are mumblecore's leading lights. Bujalski is a writer of subtle grace, the only director of the bunch whose movies contain quotable lines. In contrast, Swanberg barely writes at all, evolving stories in close collaboration with his actors, who extemporize scenes while the camera rolls. He has found that in such situations, nonprofessional actors start drawing on their own autobiographies, discovering and contributing intimate, even mortifying material that Swanberg can then fold into his scenario (typically, all of the actors in his films also receive a writing credit). What this lacks in literary wit, it more than repays in terms of emotional revelation. Swanberg's work is also noteworthy for its explicit presentation of contemporary sexuality-the daisy-chaining hookups of the characters in his Nerve.com web series Young American Bodies feel like a series of American Apparel ads come to life, while LOL (which also features Gerwig, in a series of arrestingly emo phone-cam pix and voicemail monologues) is a pitiless examination of a trio of guys whose obsession with elusive relationships conducted via cell phone and computer sabotages their chances with the flesh-and-blood hotties who are actually interested in them.

Embracing mumblecore demands a willingness to forgive a certain cinematic inelegance-wonky sound mixes, awkward acting, uneven, rushed, or unremarkable composition and editing-and to indulge sometimes exasperating, acutely self-conscious characters as they figure out their way, seemingly in real time. When it all works, this rough-hewn approach to situations that don't admit easy answers makes more slickly self-congratulatory Hollywood versions of the same material-Garden State, say-feel just about worthless.

It says something about the evolution of film's place in our culture that 13 years ago, Kevin Smith could make the semi-competent mumblecore movie Clerks (wisecracking script, wildly uneven acting, and Smith's stunted camera sense-which has persisted through all his movies even when Oscar-winning cinematographers shoot for him) and get a career out of it, while Hannah Takes the Stairs so far has yet to earn $100,000, and Swanberg continues to be supported by his wife's salary as a public high school teacher. "I'm still sitting in Chicago wondering how I'm going to buy groceries," he recently told The Chicago Reader. "I'm not getting phone calls from agents or studios saying, ‘What are you up to?'" (Bujalski is-he's been hired by producer Scott Rudin to write a script adapted from Benjamin Kunkel's novel Indecision.)

It's a classic mumblecore dilemma-deciding how to proceed in a world of diminished possibilities and expectations. And while you can only wish a happy Hollywood ending for Swanberg, and Bujalski and other directors in the genre, such as the Duplass brothers (The Puffy Chair) and Aaron Katz (Quiet City), you also have to hope that dedicated artists with such idiosyncratic talent continue to remain as far away from Hollywood as possible.










Mumblecore through the ages:




J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (Little, Brown and Company)

The original mumblecore text; a spiritual quest framed as a series of lengthy conversations, alternately exasperating and riveting, about academics, poetry, theater, ambition, literature, faith, sentimentality, ego, holiness, and, most important, how to separate the phony from the authentic.




Eric Rohmer, Boyfriends and Girlfriends

Blanche, a young City Hall bureaucrat, befriends a computer-science student named Lea, who tries to fix her up with her boyfriend's friend-only Blanche finds herself attracted to the boyfriend, while Lea develops a thing for the friend. Trivial and self-centered, these characters can be stupid and shallow and annoying … and yet, in the end, incredibly, radiantly human.

Liz Phair, Exile In Guyville

The lo-fi, livejournal-style indie rock version of a Joe Swanberg movie, Phair seeks self-knowledge via a diaristic series of regrettable hookups, disappointing boyfriends, unattainable fantasies, false hopes, fleeting erotic fulfillment, and meditations on the dichotomy between observer and participant.




Andrew Bujalski, Mutual Appreciation

Seeking new bandmates, Alan, an indie-rocker from Boston, relocates to Brooklyn and causes tension between his best friend and the best friend's girlfriend. Another friend's impending wedding starts to feel increasingly ominous as Alan's dad keeps calling, ever so reasonably suggesting that Alan get a job. One boozy night after a gig, Alan looks into the eye of the aging former music-biz insider who has offered to help, and asks, "Do you want me to end up like you?"




Joe Swanberg, Hannah Takes the Stairs

Over the course of a sweltering Chicago summer, an aspiring playwright named Hannah dumps her boyfriend and takes up with one, and then another, of the writers she's assisting on a web-based video show. A collection of carefully husbanded moments combine with a star-making performance by Greta Gerwig in the most exhilarating mumblecore picture to date.
]]>

Mumblecore-the label attached to the current wave of lo-fi, micro-budget American indie films about 20-somethings-is a somewhat misleading term. Hearing it, one thinks of Marlon Brando in The Wild One, or Michael Stipe, interring comprehensibility deep in the mix on R.E.M.'s first records. But mumblecore movies are actually quite voluble, their soundtracks a series of halting announcements, doubtful questions, proclamations fueled by false confidence, drunken blurtations, and sad confessions. Making eloquent use of inarticulacy, films like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Mutual Appreciation happen to be precise (and to the extent of their precision, thrilling) depictions of post-collegiate flailing. They are set in a world populated by overeducated, unaccomplished, chronically ambivalent people who are starting to take grown-up jobs but still need a roommate to pay the rent; whose unfocused ambition and vague sense of artistic integrity propel them to pursue creative endeavors, even as they remain mystified by how a book might actually get published or a CD get made.

It's rare to watch a movie and believe it could have been made by one of the characters in it, but mumblecore films have a documentary intimacy and rawness, a level of self-examination that feels new.They're products of the thinner art/life membrane that affordable digital production tools have made possible, and which the imperatives of self-presentation on Facebook, blogs, and MySpace have made ubiquitous. Of course, it's not all new. The dialogue in J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey is pure mumblecore; so are the conversational erotics in Eric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's and the characters' ditherings in his Boyfriends and Girlfriends; the perpetual hangout milieu of Richard Linklater's Slacker; and the diaristic songs chronicling Liz Phair's sexual, emotional, and relationship crises on her album Exile In Guyville.

The handful of young directors actively cultivating this aesthetic have accumulated buzz on the festival circuit, but the selection earlier this year of Hannah Takes the Stairs, the third feature by the prolific 26-year-old Chicago auteur Joe Swanberg, for national distribution (as part of IFC's First Take series, which offered the film via OnDemand parallel to its art-house run in selected cities), represents a breakthrough moment. A small miracle of close observation, Hannah follows its title character-played by the New York-based playwright Greta Gerwig in an effervescent star-making performance reminiscent of the young, Woody Allen era Diane Keaton-as she makes her way through three different boyfriends over the course of a summer.

Swanberg and the 29-year-old, Boston-based Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation, Funny Ha Ha) are mumblecore's leading lights. Bujalski is a writer of subtle grace, the only director of the bunch whose movies contain quotable lines. In contrast, Swanberg barely writes at all, evolving stories in close collaboration with his actors, who extemporize scenes while the camera rolls. He has found that in such situations, nonprofessional actors start drawing on their own autobiographies, discovering and contributing intimate, even mortifying material that Swanberg can then fold into his scenario (typically, all of the actors in his films also receive a writing credit). What this lacks in literary wit, it more than repays in terms of emotional revelation. Swanberg's work is also noteworthy for its explicit presentation of contemporary sexuality-the daisy-chaining hookups of the characters in his Nerve.com web series Young American Bodies feel like a series of American Apparel ads come to life, while LOL (which also features Gerwig, in a series of arrestingly emo phone-cam pix and voicemail monologues) is a pitiless examination of a trio of guys whose obsession with elusive relationships conducted via cell phone and computer sabotages their chances with the flesh-and-blood hotties who are actually interested in them.

Embracing mumblecore demands a willingness to forgive a certain cinematic inelegance-wonky sound mixes, awkward acting, uneven, rushed, or unremarkable composition and editing-and to indulge sometimes exasperating, acutely self-conscious characters as they figure out their way, seemingly in real time. When it all works, this rough-hewn approach to situations that don't admit easy answers makes more slickly self-congratulatory Hollywood versions of the same material-Garden State, say-feel just about worthless.

It says something about the evolution of film's place in our culture that 13 years ago, Kevin Smith could make the semi-competent mumblecore movie Clerks (wisecracking script, wildly uneven acting, and Smith's stunted camera sense-which has persisted through all his movies even when Oscar-winning cinematographers shoot for him) and get a career out of it, while Hannah Takes the Stairs so far has yet to earn $100,000, and Swanberg continues to be supported by his wife's salary as a public high school teacher. "I'm still sitting in Chicago wondering how I'm going to buy groceries," he recently told The Chicago Reader. "I'm not getting phone calls from agents or studios saying, ‘What are you up to?'" (Bujalski is-he's been hired by producer Scott Rudin to write a script adapted from Benjamin Kunkel's novel Indecision.)

It's a classic mumblecore dilemma-deciding how to proceed in a world of diminished possibilities and expectations. And while you can only wish a happy Hollywood ending for Swanberg, and Bujalski and other directors in the genre, such as the Duplass brothers (The Puffy Chair) and Aaron Katz (Quiet City), you also have to hope that dedicated artists with such idiosyncratic talent continue to remain as far away from Hollywood as possible.










Mumblecore through the ages:




J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (Little, Brown and Company)

The original mumblecore text; a spiritual quest framed as a series of lengthy conversations, alternately exasperating and riveting, about academics, poetry, theater, ambition, literature, faith, sentimentality, ego, holiness, and, most important, how to separate the phony from the authentic.




Eric Rohmer, Boyfriends and Girlfriends

Blanche, a young City Hall bureaucrat, befriends a computer-science student named Lea, who tries to fix her up with her boyfriend's friend-only Blanche finds herself attracted to the boyfriend, while Lea develops a thing for the friend. Trivial and self-centered, these characters can be stupid and shallow and annoying … and yet, in the end, incredibly, radiantly human.

Liz Phair, Exile In Guyville

The lo-fi, livejournal-style indie rock version of a Joe Swanberg movie, Phair seeks self-knowledge via a diaristic series of regrettable hookups, disappointing boyfriends, unattainable fantasies, false hopes, fleeting erotic fulfillment, and meditations on the dichotomy between observer and participant.




Andrew Bujalski, Mutual Appreciation

Seeking new bandmates, Alan, an indie-rocker from Boston, relocates to Brooklyn and causes tension between his best friend and the best friend's girlfriend. Another friend's impending wedding starts to feel increasingly ominous as Alan's dad keeps calling, ever so reasonably suggesting that Alan get a job. One boozy night after a gig, Alan looks into the eye of the aging former music-biz insider who has offered to help, and asks, "Do you want me to end up like you?"




Joe Swanberg, Hannah Takes the Stairs

Over the course of a sweltering Chicago summer, an aspiring playwright named Hannah dumps her boyfriend and takes up with one, and then another, of the writers she's assisting on a web-based video show. A collection of carefully husbanded moments combine with a star-making performance by Greta Gerwig in the most exhilarating mumblecore picture to date.
]]> Aung Moe Win Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:23:04 PST <![CDATA[Mark Peters on the Colbert Suffix]]> http://www.good.is/post/mark-peters-on-the-colbert-suffix/ http://www.good.is/post/mark-peters-on-the-colbert-suffix/

In his fantastic book On Bullshit, the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt says a bullshitter "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Maybe that has something to do with why Stephen Colbert's bullshit synonym "truthiness" has hit the linguistic spot like few words in recent years: It names the degraded condition of truth in media, government, nonfiction, and elsewhere. "Truthiness" has been so successful that it's begun fathering children-"fameiness," "referenciness," and others-that demonstrate the Colbert suffix, a timely new meaning of an old word ending that allows writers to spoof and skewer our regular diet of drivel and twaddle.

But before a suffix could be named after him, Colbert had to coin "truthiness," which debuted during a segment called "The Word" on the very first episode of The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005. Colbert's Bill-O'Reilly-esque, attack-poodle character introduced "truthiness" and became preemptively indignant over the word's reception, in a now semi-famous speech: "Now I'm sure some of the Word Police, the wordinistas over at Webster's, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that's not a word.' Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I want to say it happened in 1941, that's my right. I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart." Colbert finished by saying, "The truthiness is anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you."

Despite his disparagement of wordinistas, "truthiness" might never have caught on if the American Dialect Society's linguists, lexicographers, and other wordmongers hadn't voted it 2005's Word of the Year. (I was part of the meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it happened, and made a few pro-"truthiness" comments that-I swear by Odin's raven-inspired some head-nodding and swayed some voters, so I'll take a nickel's worth of huzzahs for the word's success.) Much more credit is due to Steve Kleinedler, the senior editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, who nominated "truthiness," along with the less gripping Colbert coinage, "grippy." The final vote was between "truthiness" and "Katrina"-two words proposing opposite views of what a word of the year should be. Since 2005 was the year of the Katrina disaster, that name was depressingly prominent, while only a rabid Colbert-head would have heard of "truthiness," which was embraced for its mega-relevance, not its mini-success.

When "truthiness"was announced the winner, at least one disgruntled wordman stormed out of the room in a cloud of peevishness, presumably annoyed by the fuzzy meaning of this Colbertism. Truthfully, the meaning of "truthiness" is a bit up for grabs, perhaps appropriately so-it was defined by the ADS as "what one wishes to be the truth regardless of the facts" and by member Michael Adams as "truthy, not facty." Colbert himself, meanwhile, has admonished, "You don't look up ‘truthiness' in a book, you look it up in your gut." Hours after the ADS vote, at a restaurant with some fellow wordfolk, our telling of the victory of "truthiness" prompted a classic who-farted-in-church face from the waitstaff. The rest of the world reacted more kindly, as this distinctively 21st-century brand of bullshit moved from pet word of language mavens to a successful word that has appeared in a metric truckload of news stories, replaced "truth" in dozens of clichés (the truthiness hurts, you can't handle the truthiness, etc.), and won Word of the Year twice more in 2006 by users of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and dictionary.com.

Though Colbert has said "Truthiness is a word I pulled right out of my keister," he wasn't the first to do so. Under the entry "truthy," the Oxford English Dictionary has an 1824 example of "truthiness" as "truthfulness": "Everyone who knows her is aware of her truthiness." Likewise, The Century Dictionary's 1832 citation has none of the disparaging quality of Colbert's version: "Truthiness is a habit, like every other virtue."

It's Colbert's nonvirtuous sense of the -y suffix-and his new meaning of "truthy" as not truthy at all-that's inspired some recently coined words, demonstrating what the Stanford University linguist Arnold Zwicky has called the Colbert suffix. The most notable case is probably "fame-iness," a type of devalued, insubstantial fame epitomized by Paris Hilton and discussed by Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times. Zwicky has also found examples of "referenciness" (a quality possessed by writing that appears to contain solid references, but upon closer examination, those sources are actually bogus or beside the point) and "faithy-ness" (an insincere pretense to religious faith, endemic to politicians). Elsewhere, I've spotted "democraciness," "innocentiness," "integritiness," "intelligentiness," "outraginess," "victoriness," and "youthiness," all of which have the Colbert flavor.

Bullshitters and truthiness-tellers may not care about the truth, but clearly someone does, or the Colbert suffix wouldn't be catching on. This trend is a handy tool for pointing out the emptiness of abstract nouns-those puffed-up, gassy, focus-group-propelled buzzwords that are so prone to being abused. The spread of "truthiness" and the Colbert suffix are also reminders that language is a mass phenomenon. "Doh" is in the OED too-not because Homer Simpson uses it, but because lots of people do. Dictionaries are books everyone writes, and the wordinistas follow our lead. I'd say we're doing the language a favor if we keep pointing out educationiness, journalisminess, ethicaliness, and other destructive or preposterous farces. By doing so, maybe we'll make actual education, journalism, and ethics easier to locate too.


More-iness:


fame-iness

Feb. 17, 2007, Meghan Daum, Los Angeles Times

"Now that the mystique of so many celebrities is rooted less in their accomplishments than

in their ability to get our attention by provoking our disgust, perhaps it's not fame they're offering but ‘fame-iness.'"

faithy-ness

June 7, 2007, Karen Cohen, letter to the editor, The New York Times

"How ironic that in the country founded on separation of church and state, candidates must compete with one another over their ‘faithy-ness.' Their stands on issues like the Iraq war, poverty, health care and global warming are … independent of the amount of faith in a supreme being they profess."

referenciness

Feb. 12, 2007, Ben Goldacre, The Guardian

"The scholarliness of [Gillian McKeith's] work is a thing to behold: she produces lengthy documents that have an air of ‘referenciness,' with nice little superscript numbers ... but when you follow the numbers, and check the references, it's shocking how often they aren't what she claimed them to be in the main body of the text."

scienciness

July 1, 2007, The Yorkshire Ranter blog

"British politics is afflicted with scienciness, by analogy to ‘truthiness.' Thinking about the obsession with biometric quackery, I realised that over the last 10 years we've been governed by people who like the idea of science, but not anything specifically scientific."

youthiness

Jan. 4, 2007, The Boomer Chronicles blog

"I still see myself as young no matter what. Even when that extra crease appeared on my eyelid-a telltale sign of middle age-I persisted in my belief that I was young and vital. So, if Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's popular Colbert Report has ‘truthiness,' I want: youthiness."]]>

In his fantastic book On Bullshit, the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt says a bullshitter "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Maybe that has something to do with why Stephen Colbert's bullshit synonym "truthiness" has hit the linguistic spot like few words in recent years: It names the degraded condition of truth in media, government, nonfiction, and elsewhere. "Truthiness" has been so successful that it's begun fathering children-"fameiness," "referenciness," and others-that demonstrate the Colbert suffix, a timely new meaning of an old word ending that allows writers to spoof and skewer our regular diet of drivel and twaddle.

But before a suffix could be named after him, Colbert had to coin "truthiness," which debuted during a segment called "The Word" on the very first episode of The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005. Colbert's Bill-O'Reilly-esque, attack-poodle character introduced "truthiness" and became preemptively indignant over the word's reception, in a now semi-famous speech: "Now I'm sure some of the Word Police, the wordinistas over at Webster's, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that's not a word.' Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I want to say it happened in 1941, that's my right. I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart." Colbert finished by saying, "The truthiness is anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you."

Despite his disparagement of wordinistas, "truthiness" might never have caught on if the American Dialect Society's linguists, lexicographers, and other wordmongers hadn't voted it 2005's Word of the Year. (I was part of the meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it happened, and made a few pro-"truthiness" comments that-I swear by Odin's raven-inspired some head-nodding and swayed some voters, so I'll take a nickel's worth of huzzahs for the word's success.) Much more credit is due to Steve Kleinedler, the senior editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, who nominated "truthiness," along with the less gripping Colbert coinage, "grippy." The final vote was between "truthiness" and "Katrina"-two words proposing opposite views of what a word of the year should be. Since 2005 was the year of the Katrina disaster, that name was depressingly prominent, while only a rabid Colbert-head would have heard of "truthiness," which was embraced for its mega-relevance, not its mini-success.

When "truthiness"was announced the winner, at least one disgruntled wordman stormed out of the room in a cloud of peevishness, presumably annoyed by the fuzzy meaning of this Colbertism. Truthfully, the meaning of "truthiness" is a bit up for grabs, perhaps appropriately so-it was defined by the ADS as "what one wishes to be the truth regardless of the facts" and by member Michael Adams as "truthy, not facty." Colbert himself, meanwhile, has admonished, "You don't look up ‘truthiness' in a book, you look it up in your gut." Hours after the ADS vote, at a restaurant with some fellow wordfolk, our telling of the victory of "truthiness" prompted a classic who-farted-in-church face from the waitstaff. The rest of the world reacted more kindly, as this distinctively 21st-century brand of bullshit moved from pet word of language mavens to a successful word that has appeared in a metric truckload of news stories, replaced "truth" in dozens of clichés (the truthiness hurts, you can't handle the truthiness, etc.), and won Word of the Year twice more in 2006 by users of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and dictionary.com.

Though Colbert has said "Truthiness is a word I pulled right out of my keister," he wasn't the first to do so. Under the entry "truthy," the Oxford English Dictionary has an 1824 example of "truthiness" as "truthfulness": "Everyone who knows her is aware of her truthiness." Likewise, The Century Dictionary's 1832 citation has none of the disparaging quality of Colbert's version: "Truthiness is a habit, like every other virtue."

It's Colbert's nonvirtuous sense of the -y suffix-and his new meaning of "truthy" as not truthy at all-that's inspired some recently coined words, demonstrating what the Stanford University linguist Arnold Zwicky has called the Colbert suffix. The most notable case is probably "fame-iness," a type of devalued, insubstantial fame epitomized by Paris Hilton and discussed by Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times. Zwicky has also found examples of "referenciness" (a quality possessed by writing that appears to contain solid references, but upon closer examination, those sources are actually bogus or beside the point) and "faithy-ness" (an insincere pretense to religious faith, endemic to politicians). Elsewhere, I've spotted "democraciness," "innocentiness," "integritiness," "intelligentiness," "outraginess," "victoriness," and "youthiness," all of which have the Colbert flavor.

Bullshitters and truthiness-tellers may not care about the truth, but clearly someone does, or the Colbert suffix wouldn't be catching on. This trend is a handy tool for pointing out the emptiness of abstract nouns-those puffed-up, gassy, focus-group-propelled buzzwords that are so prone to being abused. The spread of "truthiness" and the Colbert suffix are also reminders that language is a mass phenomenon. "Doh" is in the OED too-not because Homer Simpson uses it, but because lots of people do. Dictionaries are books everyone writes, and the wordinistas follow our lead. I'd say we're doing the language a favor if we keep pointing out educationiness, journalisminess, ethicaliness, and other destructive or preposterous farces. By doing so, maybe we'll make actual education, journalism, and ethics easier to locate too.


More-iness:


fame-iness

Feb. 17, 2007, Meghan Daum, Los Angeles Times

"Now that the mystique of so many celebrities is rooted less in their accomplishments than

in their ability to get our attention by provoking our disgust, perhaps it's not fame they're offering but ‘fame-iness.'"

faithy-ness

June 7, 2007, Karen Cohen, letter to the editor, The New York Times

"How ironic that in the country founded on separation of church and state, candidates must compete with one another over their ‘faithy-ness.' Their stands on issues like the Iraq war, poverty, health care and global warming are … independent of the amount of faith in a supreme being they profess."

referenciness

Feb. 12, 2007, Ben Goldacre, The Guardian

"The scholarliness of [Gillian McKeith's] work is a thing to behold: she produces lengthy documents that have an air of ‘referenciness,' with nice little superscript numbers ... but when you follow the numbers, and check the references, it's shocking how often they aren't what she claimed them to be in the main body of the text."

scienciness

July 1, 2007, The Yorkshire Ranter blog

"British politics is afflicted with scienciness, by analogy to ‘truthiness.' Thinking about the obsession with biometric quackery, I realised that over the last 10 years we've been governed by people who like the idea of science, but not anything specifically scientific."

youthiness

Jan. 4, 2007, The Boomer Chronicles blog

"I still see myself as young no matter what. Even when that extra crease appeared on my eyelid-a telltale sign of middle age-I persisted in my belief that I was young and vital. So, if Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's popular Colbert Report has ‘truthiness,' I want: youthiness."]]> Mark Peters Wed, 3 Oct 2007 18:38:18 PDT <![CDATA[Rita Flórez on Why Zines Won’t Die]]> http://www.good.is/post/rita-florez-on-why-zines-wont-die/ http://www.good.is/post/rita-florez-on-why-zines-wont-die/

I've never made a zine. In fact, I only started paying attention to them about a year and a half ago when I went to an Atlanta record shop that happened to have an impressive, crowded magazine rack. I know zines were huge in the D.I.Y. 1990s, but I couldn't believe that people were still taking the time and spending the money to publish their thoughts on paper for no other reward than being heard. Isn't that why we have blogs? It occurred to me, though, that zines have the potential to be more substantial, and that the people who drive these publications are our modern-day pamphleteers: people willing to risk time and money to float their ideas wherever people will distribute them. When people decide to make zines, they aren't doing it to become famous or get rich. They're doing it for themselves, and if other people like it, great.

Of course, a lot of them are total garbage. Chip Rowe, creator of Chip's Closet Cleaner and editor of The Book of Zines, says he used to spend about $100 a month looking for good ones. "I have to read 20 zines to find the one I'm going to save. But it's worth it." It hasn't always been a gamble, though. In their heyday, zines had Factsheet 5-a zine of zines that reviewed the newest editions-to help separate the wheat from the chaff. But that publication went under sometime around the end of grunge, leaving collectors no choice but to spend their cash on what might be an inferior product. Now, though, since fewer people still make zines, the ones that have lasted tend to be the more impressive ones. "Before the internet, there were [a lot of] crappy-looking zines with really bad writing," says Gavin Frederick, a distributor from Atlanta. "Now all those people have blogs, because it's cheaper. Ten years ago, print media was the only way to go about it because there was nothing else."

To Pagan Kennedy, creator of Pagan's Head and author of 'Zine, blogs and sites like MySpace are just the natural extension of zine culture. "In many ways, the zine world is very much like the internet," she says. "It's just that zines happened through the mail, so it happened slowly. Even the conventions of the zine world-the personal zine, where you tell your life story-are very much like blogs and MySpace."

Still, for avid zine readers like Rowe and Frederick, there's a distinction between blogs and zines. "I don't think MySpace has the zine spirit," says Rowe. "The motivation behind a zine is [personal], but you don't care about getting noticed. Print gives you many more options. If you publish it online, it's limited by the coding."

And, unlike the majority of blogs, the better zines reflect something more than the ins and outs of someone's personal life. Some of them explore a topic, dissect it, and give their readers something that they can't get anywhere else. Chainbreaker, for example, is a great zine devoted to every aspect of bike culture, and On Subbing is a personal zine about the experiences of an education assistant for special-education classes in the Portland Educational System. "A lot of people are into topics that aren't covered in the mainstream," says Rowe, "and zines are just a way to get more on that subject."

There's also the "Can I read it on the toilet?" factor, which print lovers argue is irreplaceable. "If it's really good artwork, there's only so much you can get out of looking at a computer screen," says Frederick. "You'd rather own a nice book or a nice bound zine rather than a stack of printouts."

Rowe agrees: "There's something about being able to hand somebody a copy of your zine. There's more of a personal interaction. When I ask people what they love about reading zines, they mention that it's not just getting the zine, it's getting this note from the person who made the zine. It became a personal correspondence." Think people will be saying that about a MySpace profile 10 years from now?


Books on zines:




The Book of Zines

by Chip Rowe (Owl Books)

A great primer on zines, with an emphasis on the good ones. Plus, you can see what ur-blog Boing Boing looked like as a zine, before it found a home on the internet.

 





Stolen Sharpie Revolution

by Alex Wrekk (Microcosm)

A D.I.Y. zine resource, this book explains everything from what a zine is to how to make one, and the ins and outs of distribution. Then it charges the reader to arm himself or herself with a glue stick, scissors, and a copy machine.

 





Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine?

by Esther Pearl Watson and Mark Todd (Graphia)

Some of the bigger names in the business came together for this indie publishing how-to, with instructions on silk-screening, beating writer's block, and the best supplies.

 



Where to get them:


Microcosm Publishing

microcosmpublishing.com

A great place for stocking up on political zines, as well as comics.

Stickfigure

istickfiguredistro.com

Most of Stickfigure's zine collection is for people with a taste for underground, independent music.

Zine World

undergroundpress.org

This magazine and site reviews other zines, covers news, and has a where-to-buy directory for collectors.

Upcoming zine fairs nationwide:


The Midwest Zine Fest

October 13, 2007 in Madison, Wisconsin

midwestzines.org

Zine-A-Palooza

November 3, 2007 in Atlanta

muxproductions.com/zap

The New Orleans Bookfair

November 10, 2007 in New Orleans

hotironpress.com/bookfair.htm]]>

I've never made a zine. In fact, I only started paying attention to them about a year and a half ago when I went to an Atlanta record shop that happened to have an impressive, crowded magazine rack. I know zines were huge in the D.I.Y. 1990s, but I couldn't believe that people were still taking the time and spending the money to publish their thoughts on paper for no other reward than being heard. Isn't that why we have blogs? It occurred to me, though, that zines have the potential to be more substantial, and that the people who drive these publications are our modern-day pamphleteers: people willing to risk time and money to float their ideas wherever people will distribute them. When people decide to make zines, they aren't doing it to become famous or get rich. They're doing it for themselves, and if other people like it, great.

Of course, a lot of them are total garbage. Chip Rowe, creator of Chip's Closet Cleaner and editor of The Book of Zines, says he used to spend about $100 a month looking for good ones. "I have to read 20 zines to find the one I'm going to save. But it's worth it." It hasn't always been a gamble, though. In their heyday, zines had Factsheet 5-a zine of zines that reviewed the newest editions-to help separate the wheat from the chaff. But that publication went under sometime around the end of grunge, leaving collectors no choice but to spend their cash on what might be an inferior product. Now, though, since fewer people still make zines, the ones that have lasted tend to be the more impressive ones. "Before the internet, there were [a lot of] crappy-looking zines with really bad writing," says Gavin Frederick, a distributor from Atlanta. "Now all those people have blogs, because it's cheaper. Ten years ago, print media was the only way to go about it because there was nothing else."

To Pagan Kennedy, creator of Pagan's Head and author of 'Zine, blogs and sites like MySpace are just the natural extension of zine culture. "In many ways, the zine world is very much like the internet," she says. "It's just that zines happened through the mail, so it happened slowly. Even the conventions of the zine world-the personal zine, where you tell your life story-are very much like blogs and MySpace."

Still, for avid zine readers like Rowe and Frederick, there's a distinction between blogs and zines. "I don't think MySpace has the zine spirit," says Rowe. "The motivation behind a zine is [personal], but you don't care about getting noticed. Print gives you many more options. If you publish it online, it's limited by the coding."

And, unlike the majority of blogs, the better zines reflect something more than the ins and outs of someone's personal life. Some of them explore a topic, dissect it, and give their readers something that they can't get anywhere else. Chainbreaker, for example, is a great zine devoted to every aspect of bike culture, and On Subbing is a personal zine about the experiences of an education assistant for special-education classes in the Portland Educational System. "A lot of people are into topics that aren't covered in the mainstream," says Rowe, "and zines are just a way to get more on that subject."

There's also the "Can I read it on the toilet?" factor, which print lovers argue is irreplaceable. "If it's really good artwork, there's only so much you can get out of looking at a computer screen," says Frederick. "You'd rather own a nice book or a nice bound zine rather than a stack of printouts."

Rowe agrees: "There's something about being able to hand somebody a copy of your zine. There's more of a personal interaction. When I ask people what they love about reading zines, they mention that it's not just getting the zine, it's getting this note from the person who made the zine. It became a personal correspondence." Think people will be saying that about a MySpace profile 10 years from now?


Books on zines:




The Book of Zines

by Chip Rowe (Owl Books)

A great primer on zines, with an emphasis on the good ones. Plus, you can see what ur-blog Boing Boing looked like as a zine, before it found a home on the internet.

 





Stolen Sharpie Revolution

by Alex Wrekk (Microcosm)

A D.I.Y. zine resource, this book explains everything from what a zine is to how to make one, and the ins and outs of distribution. Then it charges the reader to arm himself or herself with a glue stick, scissors, and a copy machine.

 





Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine?

by Esther Pearl Watson and Mark Todd (Graphia)

Some of the bigger names in the business came together for this indie publishing how-to, with instructions on silk-screening, beating writer's block, and the best supplies.

 



Where to get them:


Microcosm Publishing

microcosmpublishing.com

A great place for stocking up on political zines, as well as comics.

Stickfigure

istickfiguredistro.com

Most of Stickfigure's zine collection is for people with a taste for underground, independent music.

Zine World

undergroundpress.org

This magazine and site reviews other zines, covers news, and has a where-to-buy directory for collectors.

Upcoming zine fairs nationwide:


The Midwest Zine Fest

October 13, 2007 in Madison, Wisconsin

midwestzines.org

Zine-A-Palooza

November 3, 2007 in Atlanta

muxproductions.com/zap

The New Orleans Bookfair

November 10, 2007 in New Orleans

hotironpress.com/bookfair.htm]]> Rita Flórez Wed, 3 Oct 2007 18:15:29 PDT <![CDATA[Anne Trubek on the Allure of Collecting Hypermodern Literature]]> http://www.good.is/post/anne-trubek-on-the-allure-of-collecting-hypermodern-literature/ http://www.good.is/post/anne-trubek-on-the-allure-of-collecting-hypermodern-literature/

Ignoring first editions of the King James Bible, illustrated medieval manuscripts, and fine-press editions of Pride and Prejudice, I scoured the aisles of this spring's New York Antiquarian Book Fair at the New York Armory. I was indifferent to the museum pieces and objets d'art. I was looking for the small number of recent releases that make it into the fair every year, peering into display cabinets for glossy, colorful dust jackets. I went to the rare book fair to suss out the contemporary book scene.

Those who collect hypermoderns-books published in the past 20 years or so-are the cowboys of the antiquarian book trade, investing in the most speculative niche in this otherwise staid market. They scout and bet on future greats, scooping up first editions that they think (and hope) will eventually become classics.

Books both high- and lowbrow get tapped with the spending frenzies reserved for the most popular titles. A first U.K. edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, for example, recently sold for $37,000; when J. K. Rowling's first novel came out, in 1997, it retailed for about $25. Other popular bestsellers are prone to bubbles, liable to lose their value quickly. According to P. Scott Brown, the editor of Fine Books & Collections magazine, the classic case of declining value is Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Galsworthy. Popular in his day, publishers issued numerous fine-press volumes of his works, but his reputation declined, and now those limited-edition, signed firsts are easy to come by, selling for $200 or so apiece.

So what makes a good investment? Literary fiction of lasting value-classics to be. Today, first editions of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner go for six figures. Hypermodern collectors are wagering on what will be deemed classic 50 years or so down the line. Based on my day at the fair, hot authors include Raymond Carver (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: $2,500), Tim O'Brien (If I Die in a Combat Zone: $4,500) and D. B. C. Pierre (Vernon God Little: $400). But the clear darling of the hypermodern posse is Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy is perfect for collectors: He is male, writes in difficult prose, attends few book signings (making signed copies scarcer), and once published in small print runs. A copy of McCarthy's 1968 novel Outer Dark was going for $3,000 at the April Armory show. A few weeks later, McCarthy won the Pulitzer and a nod from Oprah. His stock further skyrocketed. At another auction at the Swann Auction Galleries, a copy of his 1985 Blood Meridian sold for $4,560.

Collecting is a risky game, though. Some scored with McCarthy, but followers of the American author William T. Vollmann lost big in the1990s. Ken Lopez, a bookseller who specializes in modern and hypermodern titles, told me of a failed attempt to corner Vollmann futures: "A small group of young guys got together to monopolize the market," he says. "They would travel to book signings, buy 10 copies of Vollmann's books for $17.50, and mark the prices up to $100." But they overshot, and today the market is overstocked, supply having outstripped demand.

The collecting of hypermoderns became more profitable in the 1970s with a change in the tax law. Beforehand, publishers kept books on the backlist for ages, but with the change, it made financial sense for them to off-load unsold copies. This created a glut of remainders, those bargain-priced books stacked in bookstores. Remainders usually have a black slash in marker on them, rendering them less valuable. With fewer unmarked copies available, prices went up.

Also helping the market was the internet, which made it easier to find rare books. Lopez calls this "the golden age of book buying." Most dealers now put their holdings online, and lower prices to stay competitive. Lopez used to sell Cynthia Ozick's first novel, Trust, for $500 to $600; today it sells for half that, but, he explains, the price will eventually go back up. "There may be 12 copies on the internet now; when those go away, they will be replaced by six, then three."

Hypermodern collecting is a bit absurd, maybe even crass. Many collectors are only interested in trophy hunting, buying matching leather-bound volumes they may never read to line their bookshelves. But it's also enormously compelling. I have been bitten. Since I know more about books than about financial markets, hardbacks are my stocks. After I read a book I admire, I purchase another copy to put on my shelf. I am a big Richard Powers fan, so I have collected all his novels. Shortly after Jeffrey Eugenides' marvelous Middlesex won the Pulitzer, I found a signed copy in my local bookstore for $50. Today, I might get $125 to $350 for it. (Plus, my money went to a worthy place. My $50 helped keep an independent bookstore afloat. Independent publishers also have a hard time, so I go out of my way to invest in them as well.)

Powers and Eugenides are big names with large publishing houses behind them. Another way to go is to find up-and-coming authors publishing with small presses. After I read a borrowed copy of Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, I bought a collectible copy on the Small Beer Press website. McSweeney's is another great press to support and potentially reap gain from. Collectors love its stable of authors, especially mastermind Dave Eggers.

My last tip is to sign up for book-release clubs. If you had been a member of Square Books's Signed First Editions Club in 2002, it would have sent you Yann Martel's Life of Pi, which now goes for $200 to $800. Many small presses are launching similar release clubs to help guarantee their own income, and it might help yours, too.

Want to bet on America's next top author and put your money into deserving coffers? Buy a new release. Buy three.


Start your own collection:


 





Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

It won the Pulitzer, and for good reason. Eugenides is a sophisticated writer who publishes infrequently, increasing his value to collectors.

 





This Shape We're In

by Jonathan Lethem (McSweeney's)

Lethem is a consistently strong novelist, and this title, published by McSweeney's, is his prettiest.

 





Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers (William Morrow)

The first novel by this Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur "genius" is clever and endearing.

 





Tom Thomson in Purgatory

by Troy Jollimore (Margie/Intuit House)

A collection by America's next great poet, this book was a surprise winner of this year's National Book Critics Circle Award.

 





Magic for Beginners

by Kelly Link (Small Beer Press)

Surprising, wacky, smart stories from a rising star. She'll make you laugh and fall on the floor in disbelief.

 





Fieldwork

by Mischa Berlinski (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A thought-provoking and hilarious debut novel about anthropologists and missionaries in Thailand. It should have received more ink, and his next novel may be big.

 





The World to Come

by Dara Horn (W. W. Norton)

The second novel by an underappreciated, lyrical writer. Horn goes backward in history and forward to the afterlife and also manages to pen a page-turning mystery.

 





My Happy Life

by Lydia Millet (Henry Holt and Co.)

The third novel by this genre-bending, inventive writer, who deserves more readers.]]>

Ignoring first editions of the King James Bible, illustrated medieval manuscripts, and fine-press editions of Pride and Prejudice, I scoured the aisles of this spring's New York Antiquarian Book Fair at the New York Armory. I was indifferent to the museum pieces and objets d'art. I was looking for the small number of recent releases that make it into the fair every year, peering into display cabinets for glossy, colorful dust jackets. I went to the rare book fair to suss out the contemporary book scene.

Those who collect hypermoderns-books published in the past 20 years or so-are the cowboys of the antiquarian book trade, investing in the most speculative niche in this otherwise staid market. They scout and bet on future greats, scooping up first editions that they think (and hope) will eventually become classics.

Books both high- and lowbrow get tapped with the spending frenzies reserved for the most popular titles. A first U.K. edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, for example, recently sold for $37,000; when J. K. Rowling's first novel came out, in 1997, it retailed for about $25. Other popular bestsellers are prone to bubbles, liable to lose their value quickly. According to P. Scott Brown, the editor of Fine Books & Collections magazine, the classic case of declining value is Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Galsworthy. Popular in his day, publishers issued numerous fine-press volumes of his works, but his reputation declined, and now those limited-edition, signed firsts are easy to come by, selling for $200 or so apiece.

So what makes a good investment? Literary fiction of lasting value-classics to be. Today, first editions of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner go for six figures. Hypermodern collectors are wagering on what will be deemed classic 50 years or so down the line. Based on my day at the fair, hot authors include Raymond Carver (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: $2,500), Tim O'Brien (If I Die in a Combat Zone: $4,500) and D. B. C. Pierre (Vernon God Little: $400). But the clear darling of the hypermodern posse is Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy is perfect for collectors: He is male, writes in difficult prose, attends few book signings (making signed copies scarcer), and once published in small print runs. A copy of McCarthy's 1968 novel Outer Dark was going for $3,000 at the April Armory show. A few weeks later, McCarthy won the Pulitzer and a nod from Oprah. His stock further skyrocketed. At another auction at the Swann Auction Galleries, a copy of his 1985 Blood Meridian sold for $4,560.

Collecting is a risky game, though. Some scored with McCarthy, but followers of the American author William T. Vollmann lost big in the1990s. Ken Lopez, a bookseller who specializes in modern and hypermodern titles, told me of a failed attempt to corner Vollmann futures: "A small group of young guys got together to monopolize the market," he says. "They would travel to book signings, buy 10 copies of Vollmann's books for $17.50, and mark the prices up to $100." But they overshot, and today the market is overstocked, supply having outstripped demand.

The collecting of hypermoderns became more profitable in the 1970s with a change in the tax law. Beforehand, publishers kept books on the backlist for ages, but with the change, it made financial sense for them to off-load unsold copies. This created a glut of remainders, those bargain-priced books stacked in bookstores. Remainders usually have a black slash in marker on them, rendering them less valuable. With fewer unmarked copies available, prices went up.

Also helping the market was the internet, which made it easier to find rare books. Lopez calls this "the golden age of book buying." Most dealers now put their holdings online, and lower prices to stay competitive. Lopez used to sell Cynthia Ozick's first novel, Trust, for $500 to $600; today it sells for half that, but, he explains, the price will eventually go back up. "There may be 12 copies on the internet now; when those go away, they will be replaced by six, then three."

Hypermodern collecting is a bit absurd, maybe even crass. Many collectors are only interested in trophy hunting, buying matching leather-bound volumes they may never read to line their bookshelves. But it's also enormously compelling. I have been bitten. Since I know more about books than about financial markets, hardbacks are my stocks. After I read a book I admire, I purchase another copy to put on my shelf. I am a big Richard Powers fan, so I have collected all his novels. Shortly after Jeffrey Eugenides' marvelous Middlesex won the Pulitzer, I found a signed copy in my local bookstore for $50. Today, I might get $125 to $350 for it. (Plus, my money went to a worthy place. My $50 helped keep an independent bookstore afloat. Independent publishers also have a hard time, so I go out of my way to invest in them as well.)

Powers and Eugenides are big names with large publishing houses behind them. Another way to go is to find up-and-coming authors publishing with small presses. After I read a borrowed copy of Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, I bought a collectible copy on the Small Beer Press website. McSweeney's is another great press to support and potentially reap gain from. Collectors love its stable of authors, especially mastermind Dave Eggers.

My last tip is to sign up for book-release clubs. If you had been a member of Square Books's Signed First Editions Club in 2002, it would have sent you Yann Martel's Life of Pi, which now goes for $200 to $800. Many small presses are launching similar release clubs to help guarantee their own income, and it might help yours, too.

Want to bet on America's next top author and put your money into deserving coffers? Buy a new release. Buy three.


Start your own collection:


 





Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

It won the Pulitzer, and for good reason. Eugenides is a sophisticated writer who publishes infrequently, increasing his value to collectors.

 





This Shape We're In

by Jonathan Lethem (McSweeney's)

Lethem is a consistently strong novelist, and this title, published by McSweeney's, is his prettiest.

 





Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers (William Morrow)

The first novel by this Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur "genius" is clever and endearing.

 





Tom Thomson in Purgatory

by Troy Jollimore (Margie/Intuit House)

A collection by America's next great poet, this book was a surprise winner of this year's National Book Critics Circle Award.

 





Magic for Beginners

by Kelly Link (Small Beer Press)

Surprising, wacky, smart stories from a rising star. She'll make you laugh and fall on the floor in disbelief.

 





Fieldwork

by Mischa Berlinski (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A thought-provoking and hilarious debut novel about anthropologists and missionaries in Thailand. It should have received more ink, and his next novel may be big.

 





The World to Come

by Dara Horn (W. W. Norton)

The second novel by an underappreciated, lyrical writer. Horn goes backward in history and forward to the afterlife and also manages to pen a page-turning mystery.

 





My Happy Life

by Lydia Millet (Henry Holt and Co.)

The third novel by this genre-bending, inventive writer, who deserves more readers.]]> Anne Trubek Wed, 3 Oct 2007 17:49:02 PDT <![CDATA[Michaelangelo Matos on Magazine Archives]]> http://www.good.is/post/michaelangelo-matos-on-magazine-archives/ http://www.good.is/post/michaelangelo-matos-on-magazine-archives/

The major difference between books and magazines is tense. A magazine issue might be one for the ages, but most of the time it lives only in the present. A book made up of magazine articles tends to assume its contents will stand up in the decades to come, but you never know. As someone who holds on to far too many back issues, clippings, and photocopies of magazine and newspaper articles, I've often had the experience of going back to a piece I remember loving and finding it less substantial than I had thought. It may have defined its moment, but it didn't outlast it.

Still, remembering how something felt at the time-not how history has come to account for it-has its own appeal. And as history continues to expand and accumulate, it's all but impossible to imagine there being only one "official version." Endurance counts for a lot, but time can also obscure any number of in-the-moment false starts, unfinished thoughts, and margins teeming with ideas that can tell us about their time and place in a far different way than the established record.

That might help explain the recent spate of complete digital archives of various magazines. Perhaps the funniest thing about this trend is that it was begun by that most classicist of publications, The New Yorker, which in 2005 issued a set of eight DVD-ROMs that included scans of each of its 80 years' worth of pages. While The Complete New Yorker has since been superseded, technologically at least, by a hard-drive version (plugs right into your computer, costs way more), other venerable magazines are starting to catch up: This fall, Rolling Stone and Playboywill both offer their entire oeuvre on DVD. While no other big titles have announced plans to do the same, it's hard to imagine heavy hitters like Time, Vanity Fair, or Esquire not succumbing to the temptation of proffering their legacy in expensive, easy-to-access formats sometime soon as well.

This is a significant shift. Over the years, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Playboy have been more than well represented on traditional bookshelves by greatest-hits anthologies, officially sanctioned essay collections, and historical scrapbooks. Certainly, these new archives are the result of technological innovation as well as consumer interest. But their bloom also signals a lid being put on those magazines' legacies; It's hard not to see these collections as tombstones for their magazines' vital cultural presences.

Magazine readership is changing, and a lot of people who turned to magazines for one specific thing-information, features, gossip, reviews-are finding those things piecemeal on the internet. For those of us who truly love magazines, the actual object carries a specific kind of weight, a reminder of something less transient than digital bytes. It's the difference between an album and a single, a novel and a story collection. You don't have to value one over the other, but a great larger work elevates its parts, rather than simply stacking them neatly in a row. A great magazine turns a multiplicity of viewpoints into a cohesive whole.

It's hard not to wonder if magazine readers will soon seem as dated as fans of the vinyl LP. Digital collections like The Complete New Yorker are aimed at those who are as interested in the minutiae of history-the way a specific time and place felt-as in the broad outline. Magazine geekery is more like this than most instances of cultural product hoarding. And it isn't just digital efforts that reflect this. Take Spy: The Funny Years and The Best of Smash Hits: The '80s, both oversized hardbacks made up of excerpts from, and stories about, the magazines. For fans of Spy and Smash Hits in the 1980s-and it's difficult to think of two other magazines as definitively 1980s as these-the books offer as much dirt as they do highlights. Shrewdly, both books position their parent publications in the center of the action rather than on its periphery. The Funny Years does this more explicitly, with its lengthy treatment of Spy's backstage drama, The Best of Smash Hits more implicitly, making it the more interesting book. But both magazines' primary modes would eventually spawn more prosaic variations, banishing them to the shadows before they quietly passed on.

The Last Magazine, a collection of essays on the future of print magazines edited by David Renard, is another recent book worth noting. Renard figures that the bulk of what will survive will be what he calls the "stylepress": high-end specialty titles. Though the book curiously doesn't mention the fashion-magazine world-you can't tear out an oversized, saturated-color-print photo from a laptop, no matter how good your printer-he certainly has a point.

People will always need something to read on the subway, and we remain far enough away from the flexible computer screen that the idea of not having physical pages to turn still seems alien. That said, when a cultural force runs its cycle, looking back upon it tends to take on more urgency than moving it forward. There's bounty in those back pages, for sure. Whether that will continue to be the case, though, is a question that grows dicier by the month.


It's a digital world:




The Complete New Yorker

(The New Yorker)

Of course there's no way you'll ever read it all. But to pick one example, it's the only place in print you'll find much of the penetrating late-1960s and early-1970s rock criticism of the late Ellen Willis. Worth the search time, especially her clear-eyed Woodstock analysis.

 




Spy: The Funny Years

by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, and George Kalogerakis (Miramax)

Too much, of course-just like the celebrity culture it skewered and the decade it defined. But this collection has plenty of fascinating reprints and backstage stuff, even if its self-regard can make you need to go out for air.

 




The Best of Smash Hits: The '80s

(Little, Brown)

The quintessential British teen-oriented pop mag during its glory days: eye-shocking color, irreverent interviews, and sneakily excellent feature writing from such future heroes as the journalist Chris Heath and an early editor called Neil Tennant, later of the Pet Shop Boys.

 




The Last Magazine

by David Renard (Universe)

The essays on the future of magazines are certainly intriguing, but the real draw here is its many images of artisan-like titles such as Richardson (arty erotica from photographer Terry Richardson) and Zembla (a sadly kaput attempt at a lit mag with rock and roll pizzazz).]]>

The major difference between books and magazines is tense. A magazine issue might be one for the ages, but most of the time it lives only in the present. A book made up of magazine articles tends to assume its contents will stand up in the decades to come, but you never know. As someone who holds on to far too many back issues, clippings, and photocopies of magazine and newspaper articles, I've often had the experience of going back to a piece I remember loving and finding it less substantial than I had thought. It may have defined its moment, but it didn't outlast it.

Still, remembering how something felt at the time-not how history has come to account for it-has its own appeal. And as history continues to expand and accumulate, it's all but impossible to imagine there being only one "official version." Endurance counts for a lot, but time can also obscure any number of in-the-moment false starts, unfinished thoughts, and margins teeming with ideas that can tell us about their time and place in a far different way than the established record.

That might help explain the recent spate of complete digital archives of various magazines. Perhaps the funniest thing about this trend is that it was begun by that most classicist of publications, The New Yorker, which in 2005 issued a set of eight DVD-ROMs that included scans of each of its 80 years' worth of pages. While The Complete New Yorker has since been superseded, technologically at least, by a hard-drive version (plugs right into your computer, costs way more), other venerable magazines are starting to catch up: This fall, Rolling Stone and Playboywill both offer their entire oeuvre on DVD. While no other big titles have announced plans to do the same, it's hard to imagine heavy hitters like Time, Vanity Fair, or Esquire not succumbing to the temptation of proffering their legacy in expensive, easy-to-access formats sometime soon as well.

This is a significant shift. Over the years, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Playboy have been more than well represented on traditional bookshelves by greatest-hits anthologies, officially sanctioned essay collections, and historical scrapbooks. Certainly, these new archives are the result of technological innovation as well as consumer interest. But their bloom also signals a lid being put on those magazines' legacies; It's hard not to see these collections as tombstones for their magazines' vital cultural presences.

Magazine readership is changing, and a lot of people who turned to magazines for one specific thing-information, features, gossip, reviews-are finding those things piecemeal on the internet. For those of us who truly love magazines, the actual object carries a specific kind of weight, a reminder of something less transient than digital bytes. It's the difference between an album and a single, a novel and a story collection. You don't have to value one over the other, but a great larger work elevates its parts, rather than simply stacking them neatly in a row. A great magazine turns a multiplicity of viewpoints into a cohesive whole.

It's hard not to wonder if magazine readers will soon seem as dated as fans of the vinyl LP. Digital collections like The Complete New Yorker are aimed at those who are as interested in the minutiae of history-the way a specific time and place felt-as in the broad outline. Magazine geekery is more like this than most instances of cultural product hoarding. And it isn't just digital efforts that reflect this. Take Spy: The Funny Years and The Best of Smash Hits: The '80s, both oversized hardbacks made up of excerpts from, and stories about, the magazines. For fans of Spy and Smash Hits in the 1980s-and it's difficult to think of two other magazines as definitively 1980s as these-the books offer as much dirt as they do highlights. Shrewdly, both books position their parent publications in the center of the action rather than on its periphery. The Funny Years does this more explicitly, with its lengthy treatment of Spy's backstage drama, The Best of Smash Hits more implicitly, making it the more interesting book. But both magazines' primary modes would eventually spawn more prosaic variations, banishing them to the shadows before they quietly passed on.

The Last Magazine, a collection of essays on the future of print magazines edited by David Renard, is another recent book worth noting. Renard figures that the bulk of what will survive will be what he calls the "stylepress": high-end specialty titles. Though the book curiously doesn't mention the fashion-magazine world-you can't tear out an oversized, saturated-color-print photo from a laptop, no matter how good your printer-he certainly has a point.

People will always need something to read on the subway, and we remain far enough away from the flexible computer screen that the idea of not having physical pages to turn still seems alien. That said, when a cultural force runs its cycle, looking back upon it tends to take on more urgency than moving it forward. There's bounty in those back pages, for sure. Whether that will continue to be the case, though, is a question that grows dicier by the month.


It's a digital world:




The Complete New Yorker

(The New Yorker)

Of course there's no way you'll ever read it all. But to pick one example, it's the only place in print you'll find much of the penetrating late-1960s and early-1970s rock criticism of the late Ellen Willis. Worth the search time, especially her clear-eyed Woodstock analysis.

 




Spy: The Funny Years

by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, and George Kalogerakis (Miramax)

Too much, of course-just like the celebrity culture it skewered and the decade it defined. But this collection has plenty of fascinating reprints and backstage stuff, even if its self-regard can make you need to go out for air.

 




The Best of Smash Hits: The '80s

(Little, Brown)

The quintessential British teen-oriented pop mag during its glory days: eye-shocking color, irreverent interviews, and sneakily excellent feature writing from such future heroes as the journalist Chris Heath and an early editor called Neil Tennant, later of the Pet Shop Boys.

 




The Last Magazine

by David Renard (Universe)

The essays on the future of magazines are certainly intriguing, but the real draw here is its many images of artisan-like titles such as Richardson (arty erotica from photographer Terry Richardson) and Zembla (a sadly kaput attempt at a lit mag with rock and roll pizzazz).]]> Michaelangelo Matos Mon, 13 Aug 2007 14:19:00 PDT <![CDATA[Matthew Dessem on the Ancient Art of List Making]]> http://www.good.is/post/matthew-dessem-on-the-ancient-art-of-list-making/ http://www.good.is/post/matthew-dessem-on-the-ancient-art-of-list-making/

Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is a 323-page paean to the addictive power of lists. For Barry, the novel's Falstaff, conversation is enumeration: "If he has seen a good film," Hornby writes, "he will not describe the plot, or how it made him feel, but where it ranks in his best-of-year list, best-of-all-time list, best-of-decade list." For Barry-and possibly for the rest of us-obsessive list-making keeps him young, and makes him feel important. There's something to that, to be sure, but making lists isn't completely adolescent either.

High Fidelity-which fittingly graced more than a few best-of-year lists itself-is unwaveringly contemporary, but Barry's impulse to catalogue certainly isn't anything new. Sometime around 140 B.C., Antipater of Sidon wrote that the temple of Artemis at Ephesus outshone the other six wonders of the world; today, people remember him precisely because he took the trouble to name the six less impressive wonders. Draw a straight line through history from Antipater to the present, and you find countless self-made experts doing the same thing, ad nauseam.

Take "Pabcool," for instance, an Amazon.com user who recently noted, "omg teh beatles roxxor my soxxors," in a list titled "My Favorite Junk Pt. 1." Humanity probably won't be talking about that list 2,000 years from now, but Pabcool is engaging in the same kind of criticism, a binary thumbs-up/thumbs-down system that's worlds away from what, say, a film critic like Pauline Kael does. While a traditional critic will go to great lengths to explain what's good or bad about something, in list-making, you're either one of the Seven Wonders of the World or you're not.

Everyone has opinions, but not all of us create lists titled "Things That Are Good." For one thing, a list of that sort implies a much longer, unwritten list titled "Things That Are Not Good." This second list-and fear of being on it-accounts for most of the literary battles over the Western Canon. Value judgments aside, someone has to sort films, books, albums, news, and so on into two categories. The fact that most of the material out there ends up on the scrap heap is an inevitability. Given the sheer volume of media out there, we can't do all the work ourselves. Think about it: Most people use some sort of automatic filtering on their email systems, whether it's a simple spam filter or a complicated scheme that moves mail from their ex to a special "When Hell Freezes Over" folder. If we can't even handle filtering our personal correspondence by ourselves, what hope do we have of finding things worthy of our attention in other types of media?

Traditional critics can't do this work entirely on their own, either. For one thing, they often don't choose their assignments, and they write too frequently. This means that over time, their standards lower toward the median quality of the films they are seeing (or books they are reading). Even Pauline Kael, in the context of a negative review, described 1986's robot-becomes-sentient movie Short Circuit as "smoothly directed." Assuming you're trying to find things that are truly worth knowing about, you need someone using more stringent criteria, more selectively. Someone charged with sorting, preserving, and championing that which is attention-worthy, saving you the trouble of going through the rest. In short, you need a curator.

As with so many difficult things in life, it's tempting to turn the job of curating over to a machine, especially since they're so much better at it. Amazon does a decent job of predicting things you'll like, picking through vast stores of data about every purchase anyone has made since the site was founded, looking for correlations. It uses what information theorists call "traffic analysis," a way of looking for patterns without necessarily caring what the data means. In Amazon's case, traffic analysis means the software has noticed that many people who buy The Secret also pick up a copy of You: On a Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management. But its probabilistic system doesn't look at the content of each purchase. That isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but it's unlikely to point you toward anything truly surprising or rare.

Pandora.com, which streams music based on artists or bands you like, has a more interesting method. Unlike Amazon, Pandora bases its predictions on analysis of the substance of the music-someone actually listens to the songs and records their characteristics. Because it relies on human intelligence instead of data mining, Pandora often taps into more obscure material. The technology will improve, but the best filters will always involve a person at the controls to list and rank and catalogue things you ought to care about. Machines just aren't good enough at analyzing content.

Naturally, there's no shortage of people vying for the role. Traditional critics publish their best-of lists at the end of the year; there's even a website with a list of the top 100 film lists, running the gamut from the National Film Registry to the film critic Leonard Maltin. The book world is similar: The American Library Association maintains a list of book lists. We all know someone who tries to see all the Best Picture nominees before the Oscars. Even blogs, in their traditional form, are essentially lists. Some bloggers even turn the form back on itself, working their way through other people's canons: The New York writer Christopher R. Beha is writing a book about reading the Harvard Classics; a fundraiser for the University of Virginia named Tara Saylor is making every recipe in The Joy of Cooking; I'm watching all the movies in the Criterion Collection. And all of us have blogs.

In the end, the question is not whether canons like these are good or bad-constant list-making is the predictable result of a society that nurtures the collection instinct. The question is which one you respect. Finding a curator whose taste and expertise you trust isn't easy, but it's worth it. Even Nick Hornby recognizes the addictive power of list-making. A few years after finishing High Fidelity, he published Songbook. It's a list of his favorite songs. Pabcool would be proud.


Collect them all:




The Harvard Classics

When Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard for 40 years (ending in 1909), claimed that anyone could "reach the standing of a cultivated man or woman" through fifteen minutes of daily reading, the publisher P. F. Collier asked the obvious question: "Reading what?" Eliot's answer was the Harvard Classics, a 51-volume set of the greatest works of literature in the Western world.

 




The Criterion Collection

Since 1984, Criterion has been releasing its "continuing series of important classic and contemporary films" on laser disc and DVD. Although copyright restrictions mean some great works are excluded, the attention Criterion lavishes on each release earns it the respect of cinephiles.

 




The Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

It would take three weeks to listen to every album. But since this list comprehensively tracks pop music from Robert Johnson to the White Stripes, that might not be a bad way to spend your time.

 




The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels List

The Modern Library offers something for both high- and lowbrows with its parallel lists. Seven of the top 10 novels on the poll-driven "Reader's List" are by Ayn Rand or L. Ron Hubbard. The "Board's List," in contrast, is a solid collection of the greatest English literature published since 1900.]]>

Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is a 323-page paean to the addictive power of lists. For Barry, the novel's Falstaff, conversation is enumeration: "If he has seen a good film," Hornby writes, "he will not describe the plot, or how it made him feel, but where it ranks in his best-of-year list, best-of-all-time list, best-of-decade list." For Barry-and possibly for the rest of us-obsessive list-making keeps him young, and makes him feel important. There's something to that, to be sure, but making lists isn't completely adolescent either.

High Fidelity-which fittingly graced more than a few best-of-year lists itself-is unwaveringly contemporary, but Barry's impulse to catalogue certainly isn't anything new. Sometime around 140 B.C., Antipater of Sidon wrote that the temple of Artemis at Ephesus outshone the other six wonders of the world; today, people remember him precisely because he took the trouble to name the six less impressive wonders. Draw a straight line through history from Antipater to the present, and you find countless self-made experts doing the same thing, ad nauseam.

Take "Pabcool," for instance, an Amazon.com user who recently noted, "omg teh beatles roxxor my soxxors," in a list titled "My Favorite Junk Pt. 1." Humanity probably won't be talking about that list 2,000 years from now, but Pabcool is engaging in the same kind of criticism, a binary thumbs-up/thumbs-down system that's worlds away from what, say, a film critic like Pauline Kael does. While a traditional critic will go to great lengths to explain what's good or bad about something, in list-making, you're either one of the Seven Wonders of the World or you're not.

Everyone has opinions, but not all of us create lists titled "Things That Are Good." For one thing, a list of that sort implies a much longer, unwritten list titled "Things That Are Not Good." This second list-and fear of being on it-accounts for most of the literary battles over the Western Canon. Value judgments aside, someone has to sort films, books, albums, news, and so on into two categories. The fact that most of the material out there ends up on the scrap heap is an inevitability. Given the sheer volume of media out there, we can't do all the work ourselves. Think about it: Most people use some sort of automatic filtering on their email systems, whether it's a simple spam filter or a complicated scheme that moves mail from their ex to a special "When Hell Freezes Over" folder. If we can't even handle filtering our personal correspondence by ourselves, what hope do we have of finding things worthy of our attention in other types of media?

Traditional critics can't do this work entirely on their own, either. For one thing, they often don't choose their assignments, and they write too frequently. This means that over time, their standards lower toward the median quality of the films they are seeing (or books they are reading). Even Pauline Kael, in the context of a negative review, described 1986's robot-becomes-sentient movie Short Circuit as "smoothly directed." Assuming you're trying to find things that are truly worth knowing about, you need someone using more stringent criteria, more selectively. Someone charged with sorting, preserving, and championing that which is attention-worthy, saving you the trouble of going through the rest. In short, you need a curator.

As with so many difficult things in life, it's tempting to turn the job of curating over to a machine, especially since they're so much better at it. Amazon does a decent job of predicting things you'll like, picking through vast stores of data about every purchase anyone has made since the site was founded, looking for correlations. It uses what information theorists call "traffic analysis," a way of looking for patterns without necessarily caring what the data means. In Amazon's case, traffic analysis means the software has noticed that many people who buy The Secret also pick up a copy of You: On a Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management. But its probabilistic system doesn't look at the content of each purchase. That isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but it's unlikely to point you toward anything truly surprising or rare.

Pandora.com, which streams music based on artists or bands you like, has a more interesting method. Unlike Amazon, Pandora bases its predictions on analysis of the substance of the music-someone actually listens to the songs and records their characteristics. Because it relies on human intelligence instead of data mining, Pandora often taps into more obscure material. The technology will improve, but the best filters will always involve a person at the controls to list and rank and catalogue things you ought to care about. Machines just aren't good enough at analyzing content.

Naturally, there's no shortage of people vying for the role. Traditional critics publish their best-of lists at the end of the year; there's even a website with a list of the top 100 film lists, running the gamut from the National Film Registry to the film critic Leonard Maltin. The book world is similar: The American Library Association maintains a list of book lists. We all know someone who tries to see all the Best Picture nominees before the Oscars. Even blogs, in their traditional form, are essentially lists. Some bloggers even turn the form back on itself, working their way through other people's canons: The New York writer Christopher R. Beha is writing a book about reading the Harvard Classics; a fundraiser for the University of Virginia named Tara Saylor is making every recipe in The Joy of Cooking; I'm watching all the movies in the Criterion Collection. And all of us have blogs.

In the end, the question is not whether canons like these are good or bad-constant list-making is the predictable result of a society that nurtures the collection instinct. The question is which one you respect. Finding a curator whose taste and expertise you trust isn't easy, but it's worth it. Even Nick Hornby recognizes the addictive power of list-making. A few years after finishing High Fidelity, he published Songbook. It's a list of his favorite songs. Pabcool would be proud.


Collect them all:




The Harvard Classics

When Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard for 40 years (ending in 1909), claimed that anyone could "reach the standing of a cultivated man or woman" through fifteen minutes of daily reading, the publisher P. F. Collier asked the obvious question: "Reading what?" Eliot's answer was the Harvard Classics, a 51-volume set of the greatest works of literature in the Western world.

 




The Criterion Collection

Since 1984, Criterion has been releasing its "continuing series of important classic and contemporary films" on laser disc and DVD. Although copyright restrictions mean some great works are excluded, the attention Criterion lavishes on each release earns it the respect of cinephiles.

 




The Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

It would take three weeks to listen to every album. But since this list comprehensively tracks pop music from Robert Johnson to the White Stripes, that might not be a bad way to spend your time.

 




The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels List

The Modern Library offers something for both high- and lowbrows with its parallel lists. Seven of the top 10 novels on the poll-driven "Reader's List" are by Ayn Rand or L. Ron Hubbard. The "Board's List," in contrast, is a solid collection of the greatest English literature published since 1900.]]> Matthew Dessem Mon, 13 Aug 2007 13:59:35 PDT