we recommend things to you

"everything's eventual" (apologies to Stephen King)

2010-12-24T18:33:00.005-05:00

So, this blog is over. Dead. Ended. It seems fitting I should post this on Christmas Eve, the internet equivalent of shrieking into a vacuum.

The reasons for this blog's demise are twofold, and both indescribably painful:

1. The last post I made here took everything out of me. Every time i tried to come back to write, I saw it, and I couldn't think of anything else except my poor cat's dead limp body and how everything smelled that day.

And, more recently and painfully,

2. There is no more MirandaThom. One could say that Thom is now blogging at Rebecca-aka-Specs-and-Thom-in-a-cheap-motel-in-Sikeston-Missouri-within-an-intricate-web-of-malicious-lies.blogspot.com. He has yelled at me that telling people what he did is "very unflattering" to me, but I think if you do something so hurtful and deliberate and dishonest that people's opinions of you change just from hearing it, it says more about your actions than about any aims or goals of the person you hurt. I think sometimes people should choose their actions when considering how much they will hurt people who care about them before screaming about how the people react, especially when said actions are engineered to occur at a stressful time and in the most painful way possible. I think it's pointless to conduct oneself in such an amoral, cavalier, dishonest, and hurtful manner and then cry for "privacy." But what do I know? I doubt anything I say is taken seriously, by anyone. If people judge others on their hurtful actions, I have no control over that. If people carry out malicious actions designed to hurt me, I have the right to discuss it with the people who are my friends. The ones who don't lie to me. Besides, nobody reads this anyway.

Anyway.

I want to leave the blog up, because I want people to know what happened to my cat, and I want my story to not die. There need to be records of these things. I'm sick of people hurting others and getting away with it. If other people are hurting because Petsmart killed their beloved pet, I want them to know they're not alone, and to be able to contact me if they want to talk.

Regardless, if you actually liked reading what i wrote here - and I did enjoy writing most of it - I am going to be blogging in the following places:

1. New personal blog: Operemur Bonum/. i will be so embarrassed if the Latin is incorrect. I will be posting media recommendations, vegetarian recipes, cat pictures, and probably little else. The blog's full title is Dum tempus habemus, operemur bonum: "While we have the time, let us do good."

2. I'm going to be blogging occasionally at Geek Buffet. I am very excited about that opportunity.

I hope some of you will follow my writing at either or both of these. I am also developing a blog for my freelance tutoring / editing, but that will be likely focused on and targeted to English language learners. If anyone is interested in that, email me.

Regardless, thanks so much for your support and enthusiasm. Especially thank you to those of you who commented on the entry about my cat, who passed the entry along, who signed the petition. That means a lot to me.

the most important recommendation i can make to you

2010-06-14T18:16:00.004-04:00

Today's recommendation has been almost a year and a half in coming. If you read through, you will see why. This might be triggering for some people. I know it is for me. But I need to write this so that maybe, someday, the right thing will happen, and to make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else. All I really ask is that if you read this, please try and be respectful of what happened to me and how it has affected my life. All I ask is that you respect my pain and grief even if you don't agree with the reasons for it.

Every time I have tried to write this since December 2008, I have gotten physically ill and just couldn't do it. But today i am forcing myself to. I know I'm going to be sick the rest of the day, but I have to do this.

Consider this entry an open letter to the CEO of Pets Mart, Philip Francis.

Today's recommendation is boycotting Pets Mart because their groomers killed my cat. Pets Mart kills pets.

Dear Mr. Francis:

My cat, Einstein (or Ei[se]nstein) was my life. He was beautiful. I got him when I was 16 years old - he was a 12 week old rescued runt kitten born to a Persian my dad's friend rescued from a cat mill. He was fun, affectionate, and a good friend. Although I did not have papers for him, he was purebred.

When I moved to Indiana in 2008, he sat on my lap for the majority of the 12 hour trip. He was in good health and loved his new, spacious apartment (that I paid the rent for).

On December 17, 2008, I was about to leave to visit my boyfriend after the end of my first semester out here. As it was finals, I realized at the last minute that I had forgotten to schedule a grooming appointment for Einstein and I did not want the cat sitter to have to deal with grooming or brushing him herself.

Einstein had been to the groomer many, many times in his life, and had also been groomed at home by me. Each time I took him to a groomer, they gushed about how easy he was to work with, how friendly he was.

Because I worry, I worried each and every time. But he was fine. Each time I groomed him, he was obviously not happy, but he was cooperative and never displayed any ill effects.

Except for the one time in my life I patronized Pets Mart. Specifically, the location at 240 N Gates Dr, Bloomington, Indiana.

I was happy, at first, that they had gotten him in on such short notice. I wasn't feeling well that day. I got out of the car and slipped on the ice. I had a fleeting thought that I should reschedule this. I didn't. If I had, everything would have been different.

I dropped him off. While I waited in line, I snapped a picture of him in his carrier and emailed it to my Livejournal, hoping to do a before/after picture. "Take good care of him," I said to the dumb girl who checked him in (and also apparently killed him). "He's all I've got."

And that was it. That was the last I ever saw him alive.

I walked to Old Navy, intent on idly window-shopping until they were done with him.

While I was at Old Navy, less than 15 minutes after I dropped him off, I got a phone call from Pets Mart. They said that he was "panting heavily" and that "his tongue turned blue." Involuntarily I let out a horrified gasp. I asked if he was okay. They didn't answer, and only told me to come over there.

I sprinted back to the Pets Mart, where my life unraveled.

I ran to the groomers, my hands shaking. They told me to go to the vet people. The receptionist did not get off the phone or acknowledge my presence. I called Thom, my boyfriend. I was panicking.

As I told Thom what was going on, I noticed the groomers watching me through their window, pointing at me.

At one point I sank to the floor. Not once did anyone acknowledge me, ask if I was all right, or offer any updates. I started sobbing. I don't really remember how long that went on and at one point everything kind of grayed out. Finally I was told to go into a back room. As I entered, the dumb girl who checked me in came storming out.

That was it. It was over. All the manager said over and over was, "We're sorry." I could not process this as realty. I still can't, on many levels. I sat there uncomprehending. I asked to talk to the vet, who was one of the most condescending and sneering individuals I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with, and I am not just saying that because she killed my cat. She rolled her eyes and obviously could not hurry away fast enough. She tried to sell me an autopsy. Nice, huh?

For hours, I sat there. Nothing was done to preserve my privacy or dignity. As I sat sobbing and holding my dead cat, the receptionist's child or some customer's child kept peering into the window of where I was sitting. I didn't know what to do. I had just moved here. I barely knew anyone. All I had was my cat. And he was taken from me by some hourly-wage employees of a big box store. I had no idea what to do. I wanted to call the police, but I was waiting for someone, anyone, to advocate for me, to help me negotiate what had literally always been the product of my irrational worrying imagination.

At one point, the manager asked how old my cat was. "Nine," I said.

"That's a real long life for one of them flat-faced cats," he said. What compassion! What empathy! Also, what an incorrect statement! ("Typically, the life span of a Persian is 15 years and up.") My cat was not old. He was middle-aged and in good health, and his life was cut short due to this company's incompetence.

At another point, someone - I don't remember if it was the vet or the manager - said in an offhand way that "sometimes cats like that just get scared to death."

I would like to know what "scared [my cat] to death." It is my hypothesis that they gave him something to 'calm him down' for the grooming, and killed him either via overdose or because he wasn't supposed to have things like that. He had a recent (within 3-4 months) certificate of health from a vet, and as the person who took care of him, he had been his usual self even that morning. A lot of people sneer at me that they think it was just "something that happened" and that they didn't really kill him. But between his track record of good behavior / experiences at the groomer and recent bill of clean health, I truly believe that the grooming employees at the Bloomington, Indiana Pets Mart were directly responsible for my cat's sudden death, and I hope someday they are held accountable for it. I do not understand how they allowed an animal to go into that much distress, why they didn't call me immediately, and why they delayed speaking to me once I arrived at the store. Yes, there are always variables when working with animals, but

This was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. I had no idea what to do and nothing was offered - no solutions, alternatives, explanations. The implication, particularly from the vet, was that . I said I would like to have him cremated, which I guess is a mistake, but I was trapped in that little room. My only alternative seemed to be to drive with my cat's dead body in my car to somewhere where someone might help me, and I had no idea where that was. I could not think rationally or objectively. I feel that the way the staff treated me was intended to get me to feel powerless, so they could cover up their handling of my cat. Not only was the most important being in my life killed, I was made into a spectacle.

My knees almost buckled as I walked out with the empty carrier. I wanted to scream at the people going into the groomers, Don't do it! They will kill you precious pet!

It wasn't until 8 hours later that the picture of him in his carrier showed up on my journal. It was strange and terrifying. Like a ghost.

This, though disjointed, is how I understand the aftermath of this incident:

The holidays are ruined for me forever.

I cannot look at pictures of my beautiful cat. I cannot talk about him or share memories or remember him. Nine years of happy memories were erased by one horrendous afternoon in a hateful big box store, holding his dead, cold body while idiots bullied me into making the wrong choices.

I cannot drive by one of those stores or see any of their commercials or ads without feeling sick to my stomach and lightheaded.

In ways I do not wish to discuss in detail here, this incident has severely impacted my ability to make a living or continue my studies.

This incident has never ended and never will. Yes, as many people have pointed out, I have other cats now - because I have a strong commitment to animal rescue (saving lives - a strange concept to Pets Mart, I am sure) - and felt that if anything positive could come out of this, it would be saving the lives of other cats. They are good cats, but I wish that my having them had not come about in this way.

I have no power; I am a poor graduate student who will likely be destitute forever. I half-expect the corporation to come in and shut my blog down over this.

Yes, I realize that losing people is much more terrible and injustices worse happen all the time. That's part of why I haven't posted this. But all I know is that this is the worst thing that has happened to me and nothing in my life has really been okay since. Every single day, I cannot shake the searing, crushing, totalizing guilt that if I had just gone to the OTHER big-box groomer - or even a better, smaller one - everything would have been different.

I cannot shake my discomfort with the fact that those people are just going on with their lives, and will never be held accountable for what they did to my cat, and to me.

Finally, I cannot stop wondering about whether he hurt, or was scared, or was angry at me. If his life ended with confusion and terror, if he thought I had abandoned him.

What do I want from Pets Mart?

Since I am assuming that they can't raise the dead, not that much. As far as I know they cremated him for free, and they even gave me a bottle of water when I was hyperventilating, eventually. Class acts! Free water and cremation with every pet they kill!

I would, however, like:

1. A written acknowledgment that this was their fault: not just my cat's death but the condescending, degrading way in which I was treated.

2. An assurance that the groomers who killed my cat that day are no longer working with animals or, god forbid, children.

3. An assurance that they are enacting more store-wide policies to better prevent such incidents from occurring. An acknowledgment that due to their handling of my situation, this horrible event became infinitely more traumatic than it had to be.

4. Paying for the treatment necessary for my ability to function after this incident would be nice, too. I do not want to discuss this in detail in this format.

5. A demonstration of empathy and compassion. The entire time i was there, I was treated much like a shoplifter or a nuisance.

What do I want from you?

1. Boycott Pets Mart. Avoiding one big box store is not that hard. Write them a letter why if you feel like it: Tell them that due to the incident on December 17, 2008, at the Bloomington, Indiana location, in which the groomers killed a customer's purebred cat, you will not be patronizing their store any more. If you feel like it, tell them that you strongly condemn the way they handled that situation

There are many local alternatives in many communities. If you must go to a big box store, PetCo seems to have a better record. If you don't live near anything, try PetFoodDirect.com. If you live in Bloomington, T&T Feed and Seed is a wonderful pet supply store and I have heard great things about Delilah's.

2. Please share this story. The more the word is out, the bigger an impact this will have on their bottom line. Since they do not care about the reasons their customers come (i.e., the animals they love as family members), it is obviously important to hit them where it hurts, which is their profit line. This needs to be the public relations nightmare that it should be. Repost, link, retweet, tell your friends - please.

3. Just -- exercise and demonstrate compassion and kindness, to everyone, to all living things. So many people surprised me in terrible ways by saying insensitive, insulting, condescending, or even horrific things to me (up to and including the statement that they "hope[d] Einstein's death was slow and painful.")

If you are an attorney licensed to practice in Indiana, and would like to discuss this matter, please contact me. I would still like to believe there is justice and fairness in the world. I can be contacted at mirandom at gmail dot com and am willing to travel to discuss this matter.

IN CONCLUSION:

PETS MART UNAPOLOGETICALLY AND GLIBLY KILLS PETS. AVOID THEM AT ALL COSTS!

Petition is here.

Reliving this was incredibly painful and upsetting for me. I hope if you read this, it wasn't quite as bad for you.

Thank you so very much if you read this.

what more can you give or risk than a life?

2010-05-20T19:12:00.002-04:00

It's been a long time since I stayed up all night reading a book, but that is exactly what I did the other day with Every Man Dies Alone. (ACHTUNG, that's an AMAZON link) by Hans Fallada (Don't worry, FTC, that was Wikipedia!).

I guess I'm a little twisted, or maybe I have been watching too much Daria on the box set. Either way, my light summer reading can best be described as "a five hundred page novel about living and resisting to Nazi rule." But wait!

The novel follows Otto and Anna Quangel's campaign of resistance against Hitler. The campaign is ineffectual - immature, even. They write and drop tiny postcards, often in rhyme, deriding Hitler.

Every Man Dies Alone is an intricately plotted, suspenseful ensemble novel. It's a weird novel. For one thing, it's enormous. The sheer scale of characters, points of view, and relationships is reminiscent of Dickens or Hugo. Yet it is informed with a postmodern sensibility.

What I hate about World War II literature and film produced after the war is that it's all so heavily weighted with its own importance. It's filled with wink-wink, nudge-nudge, look, HISTORY and salient details meant to remind you that, oh my god, IT IS OCCURRING DURING HISTORY. Radio broadcasts are abnormally loud; hairstyles are exaggerations; certain bombings become plot devices. That doesn't mean it's bad, necessarily, I am just annoyed by the excesses of devices that scream HISTORY!

Every Man Dies Alone, however, is different. Written in a 24-day frenzy right after the war, Fallada never lived to see its publication. He had spent most of the war in a Nazi insane asylum.

While the translation is a bit stilted, particularly the dialogue, I think in a certain sense it works for the novel because it captures the forgotten, archaic, or awkward turns of phrase used mid-century, though they aren't in the original language of the novel.

I loved this book. I didn't expect to. I was used to stories of WWII resistance involving parachutes and hiding people, not tiny guerilla campaigns whose effects linger in the form of the written word.

From Geoff Wilkes' afterword to the book: "[Anna] protests that this initiative is 'a bit small,' but he points out hat 'if they get wind of this, it'll cost us our lives,' prompting her to reflect that 'no one could risk more than his life,,' and that 'the main thing was, you fought back' (132)" (522). It's about futile resistance, and the question of what it takes to be defeated, and what victory means. That's why Every Man Dies Alone is today's recommendation.

inner resistance

2010-05-12T11:26:00.003-04:00

So, I'm working on some longer Recommendations. Right now I am reading Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada.

ACHTUNG, that was an AMAZON LINK.

A longer recommendation will follow, but rest assured that it is Highly Recommended (TM). Publisher's Weekly says, "This disturbing novel, written in 24 days by a German writer who died in 1947, is inspired by the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, who scattered postcards advocating civil disobedience throughout war-time Nazi-controlled Berlin." The novel is a panorama of one Berlin building as a microcosm of a larger society swept up by fascism. Unlike most other accounts of World War II (or other historical events) this is not written with heavy, weighty historiography and a bunch of nods and winks at THE TIMES. It's authentic because it was written by someone who lived through it, without fully understanding, or even living to see, the long-term historical implications of His Times.

income and expenditures

2010-05-09T13:03:00.002-04:00

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." - David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens

(Achtung FTC! That was an Amazon Associate link!)

Greetings, gentle readers. I'm 2/2 now: TWO recommendations in TWO days!

Today's recommendation is the chilling Maxed Out: Hard Times in the Age of Easy Credit
by James D. Scurlock. (ACHTUNG! Amazon link! FTC must be appeased!)

It's got everything a good horror novel should have: evil villains, a powerful system, terrifying things that happen to good people, the potential for sequels.

Unfortunately, as Orson Welles would say, It's All True. It's not fiction. I saw Maxed Out (the documentary) a few years ago and found it relentless and kind of alarmist: to pile all this information into a 90 minute movie is, honestly, a bit too much, and something some people would dismiss as manipulated or agenda-driven. After all, documentaries that are, like, angry about stuff are totally always fake like that Michael Moore dude, right? Excuse me while I smash my head into the keyboard.

Anyway.

Maxed Out (the book), on the other hand, is a different matter. On the one hand, you can close it and take a few breaths before returning. You can't deny print, or at least, it's harder to. While Scurlock had never written a book before, he has a unique and honest authorial voice that accounts for his own privilege and still manages to objectively assess the people he describes: this isn't' as black and white as victims and perpetrators, and he knows it. I think the book is better suited to this because this medium allows him to account at length for his opinion.

Maxed Out is a blood-boiling indictment of the debt system in America, and how it is destroying lives. It doesn't resort to the self-deterministic rhetoric of other books about finance (the ones that insist that anyone who can't afford the basics is just a glutton). What the book accomplishes more successfully than the documentary is an examination of the larger system: the changing American economy (and not just in the past two years or so, when it got really trendy to use the atrocious grammatical construction "in this economy"), the culture, the rapacious capitalism that preys upon the underclasses, yet requires them in order to keep the wealthy rich.

Maxed Out (best purchased used or gotten from the library, though naturally if you can afford it I'd love you forever if you purchased from my Amazon link) will recenter this crisis in your thinking. It will make you angry and bitter and maybe even depressed, but hopefully it will arm you with knowledge so that you can extract yourself from this system, or at least participate with your eyes more open.

Here are some recent and interesting blog posts related to the subject of the long decline in American prosperity:

Academia and the decline of wealth in America
Academia isn't broken. We are.

Maxed Out on DVD (ACHTUNG! AN AMAZON LINK!)

New stories and Old Stories

2010-05-08T19:02:00.003-04:00

Hi, readers. Although the semester is ended, I am still swamped, but luckily now I have the time to Recommend some things to you. I know you need it. I know I do too.

Today's recommendation is Susan Campbell's provocative memoir Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl. (n.b.: that's an Amazon link; good thing the FTC is persecuting bloggers instead of those poor victimized bankers).

The book describes Campbell's childhood and "relationship" with Jesus (get the title?), set against her theological interpretations of the Bible and Christianity. I found the book while waiting around for something in the campus union (where there is conveniently located a corporate-owned store that sells books and every kind of cluttery crap imaginable that can be painted with the university logo). Anyway, so I was in there and picked this up, intrigued by the title. The first chapter - a confessional account of a childhood baptism - so entranced and charmed me that I bought the book (whereas usually I spend weeks waffling and finally decide on a cheap copy online, which inevitably ends up smelling funny).

I have complicated feelings about this book, especially considering that I was not raised in any specific religious tradition, am not religious, and have no real insider knowledge of American Fundamentalism. Because of that, I find the book fascinating: it's a totally foreign world to me. Especially when Campbell describes her childhood, this is a funny, provocative read. When Campbell is telling childhood stories, she's really at her best because the description of this sub/culture is unforced and told without condescension.

However, the latter half of the book is a bit dull unless you are seriously interested in theology, in which case it's merely polemical, and, I suspect, unlikely to change hearts or minds. This is not inherently a problem - I just wish she had stuck with the trope of the Jesus "relationship" as it pertained to her childhood within a very specific culture.

Despite this, Dating Jesus is a fascinating look into a world that most of us sinful heathen book-readers will never access, and it manages to present this world in a compassionate way (more than I can do, I guess). If you're into the theology even the last part will be useful and interesting.

Today's recommendation: Hang in there

2010-04-13T12:00:00.003-04:00

Not just those of you who, like me, are in the death-grip of fin du semester clusterfuck, but those of you who eagerly await my next post.

I know you exist, blog fans!

So I recommend you check back in a few weeks because I have tons and tons of exciting things to recommend to you: books, music, film, and more!

But I wanted to let My Many Blog Fans (R) know that I'll be back soon!

Media, Sexuality, Children

2010-03-06T10:50:00.002-05:00

Today's recommendation is The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It by M. Gigi Durham, PhD.

This book examines the recent media tendency to sexualize and objectify young (female) children. Outlining and analyzing magazines, toys, and TV shows, Durham presents a really depressing picture of what it is to be a female in America and the reaches that this media picture has into other cultures. She lays out in meticulous detail the schizophrenic picture presented by society, the expectations for how much time women and girls should spend on body maintenance, and presents the negative repercussions of these beliefs. She historicizes these phenomena, too, taking account of the relatively recent belief that childhood is a separate time. Durham lays out the recent phenomena as myths, which is engaging, if problematic (I wonder what scholars of myths would have to say).

It's a rather depressing read, but the reason I'm recommending it is because unlike a lot of authors, M. Gigi Durham has specific action steps that educators, parents, caretakers, and concerned citizens can engage in, in order to reduce the media's negative effects on girls and fight back. She explicitly lays out discussion starters and activities that may help to undo some of the damage that this media myth has provided.

The only real loser here is Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita is subject to the most superficial reading possible.* But that's a minor issue, I guess. I also would have liked more explicit footnotes - there's a lot of "anecdata" here and sometimes I think Durham makes cases of nothing, for instance, she devotes a lot of time to examining the impact of the use of the word "hot" without accounting for linguistic change, slang, and the slippery possibilities of language (What of the word "nice," which used to refer to a loose woman?).

As a pedant, I must inform you that the edition I read (clearance hardcover for the win!) was also riddled with typos, but I am linking you, beloved blog readers, to the paperback edition, which hopefully is better-edited.

Despite these imperfections - which I often thought may have been the result of "translating" academic work to a mainstream audience - this is an important book.
Teachers, parents, and others who care for young girls (that is, those who care for them in totally non-creepy ways) will need to read this. So that's today's recommendation. Aren't you glad this entry wasn't about cats?

*Like, I get that the book is about a creepy old guy and a girl. But (pulls out literature degree) is that really what it's ABOUT? It's so metaphorical. But I also get why "The Myth of Media Sexualization of Children" would probably sell fewer copies.

take me down to the action city where the carpet's green & the mice are pretty

2010-02-27T09:17:00.003-05:00

Today's recommendation is simple, but probably rather pricey. It is Drs. Foster & Smith Cat Furniture.

I suppose my purchase of this item makes me into an official, card-carrying cat lady: it's true, dear readers. The most expensive piece of furniture I now own is for my cats. It is called "action city" though in my cats' case, I think "inaction city" would be more likely. That is, they like to nap there.

In a futile effort to get some of my deposit back when I move out next year, and to get more work done (involving less shooing-away of cats), I invested in this pricey living room accent piece. After a less-harrowing than expected 45 minutes with a socket wrench - with a brief interlude during which I looked up "how to use a socket wrench" on the Internet (don't laugh!), we had...an action city. I half - expected them to be asleep in the box, but that was not the case. Both my fuzzy freeloaders were playing on it instantly. They are both having fun. I can't seem to link directly to my pictures, but here you will find a representative image of Boris enjoying a very expensive surface.

****
If the semester releases its vise grip from my throat, I will be back soon with more recommendations. Thanks for your patience, delightful blog readers!

a sick sad world

2010-02-18T08:19:00.004-05:00

I don't identify as a millennial for a lot of reasons: I was in college when 9/11 happened, I remember using analog libraries, and MTV still sometimes ran music videos when I was in high school.

At that time, MTV also ran one of the best series of all time: Daria.

Daria was an anomaly in the Viacom-verse. Filled with intelligent jokes, Daria was distributed by a major player within culture and commented on the horrific vapidity of that culture. Daria's strength was the unchanging, unaging characters (though not in later seasons): it reflected the unending and miserable quality of high school.

So Daria went off the air, I grew up and moved away and away and away. And every now and then I'd sign a lame internet petition - the kind Daria herself would probably deride - begging for gods of Viacom-MTV-etc to release the show on DVD.

And guess what? Someone's cost-benefit-analysis finally showed this was worth it. On May 11, we will be able to purchase a box set of Daria (with, of course, much of the original music gone, but whatever. Just play the CD's). You can pre order it now. I already did. I am very excited. It's the little things. The little things that you trade money for.

Maybe.

Back to the salt mines.

this film must be loud!

2010-02-06T19:29:00.004-05:00

Hi, gentle blog readers. Remember me? I'm not sure I remember me. This semester is a killer so far (unlike all those other semesters). But, rejoice; the most intense part will be over in just a few weeks and I will be back to telling you what cultural objects to consume on a more regular basis shortly.

Today's recommendation is the 1988 DEFA/ Dieter Schumann "rockreport" Whisper & SHOUT !

I may or may not be introducing this film at a public event tomorrow. Here is an adapted version of my hypothetical remarks:

Picture this: You open your eyes. You see a door. Unlike other doors you’ve seen recently, this one is covered with handwritten words and messages. You struggle to make out some of the words: Feeling B? Nicky? Landers? Die Geld? Suddenly, the door opens. A discordant sound is heard. A young man smiles, as though embarrassed, and looks to his left, then in front of him, as though at you. Then, someone you can’t see says, in German, “What are you doing? Do it again!” He re-enters the hallway and your gaze shifts to the stringed instrument hung in the doorway. He waves and says, “Hallo!” as the person you can’t see says, “That will do.” He dashes away again into his apartment. Suddenly you realize: This entrance isn’t authentic; it’s part of an artifice: the man exiting the door is planning to do it, and he’s planning to do it in order to demonstrate the guitar-as-door-chime set up. And someone you can’t see is in control of it all.

This disorienting strategy is the sequence with which Dieter Schumann opens whisper and SHOUT, his first feature-length film. The bold visual statement draws the viewers’ attention to the tension between artificiality and naturalism that exists in documentary film; in the first thirty seconds of the film, Schumann gets the viewer to question the authenticity of what he or she is seeing as well as bear witness to the process of creating the shot.
By leaving in his own voice, Schumann exposes the staged nature of the shot and his control over the set-up, yet he also retains the authenticity revealed by the man’s entrance not going as planned and his question to the person behind the camera. In just one shot, Schumann invites the viewer not just in through a door leading to the inner worlds of East German youth in the 1980s, or music of that time, but through the labyrinth of tensions and problems that exist for documentary filmmakers. Schumann uses a mixture of staged interviews and verité-style filming – that is, uninterfering and unstaged -- which many associate with D.A. Pennebaker’s music films such as Don’t Look Back (1967) and Monterey Pop (1968, with his partner, Chris Hegedus).
This combination of apparently authentic performance footage and sit-down interviews immerses the viewer in the East German music scene of the late 1980s – into a time, place, and scene that no longer exist. The combination of planned and “authentic” footage straddles the line between performance and reality, all within a film heavily concerned with performance itself. Without using commentary or providing framing informative intertitles (other than a few brief, non-invasive notations as to which band is performing), Schumann utilizes a sink-or-swim approach to throw the audience completely into this world, letting his subjects speak for themselves and make this world real for us. Bill Nichols wrote in his 1991 book Representing Reality that non-fiction, or documentary, films seek to show an audience the world, rather than a world. Certainly Schumann’s non-invasive style seeks to present to us the world of late 1980s GDR musicians and their fans, as authentically as he saw it (though, of course, his view, like any other, is subjective). Unlike Heavy Metal Parking Lot, a similar American film that sought to document 1980s-era subculture music audiences, Schumann seems respectful and even affectionate towards his subjects, laughing along with them and eliciting revealing and intimate insights.
At the time of Whisper and Shout’s first release in 1988, reviewers focused on the varying styles of the bands portrayed in the film, particularly on their attitudes towards success and fame. They also noted the perceived contrast between Silly, the most popular and successful group, and Feeling B, Chicorée and Sandow, who were less established. Noting that it was ostensibly the first feature-length DEFA film to concern itself with GDR rock, the reviews were at best tolerant of the rock-scene and at worst, somewhat contemptuous or condescending, both of the musicians and the fans. One may well ask, why watch this movie, other than for the amusing retro-spectacle of hair, synthesizers, and clothes? Is this anything more than an artifact of 1980s excess and long-dead youth culture?
More than twenty years on, the film’s concern with and documentation of styles and aesthetics that are now considered woefully obsolescent draws our attention to the fleetingness of so many aspects of our own lives: the concert or film screening that will end, spilling its audience back out into the street as mere individuals; the animal-print pants donated to charity in the dead of night; the hairstyle that quickly dates itself; the gadget sold at a yard sale; the records (or CD’s, or 8-tracks, or backed-up files) collecting dust. To a larger extent, knowing that this film was made in the last years of East Germany, it reminds us of the instability of our own culture.
Yet the film also captures some things that are unchanging and simply human: the eternal constant of enjoying something real, something live, as part of a group that then disperses, never to gather in the same manner again. The film demonstrates the simple joys of shared singing and dancing and stomping and clapping. whisper and SHOUT captures not just the unity and fractures among the youth in late 1980s East Germany, the last years before the Wall fell, but the exuberance and joy of youth, the exhilaration of a shared generational heritage, the naïve and hopeful dreams shared for the future. The optimism of the youths interviewed can seem almost heartbreaking when set in the context of world history, or perhaps even remind us the hopes and dreams of our own youths. At its core, this is a film about being young and about being part of something.

***
So for those reasons, today's recommendation is whisper and SHOUT. You can find out more about the film (as well as order a slightly-more-expensive DVD copy) at the UMASS DEFA site and their online store.

vanity, folly

2010-01-20T12:44:00.004-05:00

Today's recommendation is simple.

Today's recommendation is not tattooing your cat.

I realize I'm about a week behind the curve on this, but that's just how I roll.

You may look at your beloved feline friend and think, "You're purr-fect, but you know what you need? A giant picture of King Tut on your chest." But you know what? If you think that way, keep it to yourself. Or get a giant tattoo on your own chest. Regardless, the proper way to deal with such feelings is not tattooing your cat.

Thus, not tattooing your cat is today's recommendation.

Thank you and good night.

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Magical Mystery Loaves

2010-01-09T22:35:00.004-05:00

Today's recommendation is the amazing little web site The Magical Loaf Studio, created by Jennifer McCann for the Vegan Lunch Box Blog. What this does is allow you to input a bunch of options based on what you have or like and it will generate a custom, delicious vegan recipe just for you! I tried it for the first time today and was pleased with the results, though I think if I hadn't had a small feline "helper" and an inability to wait a whole hour for food to cook, the recipe would have turned out a bit better. I am excited to try a whole bunch of different combinations. Aren't you?

The creator of the Loaf Generator, Jennifer McCann, also has a delightful blog and a cookbook I am excited to read sometime soon.

"healthy boundaries"

2010-01-07T21:44:00.003-05:00

Today's recommendation is the divisive A&E television series Intervention.

Yeah, you read it right. Intervention!

I, personally, watch this show to get some perspective. By that, I mean Schadenfreude. I may be filled with self-doubt and have very few job prospects. Then I watch Intervention and think, Hey! At least that's not me! I'm not (insert newest "rock bottom" from Intervention). I may not be changing the world, but at least I'm not, say, sucking on an ill-gotten Fentanyl lollipop, passing out on the lawn in the afternoon, drinking mouthwash or taking my child to buy heroin.*

I realize this makes me a horrible person.

But what about Intervention is so compelling? It could be the subliminal messages.** It could be the aforementioned feeling of schadenfreude. For me, I also take some strange comfort in Intervention's structure. For such a dramatic show, there are basically only two endings (SPOILER ALERT): Sobriety or status quo. Intervention is structured in a very banal and uninteresting way: Exposition and description of the addict's current daily life, their background (complete with weeping family members, adorable childhood photos, and usually horrifying stories of abuse or neglect), the family sitting down prior to the Intervention Event to come up with a plan of how they will cut the person out, and The Intervention Itself.

In a lot of ways, the show is about taking the filmed evidence of someone's life, and cutting it up to fit in a few boxes. What fascinates me the most is the intertitles (the forums on Television without Pity [shouldn't it be fora? ...eh] refer to them as BSOJ, Black Screen[s] of Justice). There is so much that needs to be filled in, and there is simultaneously so much and so little said (c.f. : " so-and-so has stolen from his mother"). In a way, the intertitles themselves convey the limitations of the observational documentary.*** The sad little titles convey backstory and uncaptured events deemed relevant to the narrative. The viewer's imagination can go wild and sordid.

Like I said before, the only real questions in the show are will the person go to treatment? and Will they stay sober? The entire show is built around a farce: participants are approached and told the project is a "documentary about addiction." The majority of the show is buildup to the moment when the subject walks into an anonymous business-class hotel room and is confronted by their friends, family, and one of the show's Interventionists. It's like a really depressing surprise party.

Inside the windowless conference rooms and suites of the anonymous and depressing Holiday Inns (Holidays Inn?) in this country, groups of friends and families are armed with binders and spiral notebooks, getting ready to confront the person they feel they need to cut out of their life unless they agree, in front of a production crew, to go to rehab. Maybe it's not quite like that, but it's how it seems to me. And I watch this show A LOT. In its tone it's slightly like a crime or mafia show; it conveys the sense that anywhere, at any time, if you're "a user" people could be plotting against YOU. Interventionists? They're out there.

Note: I'm not diminishing the problems any of the profiled people have. Many have criticized Intervention for what they think is taking advantage of desperate people. This is probably true, but more people credit it with saving lives and restoring sobriety, etc. Personally, I think anyone who is willing at any point to "be in a documentary about addiction" is already part of the way towards getting help, but thankfully this is a problem I don't have in my life. Overall, I don't think this show is taking advantage of anyone. Except maybe losers like me who watch it to feel slightly better about themselves.

That's why today's recommendation is Intervention.

*especially because I don't have any children.

**I am making this up.

***Of course, using Nichols' classification, Intervention may not strictly be observational but I digress.

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"vanishing cave"

2010-01-05T12:45:00.003-05:00

Today's recommendation is Craig Thompson's graphic memoir Blankets. I personally think it is one of the best books of the last decade.

I am relatively certain I cannot do it justice on my blog, but I will try. It's frustrating, because I want to write something that will convince you that this is absolutely essential reading, that this is the kind of book that makes you want to get up and hug random people and dance around, that this will be the kind of book for you that it was for me: one you'll stay up all night reading, well past the point (ca. page 300 or so) when your wrists go numb. That you'll watch the sun rise and the people go by with a new appreciation and awe afterward. But I'm not sure my stilted academic writing is still capable of expressing such joy.

So I will just tell you:

Blankets details Craig Thompson's early childhood, adolescence, and struggles with religion. Establishing the motif described by the title, it links disparate experiences, textures, and images to create an intricate and beautiful Gestalt that unifies pain, love, beauty, art, and despair.

Blankets does an excellent and subtle job of situating itself in a very specific time (look at the details: the posters on the walls, the hairstyles) and making a place I've never been come alive. It takes religious fundamentalism away from the caricature many of us associate with it, and presents a critical insider view. The world it describes merely is; it doesn't need to pound you over the head with reminders of PAST or MIDWEST.

Blankets is more than a graphic memoir. It's a cinematically structured journey through a specific time (ca. 1993-1994), a specific place (Michigan), and a specific individual's experience. But more than that, it uses such common motifs and such universal expression to make this coming-of-age story relatable. It's more than a story about rejecting the ideology of one's childhood and family; it's more than a story about first love; it's more than a story about childhood trauma.

Blankets is a story about how disparate elements of an individual's past make them who they are, and allow them to do what they do. A story about how you can let go of beginnings or foundations or negative events, but they still influence you, and sometimes you can achieve the distance necessary to appreciate what they add to your life.

Blankets, I feel, will only add to your life. So that is why it is today's recommendation.

the languages of silence & pictures

2010-01-01T14:10:00.003-05:00

Happy New Year, gentle blog readers!

Today's recommendation is the 2009 graphic novel Stitches: A Memoir by David Small.

Although I have no excuse for engaging in such shoddy linguistic practices, and offer this with the caveat that I'm not a linguist, I find it fascinating that Bildungsroman begins with Bild (meaning picture); that Bild is, in a sense, the beginning of Bildung (accumulation, creation, cultivation). Pictures accumulate to tell the story of someone's coming of age. Thus it seems apropos that so many recent memoirs have taken the form of graphic novels. That the graphic memoir is itself a renowned genre certainly says something positive about the increased critical attention given to visual media in recent years; I like to think this also bears out my explication of Bildungsroman.

I have to admit, my pure and unadulterated love for Blankets
, another graphic memoir - perhaps one of the best books of that decade that supposedly ended last night - was what drove me to Stitches and I think I ended up unfairly comparing the two. I could not read Stitches without assessing it in the shadow of Blankets.

The similarities between Stitches and Blankets are at once unsettling and fascinating; I can't tell if this is an imitator or the similarities are characteristics of troubled young men who turn to art as a form of expression. Both books depict the authors as children, escaping from upsetting home life situations by creating; both engage to some degree in a pastiche of the cultural images that surrounded the authors at early ages, demonstrating the dream-like, highly visual existence and imagination of young children.

Stitches recounts Small's early childhood and adolescence in what is revealed as a severely dysfunctional family. You think your family was bad? Small's family can top yours. I think the book jacket itself unfairly reveals too much of the story, and that it would have more impact if the jacket writers themselves left more to the imagination, so I won't say much about that, but the drawings and story together recreate a sense both of the mid-20th century and the utter fractiousness and confusion of Small's early existence. Where Blankets is beautifully structured and develops on several themes, Stitches is in places sort of an anarchy. The story itself is imbued with temporal distance, and the omniscience of the narrator alienates the bizarre occurrences in the story even more. That the structure is not so carefully plotted becomes a credit to Stitches' mimetic power. Blankets is a simple love story, pure cinema on paper; Stitches is a recreation of the senseless pain and confusion most of us get. Stitches reads like a science fiction or horror story. What I loved about Blankets was how real and full the story felt (at almost 600 pages, it better feel full); what fascinated me about Stitches was how much was left unsaid, how much of the story remained caught in gaps or written between lines. In a sense, the narrative itself is stitched together; events connected only by their mediation.

I think I've already recommended Blankets. If not, I'll recommend it again. Now and maybe later too! But today's recommendation is the more problematic and troublingly haunted Stitches.

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Do as I Read, Not as I Do

2009-12-29T11:50:00.004-05:00

Many of my friends have just finished applications to grad school and more are planning to apply in the future. Therefore, today's special bonus recommendation is a whole slew (where slew = 4; I believe it's a metric unit) of books that I've found useful as a neophyte teacher/researcher and as a long-time student. Perhaps, because I have only completed a master's and a few semesters of my PhD, these recommendations are not that weighty, but they helped me, and that's where I am, so maybe they will help you. I make no promises, only recommendations.

Note that for the purposes of this blog post, I define grad school as the process of studying for advanced degrees that prepare one for an academic career, not degrees such as law or medicine; I simply know very little about those degrees and I believe that the professional expectations surrounding those fields are very differently inculcated in students. This belief is based only on my exhaustive questioning of law student friends and my exhaustive review of Grey's Anatomy reruns.

So! On with today's recommendations!

1. Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities by Gregory Colón Semenza. If you want to go to grad school in the humanities, you need to read this book. Period. There is simply no excuse not to. Too many grad school "advice" books rely on vagaries and statements about Really Wanting Something; they paint the experience as some kind of self-discovery where moxie and pluck alone can lead to success.

Semenza will give you an even-handed assessment of what you need to do to survive. Too many books critical of the academe engage in hand-wringing and scare tactics. Again, Semenza's book is even-handed and lacks the shrill, easily dismissible tone of those other books that simply shriek at the reader about how doooooomed the academe is. He lays out, from application to job search, what can be expected and provides an explication of the professional expectations put upon grad students. When you're studying for an advanced degree in the humanities, you leave all clear-cut answers behind. The nice thing about this book is that it is almost infuriatingly prescriptive, and while you will likely not want to hear much of the advice he dispenses, one gets a strong sense that success will follow if you listen to his advice. If you read no other book about grad school, make it this one. This is the book I recommend to acquaintances interested in applying. I tell them this over and over and over and over (my recommendations seem to fall on deaf ears).

2. Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener. Unfortunately this book is out of print, but used copies are fairly reasonable and it seems a new edition (ca. 2005, import) is available. It can also be borrowed from libraries. It is aimed at the person teaching English to adult speakers of other languages, but the basic teaching advice - from determining what "kind" of teacher one is, to diagrams showing how classroom dynamic is affected by desk arrangement, to suggestions for how to call on students with hand gestures other than pointing - is applicable to the young teaching assistant. For those who have never taught, this is an incredibly useful guide. It is straightforward, jargon-free, and accessible.

3. Ms. Mentor's New and Ever More Impeccable Advice for Women and Men in Academia Caveat: I have only read the earlier edition of this book, and I recommend it with liberal sprinklings of salt. I hate to say it, because I truly respect Ms. Mentor (a sob sister character invented by Emily Toth, whose column appears in The Chronicle of Higher Education) but the earlier edition of the book was grievously old-fashioned. Particularly infuriating was her recommendation that female academics (in 1997) refrain from riding bicycles. Really. However, Ms. Mentor is truly to be commended for building an academic career at a time when it was significantly more difficult for women to do so, and the book should be taken on its own terms; readers should understand that her struggles have necessarily informed her advice. And some of the tips are very valuable. She's at her best (at least in the older edition) when she's giving very specific tips such as on how to build a case for tenure and keep records. Certainly, at the very least this book gives remarkable and valuable insight into the experiences of the generation of academics likely to be teaching and advising incoming students, and that context alone is worth the price of admission (currently $11.54 for used copies on Amazon). Since the updated version deigns to include gentlemen as well, it may be even better; in fact, I bet it probably is. eta Ms. Mentor's channeler has informed me that the 2009 book is actually a completely new book, rather than a revision! I apologize to Ms. Mentor for this embarrassing mistake and implore readers to investigate this new offering.

4. What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and "Bias" by Michael Bérubé. This book is more of a meditation on teaching than a discussion of "classroom bias" (an issue I find so patently ridiculous I can't not put it in quotes; if you want to know why, read the book). Bérubé does an excellent job of dismantling and discrediting the more well-known cases of "bias" while still describing, with compassion, his teaching experiences that have involved contentious political issues. He describes the day to day lifestyle of teaching and, more valuably, provides narratives of his experiences teaching. At times his rhetoric is incendiary and possibly alienating to those who truly believe that higher education in the United States is inherently "biased" but I doubt those people would read this. If they do, power to them.

The book lays out a significant number of classroom situations and how Bérubé dealt with them. At times, the examples come across as slightly self-congratulatory, but I appreciated them nonetheless. In today's world, where students seldom accept or respect the credentials of college instructors, it's important to respond to thornier classroom issues meaningfully and authoritatively. The book, as the cover states, defends the value of the liberal arts for all thinking humans- something that can never be done enough in our brain-dead, earnings-obsessed, dying culture. This book is useful for gauging the current atmosphere of the university for professors. It's not as needlessly negative and hopeless as other books I have read. Rather than screeching about the inevitable demise of the academe, Bérubé offers actual models for strategies to negotiate the times. And isn't that what the liberal arts are supposed to be about anyway?

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***
on a side note, thanks so much to all of you who've been reading since we launched this blog! I am excited for 2010 and am hoping to make this blog even bigger then. You know, like, bigger as in more than ten readers. But the point is, I love the ten readers we have. And if you love our blog, please tell some friends! My New Year's resolution is to update more! Maybe Thom's is to update at all! Happy New Year! And finally, if you have something you think I should recommend, send it my way! Maybe we can also work out guest posts!

suturing the gap

2009-12-23T11:24:00.004-05:00

Today's recommendation is Tom Ford's first film A Single Man. I normally hate period pieces. I hate them because they are always about the time in which they were made (cf. Philip Rosen) and the details that are attenuated, or the characters, always scream LOOK! HERE WE ARE! JUST IN THE PAST! STANDING AROUND AND TALKING ABOUT MAJOR HISTORICAL EVENTS! LIKE WE DID! IN THE PAST! WHICH IS WHERE WE ARE BY THE WAY. BUT WITH PRESENT-DAY HAIRCUTS, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

(Apologies to Philip Rosen, whose book Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory explains this far better than I ever could.

***
A major theme of A Single Man, as articulated by the characters, is letting go of the past, which works on a macro level because the film itself is an act of clinging to the past in its obsessive, beautiful rendering of a moment past. The shifting of the color palettes in the film, while unsubtle, drive home the point that at some moments the present becomes, well, presence (Cf. Lefebvre), and kept time and understood time align. The film follows a middle-aged English professor on the day he has decided to commit suicide, following the death of his lover some months prior.

Yet, as other reviewers have pointed out, this film is among the most thorough cinematic recreations of a time past. Does nostalgia color my perception here? Yes. I was not alive to see 1962, but I feel this has to be a more live and real depiction of life as it was lived than the glossy Mad Men, which constantly roots itself in its time by having the characters experience historical events and talk about them (caveat: I've only seen one episode; I didn't like it). Day to day life is often ignored in media depictions of the past. Everything is then-new and all characters in historic or period fiction seem to have a prescient understanding of what events define their era. One of the strengths of A Single Man is the ways in which the specificity of the time period is secondary; important world events are mere media background noise. The focus is on the person, in that moment, that just happened to be THAT moment, and the web of interactions he navigates on that day.

But other than theoretical blathering about this film, I'm recommending it for a slew of reasons. I haven't seen many films in the theater this year, but this is by far the best that I've seen.

* Everyone has already talked about Colin Firth's performance, so I'll put this on the list. All the performances in this film are superb.

* I personally found the depiction of 1960s academia engaging and hilarious. The office, the classroom, the students - it brought to life the halcyon days of Real Academic Freedom written about so often.

* Besides the incredible attention to detail, the film is beautiful - visually striking without the marketed, overbearing, slick appearance of mainstream Hollywood fare.

*As my friend Brandon Fibbs has pointed out, the score is beautiful.

* The story, obviously, is engaging on many levels. It's human and simple. It's really just about love and loss. But it also depicts the struggles of the GLBT minority in the 1960s in a way that relates to the ongoing fight for GLBT rights.

* The narrative structure - filled with analepses - fleshes out and makes complicated and humane the characters' struggle; in another format, George could have become fairly unlikable. That the narrative itself doesn't remained moored in the diegetic present further reinforces the message that we experience time fluidly. What to make of that message? Do we or do we not live in the past? Does mediating any feeling or idea effectively freeze it in a moment and create some kind of temporal disjunct between the Now and the Then?

Obviously, I have been writing way too many stuffy final papers lately. So I'll just say that you should go out and see this movie RIGHT NOW.

In today's awful, hyper-kinetic, dreadful world, the act of watching cinema itself seems an act of the past; cinema is so firmly and popularly rooted in the ~20th century and often I think the present (or presence) has eclipsed it. Therefore, I recommend that you defy this downward/forward progression and see A Single Man.

To find out if this film is playing near you, click here!

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Rebuilding fragmentary histories

2009-12-04T09:49:00.005-05:00

Today's recommendation is Ken Smith's book Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970.
I discovered Archive.org in late 2001, when I first started college. Looking at Prelinger's online archive, I felt I had discovered something nobody else had ever, ever heard of. I was wrong about that, but the un-selfconsciously obsolescent world of early Cold War "mental hygiene" films was fascinating to me. The damaged films, the cracked audio, the forgotten and insignificant images, the ideology of conformity. The lost and skipped frames.

A few months later, from Googling around, I realized there was a BOOK about these films. That book is Ken Smith's Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970.

Now, flash-forward the better part of a decade. I'm working on a PhD and my dissertation subject will likely be those films. Even now, I cite Ken Smith on most of the work I do. Why?

First, this is virtually the only book written about so-called mental hygiene films. Many other works tangentially mention this subgenre or type of film, which constituted tens of thousands of works. But this is the only one that focuses on it in depth. Second, for a non-academic, Smith has done some absolutely exhaustive, breathtaking research. The book contains capsule summaries of several hundred of the most popular mental hygiene films as well as contemporaneous quotes from sources like Educational Screen and producers of these films. Third, Smith situates the summaries in an excellent historical overview. Fourth, he's just a good writer. I prefer this book to any number of dry academic texts. Smith conveys information in an accessible, entertaining way.

Also, there are pictures.

Like it or not, an entire generation of American students was forced to watch these films. They are a significant part of our culture and history - which is why I study them. As much as I love pretentious art films, they have little connection to the lives of The People (Whatever that is).

This book is great for people who are interested in 20th century American history, ephemera, educational history and history of educational media, new media discousres, and film history or aesthetics. I'd also recommend this book for anyone trying to research independently (which I guess would be most adjunct faculty), because it's a great example of significant research that came into being without, necessarily, institutional validation.

Although this book is not exhaustive and there's still lots to be researched (Mr. Smith: Thanks. That means I can continue with whatever it is I do), it's a wonderful place to start if you are interested in any of the above topics, which is why it's today's recommendation. Ken Smith has also written Junk English , Raw Deal: Horrible and Ironic Stories of Forgotten Americans, Junk English 2 and Ken's Guide to the Bible

all likely to be future Recommendations.

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Birth Stories, Social Histories, and Master Narratives

2009-12-03T09:20:00.003-05:00

Today's recommendation is The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler.

I read this book for the first time a few years ago. I picked it up on impulse in the bookstore and sat and read half of it. I was never particularly interested in adoption but the arrangement of personal narratives and preservation of voice within the book is so compelling that I couldn't resist. Originally based on a video installation piece, Fessler's work weaves together individual narratives to paint something akin to a cultural study. Rather than providing dry historical or social explanations for the vast difference readers will feel while reading her work, Fessler lets the multiplicity of the individuals paint the historic and social picture with very little framing - a masterful feat.

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade is structured like a collection of birth stories. Everyone likes birth stories (Right? Maybe?) or at least understands them because they follow a roughly familiar plot that often ends happily ever after. But the stories in The Girls Who Went Away turn this "master narrative" on its head with wrenching and small differences. You could watch approximately the same story on TLC (dumbed significantly down, of course), but in this book the trajectories are different. I'm no expert - I don't have children and probably never will - but the compelling feature of birth stories, for me, is the inherently forward-looking impulse they have. Biologically, there are few features. The stories end joyfully in the same place. But the "birth stories" in this book begin from different places - disappointed or repressive parents, abusive high school boyfriends - a power differential. By and large, they continue in seclusion and end in grief and tragedy and longing. They are not forward looking; their narrative thrust ends in a vast unknown quantity of near infinitude. The only known quotient is the past. I guess it's this subversion of predicted narratives that interests me.

Even if it doesn't, The Girls Who Went Away is a sensitively and beautifully felt portrayal of a society that essentially no longer exists: A society in which it was acceptable and even preferred to send young girls away to give birth in seclusion rather than face single motherhood or let others know they were pregnant. We can't ignore that this society existed. Therefore, The Girls Who Went Away is an important book. And that is why it is today's recommendation.

ThanksKilling (2009)

2009-11-27T11:08:00.001-05:00

Today's recommendation is the fabulous and hilarious 2009 horror movie parody ThanksKilling.

I was alerted to this piece of Cinematic Art by my friend Andrew, to whom I will forever be grateful. I don't even know how to describe ThanksKilling. It's about a group of caricatures of college students on their way home for Thanksgiving, a silly legend, and a foul-mouthed turkey puppet that kills people including, coincidentally, aforementioned college caricatures.

THANKSKILLING reminds me of early Bergman.

It's the best movie ever filmed in Heath, Ohio.
It's the best movie I've ever seen that featured terrible Jon Benet Ramsey jokes.
It's the best movie with a turkey-rape scene that I have watched recently.
Its metacommentary rivals that of some of the most theoretical stuff I have read recently.
It's the best horror movie with John Waters references that I've seen recently.

it is 66 minutes of pure hilarity, of yelling WTF at your TV (or computer or iPhone), of topless Pilgrims,

And that is why today's recommendation is Thankskilling. It is available on Amazon and you can also watch it streaming online through Netflix if you have Netflix.

Start a new Thanksgiving tradition! By that I don't mean turn into undead turkeys and kill people, but watch this movie every year.

if life seems jolly rotten, there's something you've forgotten!

2009-11-20T13:56:00.003-05:00

Today's recommendation is Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
. I believe this is the thinking person's book of the year.

My whole life, people have derided me for being "negative" and "pessimistic." Things that happened were dismissed as products of my "negative attitude." This ipso facto logic didn't run my life, but other people's explanation of it dominated it in a fairly upsetting way. Setbacks and tragedies were dismissed by others as mere results of my "negativity." Therefore, I was really interested in Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Bright Sided.

Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America is a brilliant exploration of this new Calvinism, the entrenched and uniquely American ideology that explains bad things - like, say, cancer and job loss- away as the results of negative thinking. Ehrenreich, who holds a doctorate in cell biology, turned away from science to work in a career that helps the public; her work, in my opinion, serves this purpose.

I think this is one of the most important books you can read this year, to be honest. I'm not saying this because I'm a pessimist, I'm saying this because this is a well-researched, well-written, intelligent book that explores a unique cultural phenomenon and rationally argues about why it's so dangerous.

Ehrenreich examines several instances wherein the positive thinking fascism has caused dangerous, magical thinking. These examples range from the ridiculous and fairly tangential, like life coaches, to disturbing and upsetting, like the cancer patient online communities that ostracized Ehrenreich for her statement that she felt angry and helpless. While some of the examples seem cherry-picked and I wish she had gone into more detail with some of her more salient observations - such as the infantilizing of breast cancer patients - this book is one of the most important you can read. It expands what has become a useless dichotomy (positive vs. negative thinking) into a disturbing gradient of grays and asks not for despair, but for rational evaluation, and makes the compelling case that the culture of positive thinking has, ironically, extremely negative repercussions that affect all of us.

Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book. Obviously, this blog is becoming very popular. Also! If you want me to review and possibly recommend other things, why, I would be delighted! Email me!

unnatural causes

2009-10-13T20:03:00.003-04:00

Today's recommendation is the California Newsreel documentary Unnatural Causes, an important documentary that examines how social and economic inequality contributes to the declining life expectancy in the United States, to the decaying social fabric of our society, and many other things. It examines the interrelation of many factors: stress, biology, income, and rather than screeching banshees pointing fingers, the DVD takes a rationalist, biological point of view.

It is a disturbing, upsetting documentary, full of truths you probably don't want to face (or have wanted to avoid thinking about). However, it's one you need to see. It's one you are morally obligated to watch. It's one that examines the few choices we still have, although it may be too late.

The sad truth is, inequality IS making us sick. America is not tenable in its current, apocalyptic, amoral cancerous state of capitalism at all costs. If you don't believe me, watch this masterful 4 hour documentary, and then we'll talk.

The DVD is available only from their site, but here are some
unnatural causes products on amazon

YO HERTA MÜLLER I'MA LET YOU FINISH BUT FIRST LET ME SAY ATWOOD HAD THE GREATEST NOVELS OF ALL TIME

2009-10-11T11:16:00.005-04:00

I am very happy that a woman (Herta Müller) won the Nobel Prize for Literature; however, I must admit that my favorite for some years has been Margaret Atwood. I would really like to see her win this award in her lifetime. Far too many people dismiss her books as soft-sci-fi or dark "chick lit." Those people have obviously never read her work.

When I was fourteen, I read The Handmaid's Tale and I spent almost a decade avoiding her books because I imagined they would not, could not possibly live up and I did not want to deal with that disappointment. When I was in Germany, I wanted to surround myself in English in my free time. To bathe in it. I tried to read German books but I longed for English. Is that weird? So I overcame my reluctance and read almost everything Atwood ever wrote. I hate overwrought food / eating consumption metaphors, but I really did "devour" them. Oryx and Crake, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Cat's Eye... I mean, I read them as fast as Deutsche Post could get them to me. I eventually had to sell them all back at the English bookshop in Berlin to keep my belongings light enough for the airline. The rounded characters, vaguely magical situations and deft, yet unpretentious language really struck a chord with me.

I hadn't been thinking about Atwood much lately, because all of my brain is supposed to be devoted to GRAD SCHOOL. But I was really pulling for her to win a Nobel and recently, I found myself in Borders. Being desperately poor and constantly swamped with stuff to get done, I rarely go into stores - they just make me feel bad - but I saw that she had written a new novel. One about a society in which evil corporations dominate society and own the government, poison citizens, and engineer violence.

No, wait! Actually it's fiction! A novel! About the not-too-distant future!

Although it's probably academic and professional suicide, I bought it and have been reading it. Shh. Don't tell.

Atwood's new book, The Year of the Flood is what I am recommending to you today. Speculative fiction is nearly always about the present, and while there's potential for The Year of the Flood to be heavy-handed and didactic, it's neither of those things. It's about a group of religious vegans (!) who anticipate a corporate-engineered plague.

It reads as engrossingly as any other engaging book about an unsettlingly similar setting, but what's drawing me in (I'm about halfway through) is its detailed ritual and the perfectly-imagined, yet flawed religion created in the Gardeners (who first appeared in Oryx & Crake). I am fascinated by religious culture (not so much by religion itself) and the heteroglossic narration adds dimension, criticism, and comfort to the Gardeners as the backstories are constructed: backstories upon backstories, nuanced and detailed, until the looming apocalypse seems like an after thought.

Like I said. I haven't finished reading it yet, but I recommend The Year of the Flood to you whole heartedly.

magical thinking

2009-10-03T11:33:00.005-04:00

Today's recommendation is not alienating your copyeditor enough such that they ruin your product launch, assuming you have one (a copyeditor) to begin with.

This week, the Red Cross is holding a book/media sale in my town. Because i have SO MUCH time to read things that are not assigned, I made a point to go out there. Support the Red Cross, right? I was mostly looking for ephemeral media.

I was not disappointed. While Thom was seriously looking at serious books, I frolicked over to the PLEASE TAKE THESE DVDs OFF OUR HANDS THEY ARE AN EMBARRASSMENT section and found myself face to face with this.

Look very carefully, dear readers. It says what you think it says.

Yep. that's right! "Kid's Walk" is egregious enough, but that tag line up there? With that charming, homemade attempt at copy editing? Someone actually thought this was a good idea. It is, in and of itself. Teach kids (or: "kid's")...how to walk! And inspire them! With a message telling them...

naturally, I had to purchase it. I have barely been able to keep my hands off it. I can't wait to watch it today and see what it tells me. CAN I DO IT?

Update soon!

Other home fitness products by this woman. Everyone has to make a living. especially me!

1946-1992

2009-09-18T19:15:00.001-04:00

As we live out our daily lives in what may be the last gasps of the American empire, I am increasingly interested in East Germany, not just because I used to live there (briefly). This semester I am doing an independent study on East German documentaries: What does it mean to make a film about truth in a state where the state regulates truth (and how does that compare to our lives, where capitalism and the market regulate truth?) ? What does it mean to film and have a national film and television identity and suddenly have your identity canceled out by a few swift marks of the pen and a televised tearing down of a wall? I am peripherally familiar with the cultural and linguistic peculiarities of East Germany and Ostalgie and a country that no longer exists, but what of its visual rhetoric?

You may not realize it or even care but East Germany is so marginalized, both within Germany itself and within history. The way Americans understand it is the wall came down, happily ever after. The way most Germans understood it when I was there depended on what side of the scar of the wall you were on.

German film is marginalized to begin with. Even within Germany few people (that I met, anyway) had heard of Herzog, Fassbinder, etc. DEFA - that's East German state studio - film is even more marginalized. Stautde, Wolf, Carow, the names only serious Germanists or Eurocentric film scholars know.

So I was delighted that this book, edited by Sean Allen (whose name has an accent I'm too lazy to reproduced, apologies!) and John Sandford, like, totally exists. I got it because my friend's neighbor in Brooklyn threw it out. Seriously.

Defa: East German Cinema, 1946-1992

The book is not without flaws, but if you want to act like you know anything about DEFA film at cocktail parties, it is definitely Recommended. Therefore, it is today's recommendation.

back and ready for...something.

2009-09-13T18:30:00.002-04:00

Having overcome the various tribulations involved in naming furry freeloaders and HAND CANCER, I am ready once again, dear readers. to Recommend Something To You.

I rarely get a chance to read anything for fun when I am in the grasp of the semester, but I recently read Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture
by Daniel Radosh.

I am sort of obsessed with Christian pop culture. I am not a Christian nor do I have any interest in becoming one, but the bizarre grasp - you could say the stranglehold - the religion has on the culture, science, and politics of America fascinates me. So I'd wanted to read this book for a while and after only a small battle with my university's library (apparently they only have 1 copy and it's just for undergrads, WTF?) I was able to borrow a copy (but I strongly suggest you buy one through my Amazon store, because there's a recession going on, and I have a lot of student loans).

Radosh resists the trap of sneering intellectual contempt for the stuff he studies, even when I feel it's warranted, and for that he should really be commended. The book is organized as a series of adventures as he goes to a Christian rock festival, a "Jesus junk" convention, a Christian theme park in Florida, etc. While I was admittedly hoping for it to be more amusing than it was, Radosh has a lot more sympathy and empathy than was necessary.

Anyway, the Christian pop culture industry is insidious and worth $7 billion a year in America. If you ever wondered about the banalization of culture, about why well-organized groups throw a fit every time a film's released that has a bad word in it, this book goes a long way towards explaining why in an entertaining, accessible way. It is Recommended. Enjoy!

Also recommended: Hell House, 2001, a great documentary about Christian "hell houses". Entry to follow. Maybe. Depends how bad this semester eats me alive.

let your kite fly! go to her!

2009-07-23T14:33:00.002-04:00

Sorry for the delay, beloved blog readers. This week's excuse is I have a cyst in my hand & it's been causing a lot of pain (and insurance hassle) and I just haven't had the time to write without serious pain.

Today's recommendation, the third of this week's quintet of postwar German films, is Heiner Carow's

The Legend of Paul and Paula

I bet you've never seen an East German film. I bet you don't know anything about East Germany except that they used to have a wall and don't anymore but maybe once someone you knew was in Berlin and they brought you back a rock which they said was part of the wall; you may or may not believe them. You still know nothing about Germany.

This is your chance to learn something!

The Legend of Paul & Paula is about 2 people named, for real, Paul and Paula. Paul is a successful military officer who marries the daughter of carnies because, hey, it's a socialist utopia now. He should bring her up, his colleagues say, and she shows a lot of cleavage. Improve her mind. Paula is a charwoman with two children from two different men who is weighing a marriage proposal to marry herself up to a nice (old) tire salesman with a dacha. Incongruously and intercut, old buildings are imploded, making way for the glorious, classless future of a unified DDR, a slouching and silent third character in the film. The shots of demolishing buildings function as sorts of intertitles within the film.

Paul & Paula is about failed relationships and failed government systems. It's about fate, in a way. It's about the peculiar German taxonomy of fairy tales & legends and how they are transmuted into and animate the otherwise grim and lifeless Plattenbauen of 1970s east Germany. Paul and Paula are less fleshed out characters than they are symbols, functioning human widgets in a complicated moral drama. Maybe.

This is a movie about social class in the classless utopia of the DDR. It comes to troubling conclusions - our bleeding liberal hearts recoil at the notion that, say, Paul's vulgar wife is the way she is because of some social Darwinism, although I suppose our collective minds, indoctrinated from birth into American determinism, agree with the socialist critique.

Paul & Paula also features some AWESOME tunes by an East German band called Puhdys. When I was teaching in East Germany, my colleagues were amazed I had heard of the band.

As you can imagine, the government censors did not love this film, and they loved it even less because it played for a period of time before they realized it was like, all political and shit.

So, in order to become more worldly, I Recommend that you watch The Legend of Paul & Paula. The DVD is available both on Amazon & through Netflix.

Overtheorized and underseen: "The oppressed accuse you"

2009-07-14T21:41:00.003-04:00

Today's recommendation, the second in this week's quintet of postwar German films, is

Helma Sanders-Brahms'

Germany, Pale Mother

I'm not going to get into tokenism here & point out ZOMG FEMALE DIRECTOR, though i guess i just did. This film has been unfairly derided as one of the most depressing ever made. To which I say: How nice that you can concern yourself with such first-world problems.

What most people know about this film is that it is vaguely about Sanders-Brahms' mother, and that it is a Metaphor (deliberate capitals) for Germany. Hence the title, which is from the (extremely fine) Brecht poem. The story is narrated by a daughter, who exists both outside and within the narrative. She tells the story of her parents' courtship, which exists in a mordantly idyllic Germany and has milestones that occur along the backdrop of The War (deliberate capitals): a wedding during a declaration of war, childbirth during bombing, postwar marital divide.

But this isn't about the story, and the point of the story as a film is that it could be millions of families' stories, because it's about Germany's story (cf O Deutschland, Bleiche Mutter!). The structure of the film's narrative is what has always fascinated me. On the one hand it's straightforward and linear; on the other, it's elliptical and puzzling and raises questions: How can Lene's daughter narrate when she doesn't exist yet, and what does that imply about narrative? What is at stake when Sanders-Brahms integrates newsreel footage and cuts it so that it seems like old newsreel subjects are interacting with the fictional characters; how are we to interpret that within the context of historiography and New German Cinema? The film itself reminds me of the narrative structure of Willa Cather's My Antonia, a composite narrative that picks up and subsumes other narratives, structures, and texts, to create a female narrated and female-centered narrative within a male-dominated space; Germany, Pale Mother does the same thing in its integration of The Robber Bridegroom (Grimm) and the Brecht Poem

Finally, watching the film nearly 30 years after it was made, how would it be different now, in an ostensibly reunited Germany?

I obviously don't propose answers to these questions; I'm just a hack trying to fluff my ego with a blog. But I think this film is really overlooked; the only people who are even aware of it are either humorless intellectuals who ignore the life in it or laypeople who didn't seem to appreciate it very much. I Recommend it to you from the midpoint of those viewpoints and hope that you find middle ground. It's a sad film, a tragic one, but one that fights for and affirms life in every frame, and I hope you watch it accordingly.

everything else is pure theory

2009-07-13T01:48:00.002-04:00

This week's theme will be Postwar German Movies That I Recommend to You.
I used to live in Germany. I studied German for so many years I lost count. Allegedly, my PhD minor is Germanic studies. I study like, movies and shit. For my PhD. So I feel somewhat qualified to do this.

The first of this week's quintet of recommendations is

Tom Tykwer's

Run Lola Run

I realize this is pretty hackneyed, but bear with me. I think people only understand Run Lola Run as an MTV-generation music video, but I'm hoping you'll come around to the way I see it.

It isn't merely a much more fun way to introduce yourself to Berlin on foot than reading an excruciating travel guide: Lola Rennt is a philosophical examination of what I understand epistemology to be. The slick style is off putting for some, but I see the media/medium as the message , a vehicle used to deliver an important statement about the multiplicity of truths, the possibility of concurrent realities, the notion of infinite possibility

I think Lola Rennt is a good movie to watch for those who are learning German (the language), because you get to see everything 3 times, however minimal the dialogue is. As my German teacher in high school said, "There's truth in all 3 iterations of this film." That statement introduced to me the notion of concurrent truth. Maybe I was a little slow.

Unlike some of the German films I'll be talking about in the upcoming days, Lola Rennt is relatively happy and deals only peripherally with the huge, horrifying, all-caps concepts overshadowing German life and film, at least the way we understand them in the USA: WORLD WAR II and EAST/WEST DIVIDE.

I was introduced to this film at a young age, so maybe it's heavy handed. I'm not watching it again to write this post. Maybe it wouldn't hold up. Maybe it seems blatant and obvious. I recall being about 18 and finding it really profound that Tykwer shot the scenes on film of Lola & Manni but everything of everyone else on video, so it would seem less real.

And you know what, I mean, I still find that pretty profound. What can I say. I'm a philistine at heart.

Therefore, I recommend Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt) to you.

in the fragile beauty we froze: let go let go let go let go!

2009-07-11T02:37:00.003-04:00

The last shall be the first. I wrote this first , but the final album I'm Recommending to you is

(shockingly!)

Phil Ochs' Rehearsals For Retirement

I came pretty close to writing a 33 1/3 book about it this year (shortlisted, not quite good enough but thanks for trying, story of my life), and I still really want to write a book about this album. (Aside: If you know anyone, if you are a publisher, if you know stuff other than sketchy sleazy publish-yourself opportunities and if you've got anything for me other than worthless, hastily-Googled assvice, please get in touch.)

Anyway, this is about the album. Not my pitiful attempts to make something of myself.

So. Let me talk about this album in the only ways I know how.

By the time he made this album, Ochs had this idea that each song should be a self-contained narrative. Like a movie. The word I"d choose to sum up this album is cinematic. And within that, this album uses different cinematic modes, shifting frenetically between tragedy, comedy, farce, jump cuts, a switch between styles that reminds me of the Nighttown part of Ulysses or early Godard. Songs shift styles between 70s B-comic Western and historic tragedy, between war drama and musical comedy.

It isn't frenetic or schizophrenic, it's a deliberate evocation, an intentional signifying that demonstrates a mastery over different cultural styles. By the time Ochs had made this album, sneering critics had dismissed him as a bipolar alcoholic. It's my project to change the hegemonic narrative of his life, to change the way you think of him, if you think of him at all. Most just dismiss him as an inferior contemporary of Dylan's, a sad sack bipolar alcoholic who couldn't take the switch to electric and killed himself. You are wrong. This blog post will not attempt to address this biographical disservice (that's, uh, what the book was supposed to be about, because the two biographies of Ochs have been pretty lacking; mine would have been both critical and AWESOME). At the time of Rehearsals, Ochs was a multi-movie-a-day filmgoer. I often wonder how living to and through the age of MTV would have affected him and his work and I feel sad all over again that he died so young.

I thought about doing this blog post track by track, lugubriously analyzing each song, but it just doesn't work that way, not today, not on an already tl;dr post on an album that's so important to me, not already risking criticism on something where I just can't deal with it.

Rehearsals is seamless misery and rage, frustration from beginning to end. I could give you a note by note analysis. But I won't. I thought about elliptically writing impressions, but that was a little too precious for a blog post.

In a way I guess it's good I never did get to do the 33 1/3 book because all I can do is stamp my foot and make vague gestures and say, fuck recommendations, I demand that you listen to this album NOW NOW NOW because it's so essential and so passionate and sad and angry and summarizes so perfectly an important time at the brink of American politics and culture, and at the same time, it summarizes a beautiful crisis moment in one man's life. Yet it's not exploitation. It's someone screaming into a void. It's someone screaming into a void and reassembling the echoes, reassembling the reflections, in a desperate and futile attempt to make someone understand - a last-ditch effort.

So, please, I implore you, I beg you, I demand that you listen to Rehearsals for Retirement.

This album has been the constant that's followed my entire adult life. A heavy and beautiful burden. Of course it's underrated. Of course it's forgotten. Of course it's overlooked and underappreciated by sneering rock critics, but I think it's one of the greatest albums ever made.

Therefore, I Recommend it to you.

***
So, that concludes this already-delayed project (and, thanks for sticking with me, if you did). It was good to get out of my comfort zone and make myself do this (almost) every day after putting it off for a week. And now I will flee back to my comfort zone.

Next week, in a transparent attempt to vaguely cash in on the Bruno craze, I will attempt to Recommend to you 5 Postwar German films.

why when you know you should go is it so hard to leave

2009-07-09T13:34:00.002-04:00

Today's recommendation, the fourth of our quintet of out-of-date and probably un-hip album recommendations,

is

Christine Fellows'
Paper Anniversary

As you'll recall yesterday, I used to live in Germany. But eventually in 2006, I came back to the US to do a master's at what I will refer to as a large, private university in lower Manhattan. An incredible confluence of bad luck and shit circumstances convened such that around the time of September 30th, 2006, I was recovering from a quadruple wisdom tooth extraction not covered by my incredibly expensive student health insurance, I was moving, I was living off student loans, and my computer had crashed yet again, losing the majority of my music and writing. I needed the Mountain Goats show at the Bowery Ballroom. I dragged myself there after moving all day. I remember I was standing there in so much pain my knees kept buckling.

That is how I was introduced to Christine Fellows' music. I lack, and am not sure I want to develop, the real critical vocabulary to talk about her voice, which struck me as uniquely beautiful without being affected and pretentious (cough johanna newsom cough). It reminded me of all I had wanted to become during the years & years I had seriously studied voice. The lyrics of her songs were simple, yet evocative and vivid. Like The Mountain Goats, places I'd never been and people I wasn't sure were real suddenly felt real and familiar to me.

At one point during her set, her husband, Jon K. Samson (back to 2009: whom I recently saw play at Zoop! II) sang a glorious arrangement of a Cortazar poem with her. Shit. Cortazar?! Someday I will recommend Cortazar to you guys, too, but...not only was it Cortazar, one of my favorite writers, but it was one of my favorite Cortazar poems ever: "Instructions on how to dissect a ground owl."

I had been shaking before, and maybe I'll chalk it up to the painkillers, but I was crying. It was gorgeous. It was honestly one of the best live music performances I had ever seen.

A few weeks later, once I had my computer situation straightened out and I was done moving, I bought Paper Anniversary off iTunes. At the time, you have to understand that was a huge freaking purchase for me. During the long cerebral autumn of 2006, Fellows' modified jazz chords kept me company. Stories and sketches of places that were unfamiliar and yet terribly familiar filled my consciousness as I stood, alone among packed strangers, on the Q and the B and the 2 and the 3. The rain fell; life seemed sad and beautiful. Slightly askew, time.... marched on, with a minimalist piano accompaniment and the hint of a cat purr.

I feel the need to assure you that my intention in posting these recommendations was not a self-aggrandizing memoir, though that is what it is becoming.

we've got stars in our eyes tonight.

2009-07-08T21:13:00.003-04:00

Today's recommendation, the third of this quintet of recommendations, is

The Mountain Goats' Full Force Galesburg

I'm not picking out a favorite or best Mountain Goats album here. I'm just Recommending this one because once upon a time, and a very miserable time it was, I lived all alone in a tiny German village on the Polish border and this album was, for whatever reason, how I stayed sane. I'm not sure this post is even really about the album, but please, you're here to listen to me bloviate, aren't you?

You remember periods in your life in associative ways: In those days I would read such-and-such book. You use the progressive tense: I was listening, I was reading, I was doing.

But it is only recent technology that has made music iterative in this way: In those days, using my newfangled refurbished 2nd generation iPod that already looked obsolescent, I would walk around every day and listen to Full Force Galesburg over and over and over. Specifically, and mostly, I would listen and re-listen to "Maize Stalk Drinking Blood" and "Evening in Stalingrad," which seemed so eerily apropos to my situation and surroundings. As late summer turned to fall and I should have been inside, I would walk around until my fingers were numb.

The album was and became like a collection of short stories that quickly became dog-eared and annotated, as I walked around in the cool air (sometimes for the hell of it I would walk to Poland, just to be able to say that I had). The language constructed my understanding of a world that made very little sense. The sparseness of the guitar and John Darnielle's vocals matched perfectly the minimalist, depressing Soviet-bloc buildings, many of which were slowly being reclaimed by squatters, by graffiti artists, or by nature.

I have never been to Galesburg, and I don't know the dogs. But I do know that the infinite sky seemed so much bigger and so much more magical and bearable when the music took me there. The loneliness I felt seemed holy somehow, like there was a portal linking the German border to it.

Mountain Goats fans - a notoriously insular and at times even elitist group - may disagree with this assessment, but I don't care. I don't want to argue about the nuances of split 7 inches or unreleased cassettes or talk about my record collection or discuss this album in the context of a discography. I just want to speak about why I recommend this album to you because it's so important to me. Maybe it will be important to you.

Therefore, I recommend Full Force Galesburg to you.

all i could want is silver & spinning out from your arms.

2009-07-07T21:56:00.003-04:00

The second of this week's (or last week's, I guess) quintet of recommended albums is

Neutral Milk Hotel's On Avery Island.

yeah, that's right. Not In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I love that one, too, but everyone recommends that, and I'm still Building An Audience on this blog, and honestly, over the past few years I have listened to On Avery Island way more. So I am here to disagree with virtually every Music Critic Ever (because I'm not one, right?) and tell you that this is Tuesday, and today's Recommendation is On Avery Island, and you only get one recommendation a day from me if that, so forget about everything else and just hear me out for the next 300-500 words.

What's the difference? I think most people dismiss On Avery Island as early sketches for In the Aeroplane over the Sea. On Avery Island, was that their early stuff? Why are they against sex and who the hell is Pree? What's the difference? it just starts with a different pronoun, right?

Oh, you are so fucking wrong. I wish I could contemptuously end the blog post right here, but now I have to explain myself.

Plus, in case you're counting, I think I'm now 2 for 2 for dropping F bombs in these recommendations this week, which means this blog is so never getting on my department's blog roll.

Oh well.

Anyway. On Avery Island is strange and wonderful and refreshing and nearly forgotten. It incorporates found sound and ephemera in a way that In the Aeroplane simply doesn't. Where In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has at least developed a secondary hegemonic narrative in the endless dissections thereof, On Avery Island has stayed mysterious, and I'm going to keep it that way. On Avery Island is elliptical and vague and not tied to linear interpretations.

For those of us who came to On Avery island late, it's impossible to understand On Avery Island without the overshadowing behemoth that is In the Aeroplane over the Sea (and, ya know, just typing that out every time is kind of precious & infuriating, and I love that album). On Avery Island is visceral and reactionary and angry, a collage of sounds and voices and moods that range from elegaic to frustrated to despairing to vulnerable. Sounds twist and are distorted in unexpected ways; voices of the everyday mingle with the sounds and voices of musicians and thus become the sounds and voices of musicians. It's a very populist album.

But On Avery Island is neither mere chaos nor mere aural self-indulgence. It is not mere trial runs for melodies and lyrics that would be reused later with In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It stands on its own as its own ideas. It is its own masterwork that has been overshadowed by the more accessible and more talked-about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Therefore, I Recommend On Avery Island to you.

where is waged the daily strife.

2009-07-06T12:25:00.005-04:00

wow, thanks for all those cat name suggestions, gentle blog readers.
I'm being sarcastic. As usual I can only count on Asa for things I ask for on the Internet.
You want to know what i decided to name him? I'll tell you on Friday so you keep reading. HA.

ok. so now i shall commence with the album recommendation project previously scheduled for last week.

***
The first album of this quintet of recommendations is

John Vanderslice's Cellar Door.

As a *vague airquotes* "film scholar* (and, let me qualify that: by scholar, I mean, master's degree, current PhD student, once had prestigious fellowship to go overseas and do something with film, forthcoming non-blog publications, the kind that smell gloriously of bookbinding glue, the kind you only put on your CV, cuz you sure don't get paid, please, oh please for a moment avert your eyes to the TipJar; by vague I mean: well who cares), I guess I just have an affinity for narrative, cinematic music.

AND SO BUT ANYWAY AHEM.

I bought this album after seeing JV open for the Mountain Goats in Florida in 2004. At the time, I was heavily involved in reading apocalyptic things about peak oil, Katherine Harris was my representative, and I watched my country re-elect George W. Bush (Dear America: Why?). The song "Pale Horse" spoke to me in a way that nothing else really had before, and when I voted for the first time, I wrote in John Darnielle and John Vanderslice as president & vice president, respectively; I held my breath and waited for the apocalypse. I moved to Europe a few months later.

I still don't trust Diebold.

Anyway anyway:

What I liked about it (Cellar Door, I mean, wasn't that the subject of this post?) was that it was more than a soundtrack and more than fan fiction. The tracks on "Cellar Door" are translations, transliterations, interpretations and workings-with of filmic texts ("and much, much more!"). Although the best thing about it is that it's elliptical and open-ended, Cellar Door features songs that are loosely about Wild Strawberries, Mulholland Drive, Requiem for a Dream (the book or the movie? I do not know, but I hope it's the movie; I really hated that book), Percy Bysshe Shelley's "The Mask of Anarchy" and others I'm probably too much of a philistine to know. Or others that are more subtle and can refer to any one of several texts.

The result is a hypertextual, nodal album that situates itself within and between all of these texts.

The entire album, as I interpret it, is about the act of translating and working with one text to produce another. As I see it, this is the paradox of creation in the Modern and postmodern ages (I don't know why I capitalize Modern but not postmodern, either). Have we reached a critical mass of creation? Is there nothing left to create but creations about creation (oh god, does that explain fanfiction) ? Is that what all creation is anyway? A spinning off of inspiration, but now we are only inspired by an ever-growing array of other texts?

Anyway. Cellar freaking Door, guys. John Vanderslice really is the friendliest guy in the music industry, not that I know that many guys in the music industry.

Cellar Door!

Plus, it just has some fucking good beats. I Recommend it to you!

addendum

2009-06-30T20:58:00.005-04:00

by this upcoming, apparently we meant next.

something came up.

something small with 4 feet and a proportionally shockingly loud voice that was found under a tree.

something small & helpless that needed a home.

Thus, today's recommendation is helping me name this freaking orphan.

I have a few ideas of my own, but I like to utilize 21st century technology when it comes to naming the freeloaders who live with me.

we recommend this upcoming week to you

2009-06-29T14:12:00.002-04:00

I thought about giving some structure to this blog, because my life lacks it lately. Therefore, this upcoming week - loosely defined, temporally speaking - I'm going to re-recommend and revisit some albums that I'd, you know, like, recommend to you and stuff.

I don't really consider myself a music writer in the traditional sense. That's the purview of my better half and everyone I know.

But lately I feel pretty discouraged by academia and academic film / media writing, so I'll escape back to my old reasoning, which is that the best writing, all good writing, has a natural rhythm, cadence, and tone to it which relates it so closely to music that there's no real difference, if there's anything good about either of them. That's media, that's patterns. That's light on a screen, that's narrative - that's stories; that's chiaroscuro lighting; that's all art. It doesn't matter by what medium you call it or what studio you enter.

Wow, that was pretentious.

I might have synesthesia.

Firefox doesn't know that word.

Anyway.

I'm not really an album person.

HERE BE DIGRESSION

I suppose I am a dreaded, hated "millennial" in that until I discovered Ye Olde Internet, music, or what I understood music to be, did not affect my life much. Music was the crap on the radio that the really dumb kids at school listened to; even I could tell, at the age of 13, that top 40 was contrived by corporations and nothing was spontaneous or populist.

I grew up in a town with no book store and no record store.

It was a town 100% devoid of any culture whatsoever, like a mark of pride, or maybe the mark of the beast. The town library had shelves & shelves of purple prose romance novels, but not one book by Faulkner. Everyone there knew who I was, because, in a crazy bizarro version of the village idiot, I was the Village Smart Person. I am not saying that to be smug or arrogant. i am saying that because that's how it was.

We did have a mall. It grew and grew, like a cancer, a crazy, gauche, grotesque microcosm of America, or maybe because i'm from The Real Amerikkka or something.

I went away to college; now that mall has to be visible from space. There's an Olive Garden there now. And a Borders, even. That is the most unthinkable milestone I could think of, for the town in which I grew up (note deliberate lack of use of term "hometown") to suddenly have a place where you can just walk in and buy a book, culture as handed down from the executive suites of corporate conglomerates. Oh, and a latte. Crazy. I don't know what the other three horsemen are.

Anyway.

I THINK THAT'S THE END OF THAT DIGRESSION.

It was only when, in the cold basement of the McMansion of my adolescence that I began to devote hours of my life to hunting down songs with 2400 baud spears that I discovered things other than the pabulum given me by post-apocalyptic, post-Reagan corporate homogenized culture. So like my attention span, my understanding of the concept of the album was post-haste assembled, not quite natural. It was really only in college that I began listening to music as discrete albums or wholes. Perhaps it is a mark of my uselessness as a human being, my place in time and history as a member of the most post-apocalyptic generation. The fact that despite my many useless degrees, I still honestly cannot afford to download albums from iTunes or buy them in stores.

Therefore, this week's selections will reflect that, so I ask you - discerning blog readers of excruciating taste! - to bear with me a little bit; I grew up in the cultural equivalent of like Ethiopia or something.

Thus, so this week I'm going to try to revisit, from a purely textual standpoint - because honestly, most music writing annoys me (sorry, everyone I know. YOUR writing is okay) - 5 albums that I Recommend To You (TM). The reason this is different is because:

1. They're not new albums
2. I don't think I'm coming at it from a typical-music-writing-perspective
3. I need to tell myself this because I have nothing else going for me right now
4. As a failure of the music education system, despite ?9? years of music education, I don't know the right ways to use music terms to talk about music anyway and I know just enough to want to die after reading the first 5 pages of Music Theory for Dummies.
5. PONIES

***
That was a really long introduction, wasn't it?

So, I think I'll leave it at that.

FOR NOW.

Thus, right now's recommendation is that You Tune in later (what the hell do you say on a blog? Blog in later? Eyeball in later? Focus your gnat-like attention span in later?) for the first recommendation.

I may forget about this whole thing by Wednesday, but, again, in the repurposed words of Will Sheff, put to better use by my better half, its flaws are what made us have fun, right?

if you mean something, say something

2009-06-28T12:02:00.002-04:00

Today's recommendation is a more abstract, abstruse one, but it'll suffice.

Today's recommendation is linguistic accountability.

This is an umbrella term I'm using to refer to a whole host of things. Not just proper spelling & grammar, which I'm all for, despite the fact that i embrace change in language & I appreciate language in all forms. I mean, I recommend that you defy the creeping trend of infantilism and entitlement that is apparent even in spoken English.

To wit, two of my biggest annoyances:

It is believed that it's perfectly common & acceptable to say, "I'm going to school to get such-and-such degree."

I disagree. Despite what my students think, you are not a customer when you enroll in an academic institution (unless it's one of those buy-a-degree, fly-by-night, for-profit schools that advertise on websites). You are WORKING on a degree. You are EARNING it. If you cannot understand the semantic distinction, then in my estimation, at least, you imply don't deserve the degree.

This is not just my grumpy, overworked grad student self showing.

I find it kind of off-putting that people my age and older refer to themselves as kids, as boys, as girls. In a society as schizophrenic as ours, in a society as hyper concerned with the sexualization of children and as terrified of pedophiles as ours, this seems a curious phenomenon. Yeah, 30 is the new 12 or something, but step up. You're not a kid. I realize that it's a bit stilted and words like "woman" and "Man" come with their own baggage, but if you're old enough to get married, to vote, to reproduce, to get drafted for a war you don't believe in, you are old enough to refer to yourself using the word that properly describes you, no matter how immature you are.

Again: today's recommendation is LINGUISTIC ACCOUNTABILITY.

If you practice this - if give yourself over to the simple act of speaking in a way that reflects not entitlement but responsibility & accountability, I believe that it will come across in your actions. Everyone is scared of responsibility, but I think that maybe words come first. By uttering it, one gets used to the idea. By getting used to the idea, you become accountable. Right?

when you're ready to hear a message

2009-06-24T11:53:00.007-04:00

This summer is full of trendy, self-improving things in my tiny social circle*: Infinite Jest (My pretense is showing: I've already read most of it and will read it later at my own damn pace, minus book marks - mostly cuz my cat broke my printer - once I'm done reading Anna Karenina [What? no online book club of hipsters reading that with me? I'll solider on somehow]), camping trips with indie rock bands, and best of all, going vegetarian. I like to think I'm just a trendsetter.

Because my ego is fragile and I have so little else going for me, I would like to point out that I have been vegetarian since I was 18. Not that it's a contest. But, I feel I have a little bit of cred to recommend the following to my newly cruelty-free friends and anyone else is interest. Those of you making this change, I am so proud of you!

Confession: I have a complicated relationship with my own vegetarianism. I see it as a lifestyle, not a diet; an ethos, not a trendy choice; a continuum and a belief system, not a bumper sticker. I kind of hate talking about it. I hate having The Vegetarian Conversation with mouth-breathers. (This is what they say; i usually just seethe: "Are you AGAINST cruelty to animals? So what do you like eat? Don't you think God put animals on earth for us to kill? Don't you think PLANTS have feelings? haw haw haw. What about all the animals that die when you harvest vegetables? MMM MEAT AREN'T YOU HUNGRY GODDAMN LIBERAL PINKO etc.") I hate arguing in general. So please respect that, and read the following recommendations, and be patient because some of them are kind of hurr-durr:

1. Reducing meat consumption. Even if you feel you need to consume flesh to justify your humanity / masculinity / American-ness, the most compelling argument against meat consumption is environmental. I was an environmentalist before it was trendy. True story: I got in trouble in 3rd grade for petitioning my school principal to ask him to start a recycling program. Yes, really, and it was all my own idea. So I feel my investment in this issue is a little deeper than the people who just saw the Al Gore movie a few years ago and jumped on the bandwagon; I'm not knocking their commitment and I'd rather have trendy commitment based on cynical green product marketing (someday I'll post about Green Products and the purchase of a "green" lifestyle and it affinities to church indulgences; it'll be a 95 theses kind of post) than no commitment, but this has been something that has literally dominated my entire life. Maybe that's an assy, alienating thing to say. But anyway. It disappoints me when vegetarian activists mumble something incoherent about mollusks having the right to vote or all life being preshus or something. The facts are, factory farming produces more carbon emissions than cars. 90% of sea fish are gone from overfishing. The horrifying, bloated American lifestyle is unsustainable and unnatural. If you think it's impossible for you to cut out dead flesh, then just cut down. Until 20 years or so ago, it was unheard of to consume the portions and quantity of meat and dairy that Americans consume. If you want your children to have any kind of world at all to live in, or any children to have any kind of world at all to live in, stop eating so many dead things. Period. I am truly not interested in your biased rebuttals. There is absolutely no justification or reason for the bloated, inexcusable, disgusting American lifestyle we exploit and it's time for us ALL to cut back, and not just because suddenly, many people are as poor as I've always been.

2. Check out some interesting ethnic, traditionally vegetarian cuisines. It will make you a more interesting and worldly person, and help you support local businesses. My one renegade friend who went on this camping trip and didn't go veg (but, interestingly enough, did not exploit animals by petting them unsolicited - I salute you, sir!) mentioned something interesting about getting bored by meatless choices. Therefore, I'd encourage my recently vegetarian friends to try new things to reduce the chances of recidivism. Sure, you can eat PB&J (totally vegan, right?) every day, but unless you live where I do, there are lots of options for new things to try. Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Middle Eastern restaurants usually have many vegetarian options, and if you're not like me, and you have a real job, those are usually good places to go for lunch. So I hear.

3. This is the really obvious one. Try cookbooks or new recipes. When I first became a vegetarian in college, I got The Starving Students' Vegetarian Cookbook (at least I think it was that one. What I liked about it was that it assumed no fancy materials, ingredients, skills, or cookware, which was good because I had no actual kitchen. Everything was easy to make and after a while, fairly personalizable. Granted, I am a terrible cook. Kitchens burst into flames at the mere sight of me, which is a super power that would probably be a lot more profitable than this blog if I could just harness it & then lease it to the government. Anyway, it wasn't condescending like, "Here, kiddy, help in the kitchen. Do you know what a vegetable is? Now color!" but it wasn't snobby, either. Even if you're not a student, it's a good place to start. Seriously. Otherwise, try the Internet! I know! Imagine that, telling a person reading a blog to look on the Internet! For information! What am I thinking! That Internet thing has exploded recently; there are lots of sites with recipes that you can use to make food. You can use food to be less hungry. Whoa. This blog is full of life-changing revelations. Note the tip jar, people.
All vegan recipes
All Recipes.com. I have helpfully linked to the Vegetarian section.

4. Stick together. It really helped me in college that most of my friends were vegetarians (When I was in high school, I tried to go vegetarian but went back after a few months partly because I didn't know anyone else who was vegetarian; I also got really sick - not related to vegetarianism though). In my tiny liberal arts college paradise, vegetarianism was just the socially acceptable thing to do. We cooked together in the common kitchen. We went grocery shopping and scanned ingredient lists together. We became waiter's worst nightmares together (ouch, that sentence parses painfully). I'm not saying to abandon your carnivorous friends, or evangelize them, but I think it's a lot easier to make this change if you do it with someone, or hang out with someone who has been in this for a while. Two minds are better than one. It's easier to collaborate and be creative and notice things when you have two minds and two sets of eyes. This may seem obvious, but YOU try reading all the ingredients in Rice A Roni on a Saturday morning in a busy grocery store.

. 5. Be a self-advocate. I have problems with this myself. It's always awkward when some loud dude (it's always a dude. Sorry) engages me in "conversation" and yells at me and tries to make me feel like shit for my sincerely held beliefs or thinks that he can convince me that vegetables have feelings or some nonsense. I hate arguing. I truly do. I also feel bad going to restaurants and making extra work for people by asking if there's chicken stock in soup, if there's gelatin in desserts, if there's rennet in cheese. But if everyone self-advocates unapologetically, maybe society will wake up and realize that just as it's totally normal & acceptable to provide tons of information for the 1 person in 10,000 who will have an allergic reaction, they should stop rolling their eyes and being judgmental towards the hundreds more who adopt a lifestyle of lesser cruelty and realize that maybe it's important to know what is in the food they're selling or even putting in their body.

I know there's tons of cruelty & exploitation inherent in simply living in America or any other first-world country. I am racked with guilt on a daily basis because I live a stupid, pointless, elitist intellectual life while people are dying and I just sit here and pontificate while people die preventable deaths, and I rethink my choices constantly. I don't claim to know the answers or even the questions. I don't claim this cleanses me of original guilt. But it makes me feel better. That's all I can do, I guess.

Coming up some other time when I feel like it: Parallels between cruelty-free lifestyles and evangelical Christianity.

If it's even still necessary.

My real, succinct recommendation today is be kind, loving, and reduce how much you hurt all living things.. You'd be surprised just how necessary it is that we remind each other of this.

*I'm using this term lightly, because I currently live in academic exile 700 miles away from everyone I consider a close friend, and I only see them a few times a year anyway. It's more of a retinal image than a circle, a concept. The circle is not unbroken.

BOGO MONDAY!

2009-06-22T17:16:00.004-04:00

Today's recommendation from me is a double-whammy. As in, two for the price of one. Yes, two recommendations. And since the recommendations are free to begin with, this all works out to an EXCEEDINGLY GOOD DEAL.

My first recommendation is participating in Infinite Summer. Of course, those who read my other blog already know about this (and are probably wishing I would shut up about it), but Infinite Summer is a kind of virtual, online reading group, a communal project with the goal of slogging through David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest during the summer. Yes, all 980 pages plus 100 pages of footnotes. It started yesterday, but you can totally catch up.

Infinite Jest is a book I had been meaning to read for quite some time. Haven't we all, really? But that is about as far as many people go with it. I am firmly convinced that a large portion of its reputation is due to the cliché of pseudo-intellectual hipsters who continually see fit to namedrop the novel and discuss its importance and influence without having actually read it. To me, this project is at least partially about destroying this image with which the novel has been saddled. It's about not being the stereotypical pseudo-intellectual who skims Wikipedia entries for a faint grasp on a book so that one can name-drop it in conversation. It's about setting an achievable goal and turning it into a small but not insignificant personal success. It's about following through on things.

Speaking of following through on things, that is the topic of the second recommendation: knowing when to say when. I am overextended and overwhelmed and exhausted right now. I have too much on my plate:

~~Infinite Summer~~
various other books I had intended to read this summer
preparing for the impending semester
my goddamn job
packing things to move out of my apartment by July 31
At least 2 cds worth of cover songs to record as thank you gifts for the autism walk
An entire EP to write and record
artwork for these two projects
the increasing demands of Its Flaws Were What Made Us Have Fun, which appears to be developing the beginning of what could almost be considered an audience.
a few other stressors of a more personal and private nature that I will not be discussing here.

The point of all this is to say that I am going to be taking a temporary break from writing recommendations on this blog. A hiatus. As you can see, I do have a lot I am dealing with right now, and I think that the pressure implicit in a blog like this to produce content daily, as well as the irrational guilt I feel whenever I don't produce anything, has taken its toll on me and only caused more stress and anxiety. I know that I often joke about plans as being promises to be broken, but I don't like breaking promises, and therefore, I am not making these promises. Maybe I will be able to resume posting after I've moved out of this apartment; time will tell.

In the meantime, though, I do intend to follow through on Infinite Summer, and I hope you do, too. Not to push the other blog again, but I have posted links to some valuable resources and tips over there. Until next time, have a great (Infinite) summer.

hungry hearts, hungry minds

2009-06-22T11:54:00.003-04:00

I really like the strange tension involved in a recommendation blog that: 1. Has no consistent audience and 2. Leads to nobody actually experiencing my recommendations.

It's almost Borgesian, so before I break out my eye patch, I'll recommend you something that totally exists!

So today's recommendation is listening to me blather more about Anzia Yezierska in my characteristically clumsy way, because I totally had a really, really frustratingly great entry written in a notebook that's in a suitcase I haven't seen for 6 days and am, apparently, not supposed to mention here.

Please, send a hairbrush, or something.

Anyway. Yezierska.

I'm going to talk more about "Where Lovers Dream," and I'm going to avoid, hopefully, the blather that has always annoyed me about how critics have discussed it in the past. I will also hopefully not exceed my own attention span in my eagerness to post this.

Much of my *vague pretentious air quotes* research involves historiography. The narrative cultures construct about history and how it changes over time. Part of my fascination with this story involves its own historiography, the way it exists in two separate times and discusses them without it being heavily linked to stereotypes regarding discrete times and years.

This story starts with a simple, nearly postmodern fragment: "For years I was saying to myself - just so you will act when you meet him. Just so you will stand. So you will look on him. These words you will say to him."

As we used to say in happier days, in classrooms overlooking the sea discussing books, let's unpack that.

It's a pretty intriguing opening for a story that, again, has been dismissed as token, pat example of Jewish-American pulp writing in the early 20th century.

These sentences work in several ways, and that's stunningly elegant. On the one hand the speaker is referring, literally, to how she had planned for years to speak "just so" to the unnamed him (we learn later that it is the man she almost married, who rejected her because her family was poor). On the other hand, we can emphasize the just. JUST so you will stand. JUST so you will act. JUST so you will speak. These words you will say to him. It's almost an epigraph, a performance. A rehearsed litany, perhaps. Left with nothing else, able to represent herself with nothing else, the speaker unfolds her tale, building a space wherein she had once dreamed with words, evoking their power to construct nationality, identity, and social class.

She is at once external and internal to this time: she speaks from a space completely divorced from the space and time she had once built with the love she had had; yet the memory and nostalgia for it allows her to construct this space / time (diegesis) fully and vividly. Without fetishizing the poverty, without simplifying the problematics of young love, Yezierksa

Of course, nothing that happy is sustainable in America - that's really the larger message in her work (a collection of one of Yezierska's short stories is called "How I found America"; like much of her work, you can read it in 2 ways).

Perhaps some of the reason I find such affinity with Yezierska is the intellectual tradition of voluntary poverty from which she comes; her father was a Talmudic scholar who was supported by the village. The character of the non-working intellectual holy man father is a recurring one in her stories.

As someone who is desperately indebted to the life of the mind (and I mean that financially, not emotionally or anything), I guess I relate more and more every day.

Anyway, so that's your daily dose of my Yezierska evangelism. Will I write more tomorrow? Will I recommend something else? Heck, will THOM recommend something? Only time will tell! Tune in tomorrow for more!

the lost "beautifulness"

2009-06-20T20:06:00.001-04:00

N.b.: Concepts in this post are adapted from an essay I wrote in 2005, which won "honorable mention" in an essay contest in Florida, actual title of which I have now forgotten; I like to think some concepts and phrasings have improved in the ensuing 4 years, 2 continents, and graduate degrees..

Today's recommendation is hiring me to write a postmodern, fanciful movie about the passionate, brutal life and equally passionate, brutal texts of Anzia Yezierska.

I know, that's an egocentric mouthful, but KEEP READING.

I do not even really know how to pronounce her name. I came across Anzia Yezierska's short fictions in a course I took on women writers in college. Tokenism. She was the token Jewish-American writer; we read the only story most people do read by her, "Where Lovers Dream," which is fortunate, because it's her best. What struck me was not the tokenism, not the non-standard English, but the way time was softened and constructed as a place, the interplay between nostalgia and temporality. What kept me reading was the love story; I had just had my heart broken. What shattered my soul into a thousand pieces and made me say to myself, "This is absolutely brilliant" was the recursiveness of the story, the circular, nearly Borgesian narrative that ended where it began, creating a neat, circular narrative that never really ends and by dint of that, makes a stunning and innovative statement about feminist constructions of time.

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL.

I looked her up and was surprised to discover that this writer with the unproncounceable name also had an unknown birth date. think about that for a second. You think of your life as a discrete ray, a line beginning with a definite point. You have, maybe, a shoebox under your bed with cards and mementos. You know what was in the top 40 the week you were born. What of your identity would be shattered to not even know the year? I realize that's how people lived for much of human history, but it unsettled me. And it made me wonder how, if at all, this affected her writing. Her stories are filled with a confessional, nearly atavistic textual scream to the reader, an attempt to connect in a language that wasn't even her native one. Most critics have dismissed her writing as brainless prattle for immigrants, okay to demonstrate a certain mode of non-standard English writing in a certain place and time.

Also, she was driven out of her ancestral family home by the Cossacks. That image really stuck with me.

My senior thesis in college was largely about Yezierska. My senior thesis was a mess, in part because I got so lost in her texts and her life. Every story seemed a desperate, angry wail to the reader. The words were simple, but urgent.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE.

Also, apparently while she was at Teachers' College of Columbia in New York City, she had an affair with John Dewey (yeah, THAT John Dewey) and the rumors are that he fathered her (only) child.

TALK ABOUT PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION.

I don't care if I'm wrong. This is where the movie I want to screen-play-with comes in.

Can you imagine? Can you even imagine? Cossacks! Turn of the century ghettos! Fetishization of poverty is so trendy right now (see: this year's Oscars); so are crazy writers. This will make a fortune.

I am slightly sarcastic.

I am totally serious.

I will cry if you don't run out RIGHT NOW and read her stuff.

I've been editing this entry for a week (i had it all written much more elegantly in a notebook that ended up in a particularly ill-fated suitcase), so I'm just going to post this now).

we are very poor, II

2009-06-10T18:51:00.000-04:00

Today's recommendation is resisting Americanist rhetoric about being the master of your own destiny.

I read a lot of personal finance blogs, which is really stupid, because they just depress me. They're all the same, and they are frankly all written for the wealthy. Nobody writes personal finance blogs for the people who need them the most. I know everything I should do with a 401 (k) and a Roth IRA, but I have never in my life been in a position to have either. I have condescendingly been patted on the head and sneered at and told that it all comes down to what I can expect to earn with my preshus major, but nobody who writes about personal finance can offer a single useful thing to career academics. I have literally never seen a single thing in a persona finance book or blog ever addressed to anyone working on a PhD, although there's plenty for law & medical students.

The best they can offer is vagaries about asking yourself if you Really Want to Go Back to school and are you just going to hide out you lazy bum haw haw haw. I have JD Roth on our blog roll, (mostly because he likes the Decemberists and seems like a nice enough guy) even though I think his blog has really declined in the last year, especially since he's started hooking up with sleaze balls like that I Will Teach You to be Rich douchebag.

That's what today's post is all about. When I was teaching in Germany, one of the lessons I had to teach from a book dealt with a study that showed how in America, people believe they are responsible for what happens to them - moreso than in any other country in the world. If I can remember the name of the book, and the study, I'll cite it. Take it for anecdata for now. In America, we believe that if we squeeze our eyes shut, we have a classless meritocracy and hard work is rewarded, and if you forego coffee in the morning you will magically get to retire and if you have to declare bankruptcy it's your own fault, you filthy slob with no self-control. Just fucking check your credit report and cut up your credit cards and all will be magic, forget about the endemic un and underemployment problems in this country. The product these blogs sell is stability. I grew up in a house where my father worked in the kind of mind and soul-numbing, frustrating office job that these blogs purvey. Leave at 6 AM, come back at 9 PM, work hard, invest in your company's 401 (k). The day of my 18th birthday, my father was laid off. He has not held stable employment since. He has had to cash out his 401(k) just to pay the bills. It bothers me that so many people buy into this one-size-fits-all prescriptive philosophy that sings the praises of a deeply flawed system that simply provides a way for the puppetmasters of the capitalist system to stay wealthy & powerful while the plebeians struggle and eat cat food in their golden years. But don't mind that. Just pay off your credit card and put $50 a month into a Roth IRA. It's all about your mind. It's all about your attitude. You broke your leg and you're bankrupt? You must have a bad attitude. You deserve what you get!

This is the rhetoric of personal finance blogs, the upper class elites who make a fortune off selling books and seminars to people (who buy these things on credit, naturally - except Dave Ramsey, who makes a big show out of not accepting credit cards, but he's more part of the fundamentalist scene than the personal finance scene, but that's another blog post) simply to reinforce the ideology of America, which is that you need to internalize a feeling of "empowering" "control" so that if you screw up, you blame yourself and feel like a failure, and if you blame anyone else, you go on a talk show and everyone hates on you at a water cooler and clucks their tongues about this "victim" society.

I am here to tell you that this is ridiculous. Obviously you can make minute and meaningless choices about shopping and personal spending. That, and only that, is what life in post-apocalytpic capitalist America is all about. Which coffee shall you get and at which store in the mall shall you get the shirt? Or not? But in the larger sense, counting these pennies (with apologies to Elizabeth Warren, the only personal financier who only kinda makes a little bit of sense) is a feeling of false control, just like much of American society. It's pointless to blame yourself and plan for retirement spending in a country that is clearly derailing, a country and empire that is far too huge, fractured, and arrogant to govern effectively, especially when most of the country is crazily ignorant and hideously greedy. It is pointless to scrimp and save when breaking your leg will bankrupt you. It is pointless to work hard for an elite education when you can't get a job, any job.

I'm not just talking about the conversation I always seem to be having with the knuckle-draggers who really, really, really love money, the people who sneer at me and laugh with spit flying and ask me just what the hell I expected, majoring in books. Uh. I'm talking about my friends with teaching licenses who can't find teaching jobs, even in states (e.g., Florida) with stated teacher shortages; I'm talking about the evaporating jobs while the filthy, vile, indolent rich get filthier and more indolent.

So - my recommendation today is Resist, resist, resist! Fight the power! Resist marketing, resist spending, resist conspicuous consumption, and resist ideologies that tell you that you are to blame for the failures of a system that keeps a very few people wealthy & powerful. Work hard, don't blame yourself, and fight for a better system. Whether you use the Republican bogeyman word "socialism" to describe it or not is up to you, but I am beginning to think "capitalism" is far worse. You're poor, you want advice? Cut down on smoking, or quit altogether. Arrange a childcare cooperative to reduce childcare costs (note: I neither smoke nor have children, so these may be assvice-y suggestions). Fight for your rights. Join a union. Use your library. Don't fall for slick marketing, including that of anti-marketers (does that make sense?). Demand to know every side. Read the fine print. Don't accept your situation, although you must accept that mathematically, as things stand, the middle class in American society as it is today is a dinosaur (the Onion put it best in 2004). Nobody wants to be poor, but most people are going to be. Either be poor with dignity or fight and don't be anyone's stooge. I'm not sure if this results in anything more but feel goodery and anti-vagaries and unquantifiable yearnings no different from that of the rhetorics I urge you to fight against and I urge you to read critically for that. But I had to say my piece, and that's my recommendation.

but, you can't get any poorer than dead

2009-06-08T18:23:00.002-04:00

Today's recommendation is Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear it Away.

When I was about 18, I read J.L. Austin's How to Do Things With Words, which is one of the shortest philosophy texts ever written, and the easiest to understand, and the most endearingly titled. It is about performative speech acts. When speaking becomes doing. When you christen a ship or bet on the outcome of an event or marry 2 people. I have come back to it at several points in my life (see: "Short, easy to understand") and I'm coming back to it now. And I find it a useful frame through which to understand O'Connor's final novel, which deals with the fraught execution of a performative speech act Austin never discusses: baptism.

I romanticize the south. My parents are from the south, more or less. I was born there. Even though I grew up in New Jersey, I became a real person in the bastardized south - Florida - and have spent many formative summer evenings of my life on Amtrak trains in motion, speeding through crystallized slices of time and space and Carolinas. So, I have a perfectly good notion of what I think the South is and should be, and I suppose I seek that out in my reading. Sorry if that's regionalist. I was once accused of regionalism in a regionalist writing class in college.

The Violent Bear it Away teems with rage and explosions (metaphorical and literal). The rage and explosions coalesce around the tension between rationalism and Something Else, something atavistic and instinctive that was once called holy; between city and country; between knowing and believing. Then, of course, O'Connor presents each dichotomy with farcical distance and textually raised eyebrows. I'm not sure I liked that.

In the end, a novel - a story of destructive inner and external turmoil - is mounted over the act of uttering a few words and sprinkling a few drops of water; or, whatever you take Baptism to be (it is obvious from this review how I feel about evangelism). In a larger, meta sense, the story's existence seems a performative act of some sort itself. Here is where I always lose sight of what a performative speech act may or may not be. Thus, I will leave it to you, dear Blog Readers.

we are very poor

2009-06-07T14:55:00.002-04:00

I haven't been feeling very well lately; there's been little I've felt like recommending other than please, please curing my migraines and sending me money so I stop worrying and having daily, horrible anxiety attacks about how I have absolutely no safety net in the vile, rapacious capitalist society in which I live and also please send reassurance that the world isn't hurtling towards an apocalypse, or at least that it's fast & soon & relatively painless. Full stop.

But that's not much of a recommendation.

Instead, apropos of that:

Today's recommendation is another underrated writer. Today's recommendation is Juan Rulfo (c. 1917-1986), for his brutal depictions of poverty, for his haunting (haha) novella Pedro Paramo. His books were ones I left with "friends" for "safe-keeping" when I moved overseas and never got back; for this reason, they're tinctured with nostalgia and I don't care if I'm slightly wrong; I haven't read his works in years. I'm writing as I remember and that seems somewhat in the spirit of Rulfo himself. His works are brutal and decentered and decenterING. He was a photographer, and his short works, in the way they effect you, in the ways they leave you with an image, in the ways they don't just tell a story but tell a society, a fractured, post-apocalyptic society - really show that. His works always reminded me of the computer and video games I played growing up, where without explanation you were suddenly hurtled into a scorched-earth world, forced to unravel a mystery, forced to talk to characters and unravel riddles, and even then it made little sense, but it was the world, it was the only world, and you had to unravel it, you had to work with it, because it was the world - now. Rulfo's works were short, elegant, brutal, each word a carefully-chosen economy, even in translation: they said what they had to say and only later, I'd pause and shudder and think about just how brilliant and perfect they were.

Thus, I Recommend them to you.

The Burning Plain & Other Stories can be purchased at Powells Books
Pedro Paramo can be purchased from Powells (alliteration is key to an understanding of the world).

N.b.: Confession: I have only read Rulfo in translation; I am sure if you can read his works in the original Spanish you will get even more out of it.

Because it's been a while...

2009-05-31T23:11:00.006-04:00

Because it's been a while, I'm just going to recommend several songs. In list form. With no explanation. Are these my favorite songs of all time? Maybe, but not necessarily.

Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah (The John Cale recording is possibly my favorite version of this ever.)

The Beach Boys - God Only Knows

Bob Dylan - If You See Her, Say Hello

the Mountain Goats - Masher

Shearwater - Near a Garden

Jackson Browne - These Days (if you can track it down, check out the St. Vincent cover. Amazing.)

John Lennon - Isolation

The Beatles - Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)

Okkervil River - It Ends With a Fall

Radiohead - Cuttooth

The Replacements - Answering Machine

The Records - Starry Eyes

Big Star - Kangaroo

Wilco - Sunken Treasure

Jeff Buckley - Lover, You Should've Come Over

Tim Buckley - Song to the Siren (It goes without saying that the This Mortal Coil cover is very impressive as well.)

The Velvet Underground - Stephanie Says

Rufus Wainwright - Poses

Elliott Smith - Say Yes

Nick Drake - Northern Sky

Beat Happening - Godsend

Blur - Tender

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - The Ship Song

Elvis Costello - Couldn't Call It Unexpected #4

The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers - Lisa

R.E.M. - Country Feedback

New Order - Ceremony

The Smiths - Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want

Modest Mouse - Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset

Red House Painters - Void

So, that's it. An off-the-top-of-my-head list of thirty songs that are doing it for me right now. Both in terms of where I am in my life and, you know, RIGHT NOW. So track them down. Listen to them. Spend time with them. Love them. Include them on mixes. Discuss in the comments. Et cetera.

math is hard; let's go shopping

2009-05-22T15:56:00.003-04:00

Today's recommendation is Pretty Charts & Graphs.

I realize that seems pretty insipid, but wait.

As a female living in the virulently anti-intellectual America, I have had a complicated relationship with math & science my entire life. This is not why I went into the humanities, but there you go. Anyway, despite the fact that I haven't made a career of math or science (much to humanities-haters' lamentations), I still respect elegant ways to organize information. I prize optimization, and I respect ways to visualize and organize said optimization.

Therefore, I'm something of a meta-hobbyist. For me, half of the fun of Netflix is using Feedflix and trying to get my cost per disc into the green (current cost per disc: $1.06). Thom introduced me to the Gas Cubby app for the iPhone (Aren't we yuppie douchebags? We have iPhones) and now I compulsively check to make sure that overnight, my Buick didn't suddenly start getting a better MPG or that I didn't drunkenly soup up the rims. If it costs me 9 cents a mile PLUS gas to go somewhere, do I really want to go?

The other day, I was extremely excited (not nerdily excited, not geekily excited - I'm sick of having to qualify & pathologize excitement just because it centers around things mainstream society considers uncool) to hear about the premiere of Wolfram Alpha, a promising new site that, if it develops right, will kinda change everything. For one thing, it is the most unfortunate URL ever. It is difficult to remember - is it that hard to get a straight WWW? - and egotistical on a level that competes with Stephen Colbert. I, too, hope my name is someday a verb, but I also have a name less cringeworthy than "Wolfram." I like to think.

Anyway - Wolfram is pretty much in alpha / beta (parking lot?) mode but once it's up and running it will be rather revolutionary. It unites computational knowledge with something close to natural language searches.
And
PRETTY GRAPHS.
This means, for me, that all the math questions I ripped my hair out over in 11th grade, I can suddenly enter natural-language-type inputs- like - "volume cylinder height 3" and see a PRETTY CHART and a multitude of other information.
Wolfram Alpha has gotten a lot of hate. I see both sides, and I suspect I would disagree with Stephen Wolfram on a lot of things. I am still puzzling out how to use Wolfram, and at least 90% of the time it doesn't work, but this is also how I remember the early, all-textual Internet working.

The Internet was built on binary. It is a system in which things are either on or off, 1 or 0, right or wrong; yet in this system, in a short period of time, a Wild West society of freedom, libertarianism, acceptance, and a multitude of other things has sprung up. In this society, free information is key. Wolfram's pompous project uses the very form/ media of the Internet to subvert it, refusing to divulge information or to buy into trendy, world-changing notions such as open-source software.

But, they have pretty graphs. And charts.

I decided long ago that if I was going to spend a long time puzzling over something, it would be something vast and unknowable. I decided this long before I really knew that mathematics and physics and biology could be vast and unknowable; I'm the product of a sub-mediocre public school education where science meant memorizing boldfaced words and literature meant spewing plot details onto a quiz; however, I'm telling you this so you understand the framework in which I made this vague decision. Words were infinite and I'd spend hours puzzling in frustration at the dining room table only to be left with a hollow and unsatisfying number.

PRETTY CHARTS AND GRAPHS.
I recommend them to you!

freedom is overrated.

2009-05-20T23:22:00.004-04:00

Today I recommend Romanian Names, the new album from John Vanderslice. The album officially streeted yesterday, but because of a very generous preorder offer from JV and his new label, Dead Oceans, I've been living with the album for about three weeks or so as a digital download. In that three weeks, according to my iTunes, I listened to the album in full no less than 9 times, with various tracks receiving additional single listens. Because my copy of the LP arrived this past Saturday, it is impossible to say how many times I have now listened to this album, and I'm still finding new details on which to focus with each subsequent listen. Obviously, this is going to be more of a gushy post than a professional-type review - bear with me.

So far, this may very well be my favorite album of 2009. I have been a JV fan for many years, and have reliable fallen in love with his past several albums instantly and have come to expect a certain standard of quality and consistency from him; yet, somehow, this album took me by surprise, in spite of the implicit high expectations I already had for it. Perhaps this is partially because I was introduced to 5 of the 12 songs in stripped-down, solo acoustic form on the Gone Primitive tour; I became so intimately acquainted with 2 songs in particular over the course of the tour that I know the lyrics in full and was comfortably singing along with JV by the final night. It had gotten to the point where the only way I could conceive of these songs was in the stripped-down acoustic form; how much of a shock was it, then, when I first listened to the production on this album? JV and Scott Solter have always had a great knack for interesting production, sound design, and attention to sonic detail, but on this album more than any other in JV's catalog one can really get lost in the layers. Speaking as an amateur (and amateurish!) home-recording musician who has a tendency to pile on layers and sculpt the sound, this album is truly a technical marvel.

Technicality aside, though, one of the big things that sets this album apart is its easy-going, breezy nature. JV has always had an undercurrent of anxiety in his solo recordings; once the post-September 11 influence began to seep into his albums starting with Cellar Door, this anxiety was amplified and moved to the foreground, culminating in Emerald City, where every song seems to be an exercise in divergent ways of channeling a jittery, anxious nervousness about a world gone wrong with no respite. Here, although many of the themes are ones that JV has explored before, he seems to be at ease and relaxed; no longer jittery, the songs feel more accepting of the things in the world that he cannot change and more at peace as a result. Even as he sings the sweetly heartbreaking album finale "Hard Times," there is a zen-like calm to his voice, as if the pain that he has traversed in getting through the hard times has left him bruised but wise, refined. The juxtaposition is fascinating - as meticulously as the album was crafted, the songwriting feels remarkably simple, non-fussed-over, natural.

It is not often that an artist writes and records the best album of his career seven albums in, but I dare say that JV has done it. I implore you all to check it out. For a preview, download Fetal Horses or my favorite song from the album, Too Much Time. If you have an eMusic account, you can download it there; or, better yet, purchase the album from Dead Oceans or directly from JV on tour (JV gives great hugs, by the way!) Speaking of tour! If anyone will be in Brooklyn on Friday, June 12, consider seeing him with The Tallest Man on Earth at the Music Hall of Williamsburg! I will be there! So will Miranda! Come hang out with us and JV! It will be a great time!

For those who have already enjoyed the album, or still need convincing, check out this utterly incredible performance of "Too Much Time" with an orchestra. It's magical. I can't wait to hear how these songs sound on stage with a band behind him.

John Vanderslice "Too Much Time" from AV on Vimeo.

ideas for vegetarian substitutions are welcome.

2009-05-19T20:48:00.004-04:00

in this economy, it certainly hopes to cut corners wherever one can. one of the most effective ways to do so, while reaping other benefits as well, is in eschewing ordering out or going out to eat. in this spirit, i will attempt to pepper my regular recommendations with interesting or self-created recipes to help you, beloved readers, live a more financially prudent life through financially prudent meals. and so, my devoted followers, i present to you the first installment of the recession gourmet: thom's snappy chicken salad (in search of a snappy name). i should add that ideas for the snappy name are also welcome.

chicken salad is a summer picnic staple. unfortunately, it is also boring. so, when i was looking for things to make and bring to work for lunch, and had tired of both salad and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, i started to think of what else i could make and also inject my own personal touch. after a couple of experiments with different flavor combinations and ingredient ratios, i think i have hit upon a formula which represents an interesting diversion from your usual deli/lunch fare.

i start with a large can of swanson chunk chicken meat. yes, canned food in general is pretty disgusting, and i'm sure it would taste better to use fresh chicken, but it's more than i want to deal with and frankly, it's probably more cost-effective to use the canned stuff. once you have the other ingredients mixed in, you no longer get that weird canned-chicken smell and look. next, chop up a stalk of celery and throw it in. crush a fistful or two of pecan halves and throw them in; toss in a handful of craisins. (obviously, i am not very exact with my measurements. i firmly believe that this is the one and only correct way to cook anything that isn't in a book or printed on the side panel of a box.) chop up/dice about 1/3 of a medium-sized apple and toss that in, as well. you can skin the apple if you'd like, but don;t feel obligated. i generally prefer to use granny smith for this; today i tried it with an organic gala, and it was good, but i feel like the tartness of the granny smith adds a nice accent that was missing from my sandwich today.

once you have mixed together all of the solid ingredients, mix in some light mayonnaise (i tend to use hellmann's, but any brand should do; and if you are one who fears the "light" label on foods, let me assure you i can detect no taste difference between regular hellmann's and light hellmann's). any pretense of even estimating measurements goes out the window at this point; add just enough to evenly coat all of the solid ingredients. with all of the fruit and nuts that you added, it will likely take lots of turning with a small fork to make sure it is all evenly coated.

voila! you have just created a quick, easy, inexpensive, colorful, and tasty chicken salad that should feed you for about a week, depending on the size of your sandwiches. speaking of the sandwiches: here is what i have determined to be the ideal way to prepare them with this chicken salad.

first, the bread choice. oatmeal bread is good, but lately i have fallen completely in love with this apple honey oat bread that i have found at wegman's. this particular bread is manufactured by wegman's, and i am unaware of any nationally-available equivalent, so you may want to search around, or simply find your own favorite alternative. spread some apple butter on one slice of the bread; i like to use the clearbrook farms brand, which has a nice texture and a robust flavor to it. on the other slice of bread, lay a bed of romaine lettuce. spoon out some of the chicken salad onto the romaine, then sprinkle liberally with ground black pepper. and there you go. when all is said and done, it costs less than $2.00 per sandwich, since a little bit goes a long way with all of the fruit and vegetable ingredients. it is reasonably healthy - more so than whatever fast food you were going to get on your lunch break, anyhow. and if i may say so while still maintaining my usual modesty, it is a really interesting, unique combination of flavors.

i'd be interested in knowing if anyone tries this, and i'd ESPECIALLY like to know of any modifications anyone makes to the recipe! today, i tried something different; i tried to temper the more traditionally autumn flavors of the apple and cranberries by placing slices of strawberry into the sandwich. it wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. in the end, i think it was just too many different flavors at once, and the strawberry really didn't have a complement. but if you try something else and have success with it, please let me know!

in the furthest country that you did not make up

2009-05-19T12:22:00.001-04:00

I'm on a roll! Look at me recommending things 2 for 2! My allergies seem out to kill me, or at least make me extraordinarily lazy. So today's recommendation is not lowering your standards of personal hygiene or accountability and spending days in bed coughing and drinking sugar-free Kool Aid, as I have done.

But, metaphorically, drink my sugar-free Kool-Aid, as I recommend to you:

Beshkempir, the Adopted Son

There are many reasons why I am Recommending this film to you.

Pretension and Elistism. it was made in Kyrgyzstan, a country you would love to play in Scrabble (if you could play proper nouns), even if you probably can't find it on a map (did you ever buy that shower curtain I told you about?). It will make you seem so cultured at cocktail parties, to casually say: "I saw this great Kryzgz movie the other day..."

Sociopolitical and historical awareness. This is one of the first films made in Kyrgyzstan since the fall of the Soviet Union & released internationally. Film has actually been really important in that country / soviet state, as the USSR used film to indoctrinate citizens (as they did elsewhere). Probably, this will be the first Kyrzgz film you'll have seen.

Enjoyable Film in and of Itself. What? Pretense and cultural awareness are not enough reasons for you to watch a movie? Wimp. This highly visual film may lack the CGI 3D effects you have come to expect from the cinema, but the story it tells is timeless. It could take place in virtually any time, save for a few excursions to the movies in the film. The film would work just as well if it were silent. The simple narrative works. The characters aren't archetypes, but humans, but they're comprehensible enough to be relatable, even from what will most likely be a vast cultural, geographical, and linguistic divide.

Reasons other than the 3 or 4 the few critics who've noticed this film have given. Here is what you know about this film from a few Google searches. It's in black & white with "strategic," "sparse" color (and I don't mean gimmicky black & white, like Schindler's List or Guy Maddin - and I appreciate Schindler's List & Maddin's work, but you know what I mean). Some critics / summaries have tactlessly given away the entire plot, which should not be as big of a sin as we make it out to be, but it's a coming of age story (but what does that mean? Whose age? Coming from what to what?). It's a relatable story, so much so that it feels like a memory, a memory from a pleasant perspective that's disjointed temporally. Perhaps it's cultural tourism, perhaps the alien landscape exacerbates the familiar emotive aspects of this story. Perhaps I'm merely re-bloviating the same reasons that critics have given for seeing this movie in the past. Regardless, I highly recommend that you watch it.

The DVD has sadly been discontinued, but you can get it from Netflix, or order it used from Amazon.

there is no leaving new york.

2009-05-18T12:14:00.003-04:00

It's been a while since I recommended something at you. Doing nothing all day long is so much more time consuming than I thought it would be.

Today's recommendation is The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. I got this book for 50 cents at the library book sale (Attn Nicole Krauss: I am sorry I could not contribute to your fabulous royalty check that way, but I'm POOR; please feel free to contribute to my fabulous student loan fund via paypal). I wanted to read something light before I resumed my not-so-fun summer of soul-rending media theory, and this book served its purpose.

Honestly, I'm of two minds about this book & I've spent a week losing sleep about whether or not to Recommend it to you, my beloved blog readers. For one thing (Originally, I wrote "on the one hand" there, then I went back and realized I do not, in fact, have 4 hands), I am very sick of New York novels about precocious Jewish children who have lost their fathers connecting with older people who happen to have survived the Holocaust. Seriously, it's a cottage industry, and it's neither original nor plausible; I don't necessarily seek realism in literature, but I really hate precocious children in general. I think that their overrepresentation in contemporary literature is symptomatic of literature's overconcern with, and over emulation of, the cinema. I know that sounds funny, coming from a cinema "scholar" and all, but my BA is in literature, so I feel somewhat qualified to make that assumption. Frankly, I think the trope of writing through the eyes of a precocious child is a big cop-out. The writers want to affect an innocence & naiveté but they want to keep their snappy one-liners. And of course, having grown up in a media-savvy generation, they only know how to respond to situations with pregnant pauses for laugh tracks & big-eyed, affected wonder.

Another thing I didn't want to like about the book was, well, how elitist it is. This is a book for people with 6-figure incomes (or student loan debt loads), multiple degrees, therapists, and piles of books. This is a book for those who sneer at grammar and see no redeeming features in the masses, if you want to look at it negatively. This book is heavily informed by Borges, who is a writer I adore, and I adore him because I am a reluctant, overeducated elitist (True story: When I was 8 and could not sleep my father tossed Ficciones at me, and I've been a fan ever since, 4realz). This book is totally informed by a Eurocentric worldview, and as much as I identify with that, I find it very problematic lately. I'm not sure this book would be as meaningful or make as much sense to someone who hadn't read Borges or seen Shoah. I admire intertextuality, though, and if this book gets one person to read Borges, I think I'll take back the elitism part of this pseudo-argument.

However, in the end, what really sold me on this work was the problem of language. The book centers on a lost or missing text that has been translated and is being re-translated. The book centers on the problem of a missing object, and whether an object - a narrative - can exist without originals. The book deals centrally with a text to which the reader only has partial access (sort of like Infinite Jest and some other works I can't remember right now; this semester has killed my brain). The novel, in a sense, deals not just with the schmaltzy story of Loooooove and NEW YORK and DEAD FATHERS (not in the Barthelme sense) but with the inadequacies and slipperiness of language. I don't find this book interesting because of the story or the characters, but because of what the text as a whole engages with and tries to represent. Who is an author? What does it mean to translate a work? What does it mean to invent a story? Can a story be owned or attributed? Where is the essence of a story, in which words?

These questions obviously don't have pat answers - and certainly not in The History of Love, but the book begins to take them up, and for that, it is Today's Recommendation.

Stay classy, blog readers.

We just couldn't say goodbye

2009-05-10T11:46:00.001-04:00

Hello, beloved blog readers.

It's been a long time since I Recommended Things at you. My apologies. This semester thing came up. Or rather, it ended, in the ungraceful way it usually does. I've actually been done since Wednesday, but all I have been capable of is staring at my ceiling (it's. so. fascinating) and attempting to respond to hostile emails from students.

But, where do you, beloved blog readers, fit into all of this?

Luckily, I did not work efficiently on my papers. I scoured the Internet and netflix & my DVD collection to procrastinate in the most efficient way possible. I experienced MEDIA! Therefore, I have a slew of new things to recommend to you!

Today's recommendation is Sita Sings the Blues (2008, Nina Paley). I belong to a colloquium about documentaries, and one participant raved about this film (which is not a documentary). I barely noticed that you could watch it on Thirteen until I was looking for ways to not work for 90 minutes or so a few weekends ago. I noticed that David Bordwell recommended it on his blog, and decided to procrastinate by watching it.

Oh, this film. How I wish I could watch it on a big screen, but even on my laptop, its energy and panache took over my soul! The film is a retelling of the Ramayana, set within the framework of a present-day, mediated, intercontinental breakup, punctuated by Annette Hanshaw's jazz vocals. Also, there are cats. And shadow puppet narrators. And the greatest intermission you will ever see in cinema.

The phrase "eye candy" makes me retch, but if you're into that kind of phrase, yes, this is eye candy. Granted, I think that phrase in and of itself dismisses the impact on one's soul that beautiful images can have, like vitamins, but this blog is not about my bizarre linguistic predilections.

Today, this blog is about Sita Sings the Blues.

This is a triumph of postmodern hybridity. The film tells an engaging, entertaining story, but it also is about larger issues, about the power of media and modern technology to give us access to different cultures and stories; it's about cultural heritages both east & west; it's about the power of great literature to speak to our own lives.

Moreover, even if the movie sucked, which it emphatically does not, what Nina Paley is doing for / about copyright certainly warrants a recommendation in and of itself. This film has a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.

You can stream the film for free on thirteen.org and sometime this year, it should be out on DVD. I could not recommend watching it more.

reports exaggerate the capability of my hands

2009-04-27T08:55:00.003-04:00

i, too, am thick in the semsester-endgame-clusterfuck. i will be back after all my papers are turned in, or more likely, late at night the night before the remaining ones are due. And after the horrifying reality of months with no income sets in.

until then, i recommend not being a douchebag. Seriously. Try it! It's awesome.

don't know when i'll be back again.

2009-04-26T14:24:00.001-04:00

Hello faithful readers,

with the semester coming to a close, papers being due, finals coming up, and me of course being a complete slacker who is behind in all of this work, i am going to be taking a brief hiatus from updating this blog. like, a week or maybe two. however, i leave you in very capable hands with miranda, and i look forward to making further recommendations to you once i have achieved freedom from the constraints of the semester.

one more, before i go, that should be self-explanatory - i recommend listening to sigur rós on vinyl with the windows open and a nice breeze going through the room whilst working on papers and eating fresh strawberries. it's gloriously relaxing and removes the stress from the papers. honestly.

Reissue! Repackage! Repackage!

2009-04-24T22:46:00.003-04:00

Today’s recommendation: a moratorium on musical revisionism.

Before going into this post, I need to get this off my chest: I am an old fashioned, album kind of guy. I suppose in that sense, I have never really fully bought into the digital age. I mean, yes, I own an iPod, and I occasionally will use the shuffle all songs feature when I’m in the car. For the most part, though, if I am listening to music – not just putting music on in the background, but actually listening to it, which is an activity that I am not convinced more than 25% of the populace actually engages in,, but that is the subject for another post – I likely know what it is that I want to listen to, and so that is what I will listen to. Perhaps I am feeling nostalgic, and I want to listen to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. I will not just put on “Tangled Up in Blue” or “Idiot Wind” and move on, I will listen to the entire album. It doesn’t matter that I really, really hate “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” and that that song prevents this from being a perfect album (again, another post) – it is part of the album, and therefore when I listen to Blood on the Tracks, I listen to it.

The whole concept of skipping tracks on an album has always been somewhat alien to me. Perhaps it is due to my musical taste usually lying outside of the sphere of manufactured pop, where only three singles are needed to make an album, and the rest is filler. A lot of the bands that I listen to seem to have more of an album-based aesthetic rather than a singles-based aesthetic, and the albums seem designed to be enjoyed as a whole (otherwise, I would only purchase the singles). Even if I hate one or two of the songs, it is part of the artist’s original vision and who am I to second-guess that?

But second-guessing seems to be done all too often these days. I shouldn’t say “these days,” really – this has been going on at least since the ‘60s, when the UK and US versions of Beatles and Stones records carried completely different tracklistings (and, in ~~almost~~ every case, the original UK version was superior – even in the case of the Stones’s Aftermath, “Paint It, Black” be damned). Now, though, there just seems to be a more malicious edge to it. Then, as now, the rationale came down to money – the UK albums eschewed singles, assuming that the fans already owned the singles. Singles and albums were viewed as entirely different beasts. When the US version of the album would be issued, The singles that had been released prior to that album would be inserted into the tracklisting, at the expense of some album tracks. Under this philosophy, the single was seen as a way of selling the album, the assumption (probably not entirely incorrect, granted) being that if the American record-buying public did not have the instant gratification of a recognizable hit single, they would not purchase the album.

(N.B.: I have not researched this, so this description may be entirely composed of naïve simplifications and misunderstandings, and may in fact be entirely inaccurate. If this is the case, then I want you to please feel free to just turn your head the other way and ignore it; this is not meant to be academic writing, after all!)

This trend seems to have abated quite a bit by the time the 70s rolled around, though it still reared its head every now and then, most famously in the case of the first album by The Clash (do you want to guess how I have that one tracked in my iTunes?) After CDs had been around on the consumer market long enough to feel safe and established (probably the early to mid 1990s), we began to enter a long age of revisionist reissues that is still raging on.

One of the most egregious examples of recent revisionism is The Cure. Their debut single was called “Killing an Arab,” and was based on the novel, The Stranger, by Albert Camus. It is pretty much a narrative clone of that novel, in fact; there really seems to be no racial hatred involved in the title; the novel just happens to be set in Algeria, and the man the narrator shows is, indeed, an Arab. In any case, when the collection Staring at the Sea: The Singles was released in 1986, the band and label were pressured into placing a disclaimer sticker on the album stating that it was based on a novel and that The Cure neither endorse nor condone racial prejudice or violence. Silly, but fair enough.

The real revisionism began with the issue of The Cure’s Greatest Hits CD in November of 2001. “Killing an Arab” was conspicuously absent from this disc. Fair enough, I thought at the time; after all, it wasn’t a big radio hit, even if its status as a fan favorite would likely be enough to warrant its inclusion here. Then, in 2004, The Cure began their reissue campaign of the old albums. When they reissued their first album, Three Imaginary Boys (which had, of course, originally been issued in the US at Boys Don’t Cry with “Killing an Arab” inserted into the tracklisting and a handful of album tracks removed), the song was nowhere to be found on the second disc, in spite of its status as a contemporaneous single. The Faith reissue did include “Charlotte Sometimes,” a contemporaneous single, as a bonus track, so the argument cannot be made that the label chose not to include standalone singles. No, this looks to me like a case of the label trying to act like this song has never existed. Because both Staring at the Sea: The Singles and Boys Don’t Cry are out of print, the song, which is of no small historical importance, remains out of print.

Of course, this is a rather extreme example, and most cases of revisionism are not so political as that. Most of them involve merely tacking bonus tracks onto the end of an album. I am torn over this practice. While having bonus tracks is nice, there is something about the completeness and stasis of the album that is disrupted when one tacks track at the end. In the ‘90s, the Rykodisc Elvis Costello reissue campaign left ten seconds of silence on the disc after the album proper before the bonus tracks began, which at least gave you a subtle aural cue that the album was done. The early-aughts Rhino reissue campaign added several bonus tracks to each release and put all the bonus tracks on a second disc, leaving the album proper, well remastered, on its own, unadulterated disc. This reissue campaign, as well as Rhino’s subsequent Cure reissue campaign, seems to respect the original forms of the albums. (For the record, this particular Elvis Costello reissue campaign may be my favorite reissue campaign ever. We will see how The Beatles reissues measure up this September.)

Rhino is not above making a few mistakes, however; just look at their recent reissuing of the entire catalog by the notoriously reissue-aversive band, The Replacements. First of all, it is incomplete; certain b-side recordings and rarities are missing for no discernible reason. Second, the bonus tracks are tacked on to the end of the album; once again, no respect for the original album. Third, Rhino have seen fit to excise things such as bits of studio chatter at the beginning of some tracks; this is not a big deal to me, and I take no issue with it whatsoever, but some purists who have grown up with these albums have called Rhino out on this, and although this is not my battle, I stand firmly in solidarity with these people. But the biggest problem with this reissue campaign is the way they signaled the transition from the album to the bonus tracks. Here’s how it goes:

First, five seconds or so of silence.
Then, footsteps.
Next, the sound of a vault door creeping open.

Yes, seriously. This is what they did. Fortunately, I have Fission on my computer, so I was able to excise this, so that I don’t have to hear these footsteps and vault door opening every time I want to listen to “Answering Machine.” Still, though, I should not have had to do that. The extra sounds should not have been there. They are not cute. They are grating the first time you hear them, and they get progressively worse with each subsequent listen. It’s a shame, because Rhino’s remastering really sounds terrific on these albums (Tim and Pleased to Meet Me in particular really needed badly to be remastered). For the record, the last bonus track on each album ends with the vault door slamming shut and the footsteps walking away. Unbelievable.

So here is what I am proposing: why alter an album that has already been established? As much as I enjoy getting more songs, I also want to respect and preserve the album. When bonus tracks are to be had, record labels can follow the model Rhino used with The Cure and Elvis Costello and put the bonus tracks on a second disc. Or they could issue a CD of b-sides and rarities, or a double CD, or even a box set. Either way, this tendency toward changing the albums as they were originally recorded and released seems to me tantamount to disrespect for the artists, and disregard for the art they produced.

I had some more thoughts, but they are gone, and this is already three (single-spaced) pages in word, which means I should have stopped long ago. I will be expanding this into a longer and more academic think piece on my solo blog in a couple of weeks, so hopefully those thoughts will be back by then.

Here comes that awful feeling again.

2009-04-22T23:16:00.003-04:00

A simple one today:

Today, I recommend not being sick.

Being sick sucks.

Therefore, not being sick is mind-blowingly awesome.

It's a radical concept, I know.

I'm sick. I'm miserable.

It sucks.

Real post tomorrow, maybe? In the meantime, please continue to be excellent to each other.

gifting

2009-04-21T22:01:00.000-04:00

It's been a long day, Internet, and my energy is fast waning.

I have always wanted to say, "fast waning."

But I will press myself to get today's recommendation to you.

Today's recommendation is.... Freecycle.

Freecycle is a loosely organized network of local groups dedicated to recirculating Stuff. You want something? You post and ask for it. You got something? You post and offer it.

I know, I know, our blog is now in danger of turning into one of those oh-so-trendy personal finance / thrift blogs. Well, I was cheap before cheap was trendy, and I can tell you that no matter how many coupons you clip, free is still cheaper.

I've been part of several different Freecycle groups in 3 different states (and, where I went to college, we had a Free Table that sort of worked the same way). While occasionally they get overrun with greedy people asking for ridiculous things (WANTED: UNLOCKED 3G IPHONE), I have never had a negative Freecycle experience.

Over the years, I have been gifted the following from Freecycle:

A hamper
Sheets & towels (today! I got these today!)
Countless books
A decorative rug
Kitchen stuff
and that's all I can remember right now.

I have also given away lots of things, and in doing so discovered the real, important part of Freecycle. It's not just about Stuff and getting tons of free shit. It's about building a real community and engaging in face to face interaction and using this to subvert consumerist, homogenized culture.

So join Freecycle today. Chances are you probably have some crap you need to get rid of; chances are greater there's some crap you need or want but probably shouldn't buy.

be excellent to each other.

2009-04-20T22:34:00.005-04:00

i kind of had a whole conceptual recommendation post planned out for tonight, but recent events have curbed that for the time being.

today, i recommend respecting your fellow human beings and treating them with the dignity and respect that they deserve and with which you yourself expect (and rightfully so) to be treated.

the anonymity of the internet, unfortunately, leads some entitled/insecure people to inflate their own egos ignore their own problems by lashing out at others and trying to strike at their vulnerabilities. and, let's just lay down the guidelines here and agree that this is NOT COOL. people say some pretty unforgivable things from behind a keyboard and thousands of miles of wires, and i for one am sick of it.

i refuse to bring myself to the level of these people, but honestly, when you see people wishing for slow and painful deaths, it can be really hard not to give in to the instinct to try to hit them where it hurts also. so instead, i'm just going to take the high road and call them out on their shit.

i doubt any of the people this post was written about (and they know who they are) read this blog, but on the off-chance that they do: life is so much easier and more pleasant when you don't push everyone else away. i promise. you should try it sometime.

oh, and also, in case anyone who prompted this recommendation is reading: i expect that i will not have to write another entry like this. i mean it.

in the end, apparently we have something to learn from keanu reeves. who knew?

Sure is nice to be able to see the floor again.

2009-04-19T22:31:00.002-04:00

Today’s recommendation is going to be a quick and self-explanatory one: clearing out clutter.

Tanya and I have had a 2-bedroom apartment for the past two years. For virtually that entire time, the small second bedroom has been a room for storage of my guitars, records, CDs, and desktop computer. As I accumulated more “stuff,” that stuff ended up accumulating in the room. Eventually it got to the point where the room was a disaster of clutter and junk through which one could not safely walk without breaking something or running the risk of tripping and seriously injuring oneself.

Lately, between my growing desire for more privacy (ever since the breakup I have more or less been spending all of my time at home out in the living room or dining room), and the fact that I have a BRAND NEW STEREO (expanded recommendation coming soon!), I have been wanting more and more to finally remedy that room. Well, today, faced with the prospect of researching Shakespeare or writing about critical theory, I finally decided to declutter.

It is a process, of course. I had a LOT of shit in here. But, I have thrown out probably about three tall kitchen garbage bags worth of crap. A lot of it was stuff that I found amusing, or sentimental, and still had some meaning to me… but I had come to terms with the fact that I no longer needed it. One can’t spend all of one’s time dwelling on a past that is out of one’s reach, to which one cannot return. That’s what the next 8 months need to be about – jettisoning that past. Getting ready for the future (ready for the world about to come).

There’s still a lot more left to go through and throw out. Boxes of stuff in the closet I need to sort through. But, the room is almost to a point where I feel comfortable sitting in it playing my records (have I mentioned how great my stereo sounds?), almost to the point where I wouldn’t feel embarrassed having friends in *to show off my stereo, of course).

Post Script: And before anyone scolds me on my comment about throwing things out… I’ve also been recycling what I can. I’ve only genuinely been trashing things I can’t recycle around here.

in case of food flare up, unplug unit

2009-04-19T22:24:00.003-04:00

We're back to typical gloomy, totally-devoid-of-sun-weather and I'm back to my usual mopey, totally-devoid-of-productivity habits.

Lucky for you, I don't consider this blog actual productivity.

Today's recommendation is NOT BUYING THE BLACK & DECKER TOAST-R-OVEN.

This is a moderately expensive toaster oven from what you may consider a respected brand.

It is also guaranteed to kill you in a fire.*

At least, that's what almost just happened to me. I put my vegetarian pop tart in and put it on light toast, and jumped in the shower. I realize that you are supposed to hover, concernedly, near the toaster oven. That's not how I roll. I double-checked to make sure it was on toast.

I got out of the shower very quickly when i smelled smoke.

The toaster oven is charred and the pop tart is worse. Smoke was everywhere. I had to close the cat in the bathroom and open all the doors and turn on all the fans.

The problem was, the toaster didn't turn off when it was finished toasting. This is really stupid, considering I've only had it a few months and don't really use it that often. I looked up the warranty information (none that I could find) in the instruction manual and then...

It was then that I remembered I'd had terrible experiences with Black & Decker before. In 2007 I got a small coffeemaker, the kind that fills up a coffee tumbler. It was great for a week & then suddenly stopped working. After a bunch of frustrating phone calls, the powers that be at B&D decided that if i shipped it at expense to them they'd send a new one.

I did so, and thus began the great Warranty Headache of 2007.

2 weeks later a package arrived. It was not the same coffeemaker; it was a crappier model that retailed for half the price of the other one. I called them to point this out and they said that if I shipped this back at expense they'd send me what I'd originally ordered.

It was finals, I was applying to PhD programs at the time, I was about to go out of the country - this made me livid. I needed coffee and I had no time for this crap. Finally they said I could keep that one & they'd send the original one.

It arrived while I was in Germany, and nobody signed for it, so it got sent back by UPS.

Thanks, Black & Decker.

I guess the real question is why I ever bought the toaster oven; the answer is probably "It was the cheapest one in target."

Well, never again.

Dear Black & Decker:

You now owe me a toaster oven AND a coffee maker.

So let's revise my Recommendation.

Today's recommendation is don't ever buy anything from Black & Decker unless you want to die a fiery, non-caffeinated death.

*n.b.: HYPERBOLE. I did not actually die in a fire today. The real danger is smoke damage and wasting $50 on a piece of stupid crap.

That's nothing, you should have heard my rendition of "My Heart Will Go On"

2009-04-18T23:43:00.005-04:00

Today’s recommendation is perhaps a bit crass, in a way, but it is crass with good intentions and in a selfless way. Today, I recommend donating to my autism walk.

I will spare you the statistics, which you likely have already heard countless times and can look up easily anyway. The fact of the matter is, this is a disability that we really don’t understand as much as we should. It has a huge effect on those who live with it, and for the number of people diagnosed with autism, it’s truly puzzling how little funding is available for research.

I have been working with individuals diagnosed with autism and other developmental disabilities for nearly nine years. About six years ago I first became involved with N.A.A.R., which later merged with Autism Speaks. Autism Speaks is currently the nation’s largest autism awareness and advocacy organization and is the major sponsor of the autism walk.

As you can see from the page, I have set a high fundraising goal for myself, but I believe that I can do it with your help. I also wish to call to your attention my two incentive campaigns. The first campaign is a donation-matching campaign; I will submit my personal donation to match the largest single donation I receive from any individual up until the evening before the walk. It’s pretty straightforward; I’m putting my money where my mouth is. Note the qualifiers: single donation and individual. Corporate donations, including employer’s matching charitable gifts, do not apply to this campaign, and a series of small donations will not be aggregated for these purposes.

The second incentive campaign, from my point of view, is the interesting one: if you donate to my fundraiser, I will play and sing a song for you. Any song that you like. I will compile all these songs onto a CD (or, hopefully I will have enough donations to make it a double-CD or even a box set!), which will then be distributed as a gift to everyone who has donated. This is my third year running such an incentive; two years ago, I covered songs at open mic nights for donations. Some of the songs I played included “Fire in Cairo” by The Cure and “Sexyback” by Justin Timberlake. Seriously, this really happened!

Last year, I recorded two EPs of cover songs. Covers included songs by Coldplay, Okkervil River, Shearwater, *Nsync, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Phil Ochs, as well as The Most Unwanted Song. I believe I still have a few copies of these EPs lying around, so if you want one of these, please let me know in the comments. Those requesting old EPs will waive their request for this year’s set, unless they make another donation.

Note that I do reserve the right to set a price on certain songs; if a song is ridiculously difficult to learn/perform or has the potential to be highly embarrassing, I may need a more substantial donation than the minimum in order to fulfill the request. Also note that multiple donations will give you multiple request credits.

So go! Donate! E-mail me your requests (I’d prefer to keep the requests a secret so people are surprised when they get their CDs, so I ask that you do not leave requests in the comments)! Help me reach my fundraising goal! Earn your good Samaritan points for the day!

Hopefully I will be back with a real recommendation tomorrow!

it's been a long cold lonely winter

2009-04-18T15:43:00.002-04:00

Good morning, Internet. It's a sunny Saturday as I finish my coffee and think about how next to procrastinate on my mountain of work. No better way than Recommending Things to People, right? I'm really good at it.

I was going to recommend Hiring Me for Summer Work, but that seemed crass. You and I barely know each other, Blogging Audience; who knows if we'd work together well?

So today's recommendation is... going outside and enjoying the extremely rare beautiful weather.

8 months ago, I moved to Bloomington, Indiana, which has pretty awful weather. I was surprised by how completely awful, and varied in its awfulness, the weather is. This town / state / region of the country is pretty unremarkable otherwise. But no. in the past 8 months, I have been hailed upon, tornado sirened-at, flooded, snowed, sleeted, frozen, and forced to exist under a grey, depressing haze of ominous clouds. Granted, I have been told that true natives everywhere complain about the weather. I have also (somewhat condescendingly) been told that "nobody moves to the Midwest for the weather." Well, this may be true, but I still have the right to complain about it. Besides, I went to college in stunningly-beautiful Sarasota, Florida. Of course my weather standards are high.

But today is beautiful. It's warm, but not sweltering and disgusting. It's sunny, but I went outside and didn't get sunburned.

Go get on it. I don't need to say anything else. Get off the Internet and go play.

See you tomorrow, loyal blog readers.

Do we look like the kind of store that sells "I Just Called to Say I Love You?"

2009-04-17T21:32:00.008-04:00

Hello, interpeople. I’ve been neglecting to greet you in my posts lately. I apologize to be so rude and thoughtless. I don’t want the five of you or so who read this and wait with baited breath for each day’s new recommendations to think that I take you for granted. (N.B..: I am including Miranda in that estimate of five people. Prove me wrong.)

Today, in conjunction with/in honor of Record Store Day, I am recommending supporting independent record stores.

When I first starting purchasing my own music (first two CDs I purchased: Out of Time and Automatic for the People by R.E.M., both purchased at the same time!), I never gave much though to where I was purchasing it. One place was as good as another, I thought. Of course, when I went to a local chain called Tunes, I did notice that he selection was much cooler and more varied, but at that point I did not think of choosing a location from which to purchase music in terms more complicated than convenience, proximity, and cost.

I think it was around the time that I discovered and started hanging out in my dearly departed Full Circle Records in 1998 or so that I began to think about what I got from independent record stores as opposed to the Best Buys, Circuit Cities, Sam Goodies, Tower Records, et cetera. The fact that the owners took the time to talk to me and get to know my tastes and recommend things that I might like, and that I could strike up a conversation with random customers, sparked something in a part of me that had never quite been touched in that way. Before I knew how to articulate it as such, Full Circle had become a source of community for me. That was what I loved about it – it was so much more than a record store. It was a place to hang out with friends, to make new friends… and, of course, to discover some really, really great music.

Like all great things in life, it had to come to an end eventually. I worked there for a while, and I loved getting my pay from Mike just to turn right around and hand almost ll of it right back to him. It was at Full Circle that I first started purchasing vinyl, that I ordered most of the Mountain Goats and Red House Painters and Elliott Smith and Elvis Costello catalogues, that I would have debates with Scott or George (well, a debate with George usually just involved vehement repetitions of contradictory positions with no reasoning involved). I shot some video of my friend Bob's band, The Young Professionals, at Full Circle. I played my very first “show” at Full circle, probably also setting the record for the longest show Full Circle has ever hosted. I played the last show that Full Circle would host before closing its doors. Anyone who was paying attention would have seen me shedding some tears during my truly horrendous butchering of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” at the end of the show. Somehow, I knew that Full Circle closing marked the end of a lot more than just Full Circle.

After Full Circle closed, I started going to Mars Red records in Haddonfield. The owner, Scott, was a great guy. Unfortunately, it was not more than a year and a half after I discovered Mars Red that it, too, closed its doors forever. I will spare my analysis of what has happened to create such a state of affairs; that is not the point of this entry, and would probably be better suited to my solo blog, if I ever get that one off the ground. But, all finger-pointing aside, I am now in the unenviable position of not having a good independent record store to call my own. I really don’t like Tunes very much; it is rather impersonal and geared increasingly toward the mainstream, and its chain status, regardless of the fact that it is strictly local, is a turn-off for me. AKA Music and Repo Records in Philadelphia are just inconvenient to get to, and have a bit of a slick, glossy feel to me. Princeton Record Exchange is kind of far and is sort of oppressively overwhelming, intimidating, and impersonal. Vintage Vinyl is even further and kind of has the same feel. Bloomington is fortunate to have a great independent store in Landlocked Music and a truly mind-blowingly awesome shop in T.D.’s CDs and LPs, but I won’t be moving to Bloomington until January.

These places are true sources of community for music lovers, and they have been and are drying up at an alarming rate. It is up to us music lovers to take a stand and save them. I’m not going to engage in hyperbolic and George W. Bush-esque rhetoric about the big box stores being the enemy and supporting them being tantamount to treason, but, well, I suppose I have already put the suggestion there, haven’t I? I know that the economy is in shambles and that expendable income is hard to come by these days, so I’m not taking the hard line here and demanding that everyone drop everything and immediately spend $200 at a local independent. However, I am imploring everyone, when they want to purchase a new record, please consider not going to Amazon or iTunes or Best Buy or wherever you would normally shop for such an item. Instead, visit an independent record store. Go to your usual haunt. If you don’t have a usual, just pick one. Talk to the employees. Start a conversation with a customer. Independent record stores are one of the few kinds of retail establishments in which you can strike up a conversation with a complete stranger at random and not be thought crazy. It’s a pretty magical thing.

And, with tomorrow being Record Store Day, seriously, what better time to start? I know that I had a pretty good time with Anthony on Record Store Day last year, traipsing to AKA and Repo in Philly, Princeton Record Exchange, and Princeton Record Exchange. I came out with all kinds of cool loot last year, including Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks’s “Cold Son” 10” single, a 12” EP of Arthur Russell covers including Jens Lekman, and 7” singles from Death Cab for Cutie, R.E.M., The Breeders, and the Black Keys. Tomorrow’s list of exclusive releases is a completely tl;dr clusterfuck of amazing releases, which promises some hard decisions on my part. Among the highlights:

A box set of Jesus Lizard 7” singles
An exclusive Flight of the Conchords single
An Iron & Wine live album
Two Sonic Youth split singles! (one with Beck, one with Jay Reatard)
A Flaming Lips/Black Keys covers split 7” (FL do Madonna’s “Borderline,” BK do a Captain Beefheart song)
A live Pavement album recorded in 1997
A My Morning Jacket live EP
Reissues galore!: Jane’s Addiction, MC5, The Smiths, and more
New 7”s from Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, the Decemberists

And there will be more that I will find interesting, I’m sure. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s likely recommendation, listening to 5 days worth of new music.

* * *

N.B. Miranda has directed me to an interesting interview with a gentleman who has made a film on the state of the independent record store. He shares some of my ideas about the record store being a community space beyond just a retail space. You can find it here.

GET BACK IN LINE!

2009-04-17T19:36:00.006-04:00

I haven't been feeling very well this week. I have a terrible cough (which I suspect is due to allergies) and creeping feelings of terror, related both to the upcoming months of no income and the final papers I procrastinate on.

I thought about recommending "better shuffle algorithms for CD players," because my 3rd-hand 300 disc changer seems to favor the crappiest stuff in there, and it annoys me.

But I'm not even sure if they actually work on an algorithm.

I was going to recommend a short Russian film I really liked, but I can't find it on the Internet anymore, so that's out for today.

Therefore, instead, today I am going to recommend...

Holiday from Rules.

I am recommending a film called Holiday from Rules, from 1959, not an actual holiday from rules. Sorry, anarchists!

Ken Smith, in his brilliant 1999 book Mental Hygiene (which you can buy here; i should really formally Recommend this to you someday), says this about it:

"An omniscient narrator with magical powers grants the wishes of four bratty kids by teleporting them to a tropical island where there are no rules. [...] As in Lord of the Flies -- which this film suspiciously resembles -- the little children quickly become dirty, hungry, and physically battered, and their anarchist Eden falls apart. Holiday from Rules conflates happiness and conformity (as do many films from the 1950s), but after the kids have been slapped around a little, they're more than willing to see things the narrator's way.

(pp. 158-159)

Well, sort of. In this short film, things fall apart and centers do not hold. On one hand, it's a critique of anarchist theory. On the other, it is a very effective form of birth control; seeing these whiny kids will make you want to abandon any children you do have* and spit in a corner, vowing to never have any more.

But - seriously. NO RULES? Then why don't they just fly off the island? Unbreak the kid's arm? Isn't saying there are no rules a rule in and of itself? I just don't get it.

But it's okay. Watch the film and have fun and remember, rules exist to keep us safe.

*FACETIOUS STATEMENT. WE EMPHATICALLY DISRECOMMEND AND HEARTILY UNENDORSE CHILD NEGLECT! THAT WAS HUMOR! I MEAN THE PART WHERE I SAID THIS FILM MAKES YOU WANT TO ABANDON CHILDREN, NOT THE PART WHERE I SAID WE UNENDORSE CHILD NEGLECT. ALTHOUGH I COULD SEE HOW YOU WOULD MIX THEM UP.

i got some credit in the straight world.

2009-04-16T23:08:00.008-04:00

~~Today I recommend taking a day off. From anything.~~ (Actually, I guess I recommended that yesterday.)

Okay. Take two.

Today I recommend: checking your credit report.

I had never done this before. It’s not that I didn’t care what my credit rating it; it was just that I was not concerned. I was secure in the knowledge that my credit was good. I paid my things on time. I didn’t abandon debts. I had gotten into some situations when I was younger, but I had resolved it all, and it was all old enough that it should have been off of my report.

A couple of weeks ago, on a whim, I decided to check my credit reports as a way of procrastinating from actually doing anything productive, i.e. schoolwork. What I found really shocked and amazed me.

The first one I ran was through Experian. Experian just had a staggering amount of blatantly false/inaccurate information about me. I’m talking:

4 alternate forms of my name, two of which were just wrong and which neither I nor any or my family members had ever used.
3 SSNs on file for me, besides my real one.
1 address in the boondocks of NJ. Neither my parents nor I have ever resided at this address.
Countless (okay, about 7) accounts that were not and never have been mine. Many of these were either accounts belonging to my father or joint accounts he shared with my mother. Several of these were opened BEFORE I WAS EVEN BORN. Experian even acknowledged that they were opened before I was born, and that it “may be suspicious.” Amazing how it just blatantly tells you, “Yeah, somebody fucked up and this can’t possibly be yours, but we’re going to hold it against you anyway.”

I filed disputes with all of the incorrect information on Experian, then moved on to TransUnion. TransUnion’s free service is very helpful, in that it will actually supply you with your report for all three credit reporting agencies. TransUnion was also the most accurate of the three with my records, although I still found a lot of my parents’ accounts somehow tied in to my identity. Still, though, the fact that they had the most accurate records of the three was tied in to the fact that my numerical score with them was also the highest.

I’m warning you all now – EquiFax is a pain in the ass. It’s a good thing TransUnion allowed me to view my EquiFax report, because EquiFax did not seem to allow me to generate a free report. EquiFax’s website seems to imply that one is only entitled to a free online report if one was recently denied credit. Otherwise, I was free to request a hard copy via mail. Fortunately, I already had the report from TransUnion, so could just take that information and dispute it online, right?

Wrong.

In order to dispute something online with EquiFax, one needs to have gotten their report online from EquiFax. Something for which I was not eligible.

Oh well, there’s always telephone.

Right, except that in order to dispute by telephone, one must already have a report number. One obtains a report number from… that’s right, you guessed it, opening an online report from EquiFax.

At least they allowed me to print out a PDF and write in my information and EVERY DISPUTE I wished to make. By hand. I couldn’t even type into it and then print it out. Fail. EquiFax is quite obviously the least user-friendly and most behind-the-times of the three agencies.

Perhaps it is not coincidental that my EquiFax score was the lowest of the three. Like, depressingly low.

So basically, after being responsible and working my ass off to keep up with this stuff and rebound from some mistakes I made years and years ago, it was a real revelation to find that my scores, which I had assumed were safely in the at least moderately high range, were just scraping along in the acceptable range (and one of them not even). All due to misinformation, mistaken identities which should never have been an issue, and some off-the-wall random errors that seem to have come from absolutely nowhere.

I’m waiting to get all of this straightened out. I’m already so stressed out with school and with work, It’s really taken a mental/psychic toll on me. I suppose the lesson/moral here is that it is your right to view your information on this shit and to make sue that everything is nice and accurate. If you don’t do it, nobody is going to do it for you. These companies, it goes without saying, don’t care about you and will not hesitate to crush you given the chance. Don’t let it happen. Be assertive and call these companies out on things when they need to be called out.

Now, more than ever, we need to stand up to these corporations and claim the rights to which we are entitled. If we don’t, who will?

* * *

N.B.: Do not make the same mistake I did and go to each credit reporting agency website individually. It would have saved me a lot of trouble last week had I seen this before I did so. In any case, I have already cancelled the “free trials” of the services that are rather bogusly associated with these agencies, since I have already gotten the information I wanted out of them. At least for next year I know about this truly free consolidated report.

all alone in a room following lines on maps

2009-04-16T12:07:00.003-04:00

Good morning, Internet. Today's post will necessarily be short, due to my getting far behind, or at least, feeling far behind, in my task of writing papers. So, this post will not be tl;dr. Rejoice!

And hopefully it will even be useful or awesome!

Today's recommendation is... the World Map Shower Curtain by Saturday Knight Ltd.

Perhaps you agree with me: You need a shower curtain. Perhaps now, you try to take showers, but water gets everywhere, and it's very easy for people to peep on you. Or maybe you are just looking for the perfect decorative-yet-educational accent in your bathroom.

The Saturday Knight Ltd. World Map Shower Curtain is the answer, and more!

Combining the practicality of a shower curtain with the usefulness and awesomeness of a map, this shower curtain might just enable you to be awesome at Jeopardy.

The thing is - and this is the reason I'm recommending it - this isn't just any map. it's a subtly, yet highly political one. This map shows lots of contested principalities and regions - Tibet, Lesotho, etc. - and makes the daring move of making Georgia in the same color as Russia, implying unity. These are subtle, yet daring moves for a map, and unusual ones for a shower curtain map. not that I'm an expert on shower curtain maps, but it certainly seems unusual to me that they would be this political about it.

Why should you care?

It's a fact - Americans are provincial. They rarely use maps and even more rarely study geography. In many places around the world, people think that Americans are characterized by their lack of curiosity about the world. I challenge you to fight this perception!

Even if you disagree with me on the necessity of improving America's international image, or if you are a past winner of the National Geographic Bee, you will certainly agree with me that staring at this brightly-colored, cheerful map as you brush your teeth (or, whatever) will help you learn new stuff, and learning new stuff only has benefits. For instance, you can win bar trivia games, impress friends, and someday even start a blog of your own!

PS: I am in no way affiliated with Saturday Knight, Ltd., and don't know a thing about them that I couldn't find on Google in about 10 seconds. I am getting no sponsorship or anything from them. I just really like this shower curtain. Um, is that weird?

You can buy one here, among other places.

durch jede stunde

2009-04-15T09:10:00.003-04:00

Good morning, Internet. I feel my recommendation yesterday was somewhat contentious, so I will try to err on the side of bein' classy this morning as I finish my coffee, hoping to spill as little as possible on me, and comb the classifieds for jobs.

Today's recommendation is... The poetry of Gottfried Benn.

I know what you're thinking. I've never heard of this dude! Who cares?

Benn (1886-1957) was a German poet, obviously, who was also a medical doctor. He was interested in the hideousness, corporeality, and viscerality of life. So if you're a CSI fan, or extremely Goth, how can you not love work such as:

LITTLE ASTER (translation by Babette Deutsch)

A drowned truck-driver was propped on the slab.
Someone had stuck a lavender aster
between his teeth.
As I cut out the tongue and the palate,
through the chest
under the skin
with a long knife,
I must have touched the flower, for it slid into the brain next.
I packed it up into the cavity of the chest
among the excelsior
as it was sewn up.
Drink yourself full in your vase!
Rest softly,
Little aster!

***
If you can read German, you're in for even more of a treat (no disrespect for Ms. Deutsch; I just think the German original is even more stunning). Benn has an entire body (pun intended) of autopsy poems. Please understand, it's not just the SHOCKING!!!!!! gimmick of the fact that the dude wrote poems about autopsies. It's the overall dark world-view, the quiet wonder and beauty that battle with his cynicism in a hard job - that's what does it for me. Benn practiced medicine, and poetry, before World War I. He lived through both World Wars and the balkanization of his country. His work reflects and anticipates major stylistic movements within European writing - expressionism and Modernism, for instance. He has numerous important prose pieces that dealt both with cultural politics and literary criticism.

And yet for all this, he is fairly obscure, especially in America (don't even get me started). That's why I reiterate today's recommendation: look at some of his poetry.

This bilingual edition of his selected writings is a good place to start.

this site has a lot of PDF's and so forth of his work, even though the site frankly skeeves me out (and i feel the translations are not very good).

A delicious, delicious cornucopia of fail.

2009-04-14T22:13:00.003-04:00

Today’s recommendation: Gimme Pizza.

Preface: Ever since I was a child, I’ve had a real problem with different food items touching on my plate. I would also make a huge production out of making sure that I kept everything separated at all times. Holiday dinners were always the worst, purely due to the volume of food. While my family members would be piling their plates high, intermingling everything, I’d be the one carefully compartmentalizing my plate – I’d need to make sure that the corn was not in the mashed potatoes, et cetera. I know the old argument – it all gets mixed together after you swallow it anyway. My counter argument, though, has always been that your taste buds are on your tongue, and that you can’t taste it once it’s mixed together in your stomach. I’ve relaxed a bit on this, but I still have a tendency to compartmentalize my plate when preparing it. I wonder if my fascination with this video is in any way linked to this tendency.

I don’t know what to say about this that you can’t piece together by yourself after watching it. And watch it you must, although you may have some sort of violent physiological reaction to the very idea of watching it. True enough that this stuff is anathema to most sane people. But trust me on this one. You must watch. And watch. And watch again.

During the first viewing, you are likely petrified in horror and revolt. You want to look away, yet you can’t. The clip has an odd magnetism about it. During the second viewing, you find that the maddening refrain has caused you to start involuntarily tapping your foot or nodding your head. By the eighteenth viewing, you are starting to come to terms with the fact that you have a problem. Hopefully, somebody who cares about you has already initiated an intervention.

This clip comes from one of the Olsen Twins’s video releases, You’re Invited to Mary-Kate and Ashley’s Sleepover Party. I have seen the entire video, and this is the most noteworthy sequence on the video. I don’t think I can properly articulate why I love this video so much, and consequently I will not try. I just want to bring a few things to your attention:

• Was the cameraman really standing in a rowboat on a choppy sea while filming this?
• RACIAL STEREOTYPE ALERT: note that it is the token African American girl who suggests the fried chicken. Just sayin’.
• Those “fried green tomatoes” are not fried. At all.
• “We’ve got mega munchies.” I don’t think I need to comment on this.

That is all. Nothing else needs to be said, as the video speaks for itself. Enjoy. Discuss. Rinse. Repeat.

conspicuous consumption begins within you

2009-04-14T12:38:00.003-04:00

Hello there, Internet. I'm not sure at what point today I'll post this, so I will refrain from temporally-bounded greetings.

I soldier on with final papers and the general malaise that I like to call "semester endgame clusterfuck blues." On top of finishing papers, grading my students' work, and worrying about the world, I am also scrambling to apply to jobs.

Anyway, without further ado...
Today's Recommendation is....Watching horrendous reality shows about FrankenFamilies on TLC.

Yes. I know. I am able to hide my true love for reality television under the guise of being a "media scholar." You may not be in this situation, although I hasten to point out that since I am a media scholar, watching this crap is the sort of thing that passes for "pleasure time" in my life. But read on.

TLC used to be The Learning Channel. Now, apparently, they are trying to be The Life Channel and thus, approximately 90% of their programming revolves around baby shows and freak shows portraying ginormous families (the other 10% involves fashion crap). Because clearly, this is the best way to Celebrate Life: portray hideous American excess by showing us super-sized wealthy families and how they do such-and-such activity with ZOMG SO MANY PEOPLE!

I am being unkind when I say these shows are freak shows, but let's call a spade a spade. I am referring, of course, to the following TLC offerings: Jon & Kate Plus 8; to 16/17/18 Kids & Counting, and to Table for 12. These are shows that fetishize large families. And not kinds that involve selfless people adopting tons of kids - no, not at all. I mean people who:

1. were intent on reproduction at all costs - This is the subject for another post, but I feel that invasive fertility treatments are more of a class marker, an attempt to demonstrate class and social standing than anything else;

2. who would not selectively reduce when they had high order multiples - their
choice, I'm not criticizing that at all - what is important to realize is how these shows present these people as martyrs for not/making that choice, and never portray anyone who makes different choices (such as someone who chooses to adopt special-needs children, for example). It is in keeping with TLC's subtle rebranding into what is effectively the Anti-Abortion Network.

3. who subscribe to completely bizarre, marginal ideologies, such as the completely insane and hypocritical Duggar cult from Arkansas, who adhere to the "Quiverfull" movement and don't believe in hand-holding before engagement or kissing before marriage, even though they cake makeup on their daughters for all their one-on-one interviews.

Now, let me say right off the bat that I have some unpopular opinions, especially for someone who doesn't have any kids, and I really do want to qualify that, because maybe if I ever have children (which also means adoption), my opinions may change. I believe strongly in adoption. I think that overpopulation is a huge crisis, and one few people want to address. I know that climate change is a big problem, and Western levels of personal consumption (including: food / food miles, medical care, etc., as well as cars and the other crap you buy) are largely to blame.

Frankly, I don't know how people can have 10 kids and still get to sleep at night knowing there are babies starving elsewhere. I barely can sleep at night knowing this; apparently the guilt is dissipated if your DNA is personally consuming 10 times as many resources as it would be. Hell of a legacy.

I also want to qualify this essay by noting that I'm sure all the families involved are good people who simply want only what's best for their kids, although the reality show structure / editing often does not portray them that way (Kate Goselin, I am looking at you).

Anyway, so that's my position. It breaks my heart that instead of portraying some people who very worthily adopt special-needs children, TLC instead persistently focuses on wealthy products of IVF and other fertility treatments. If they are to be the "learning" channel in name, it is too bad that they cannot be so in practice by presenting things that are really in the public's best interest to learn about (e.g., the environmental impact of having enough kids to have 2 softball teams). It is too bad that they reinforce the American dream-world that ignores virtually everything outside its own borders.

Moreover, the shows really have no redeeming features other than the fact that, at least within America with its shrinking family size, they are freak shows. The editing style fetishizes shots that emphasize, holy shit, that's a lot of people: sped-up footage of a long line of people walking out of the house. CLose-ups on feet as they do so just so, hey, in case you weren't paying attention? That is a BIG family. Pop up stats smarmily informing us how many diapers have been tossed into landfills due to these people, or how many pizzas they consume in a sitting.

So let's examine each of these shows briefly, and then I may or may not make another recommendation...If you're a hater, keep in mind that I'm writing about these shows because I watch them, and that in and of itself is a punishment.

Jon & Kate + 8: Institutional Child-Rearing

This show horrifies me. Not just the fact that they have 8 kids, not just the fact that they built a set into their home to enable their reality TV dream, not just the fact that TLC seems to subsidize every aspect of their McMansion-y existence...it's the fact that, at least the way the show portrays them, the children are not allowed to have m/any individual personalities. Or just to be children. The high-strung, castrating Kate Goselin freaks out whenever the children, you know, act like children, spilling ice cream or stepping in mud or something. The children dress alike. The children receive the same Christmas presents. The children are only "the children."

I guess my interest in this show revolves around how stunningly banal it is. Once you get past the ZOMG 8 KIDS factor, there is nothing remotely interesting about these people, other than the fact that the parents gleefully seem to play their faults to the camera, bickering constantly. The only reason this is not a collection of incredibly boring, yet professionally-produced home movies is that there are ZOMG 8 KIDS.

16,17,18, whatever kids and counting
I really don't understand what TLC is doing with this show, because lately, the editing and time slot (right before Toddlers And Tiaras, the subject of another blog rant) seem to suggest camp. The non-diegetic sound effects, the Jim-Bob-and-Michelle-visit-a-head-shop episode, the constant professed cluelessness / "innocence" of the Duggars - it all seems to come across as rather mean-spirited on TLC's part.

I have always had a healthy disgust for the stunningly self-righteous, self-absorbed, holier-than-Thou media whore Duggars. Their reality show reads as an ethnography. An ethnography about a primitive group of people whose income essentially comes from providing media to the mainstream, all of which they sneer at and think are going to hell and live a worthless existence (as well as selling used cars and being landlords, presumably to the same hell-bound people). A lifestyle of "modesty," which like I said earlier apparently involves caking makeup onto 11 year olds, selling images of your kids to the entire nation, and fetishizing the virginity of all your children on public in camera. A lifestyle that involves prescriptive approaches to family life, complete with recipes for barf-inducing "American casserole slop" like - get ready with your barf bucket - tater tot casserole. Yes, with Velveeta.

Anyway, again, the show basically revolves around the trope of ZOMG WE HAVE TO KEEP CHANGING THE NAME OF THE SHOW BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY OF THEM and then the whole Fundamentalist Quiverfull vaguely-separationist aspect. The Television Without Pity forums skewer this show way better than I ever could, so I'll leave that to them and again say: the show is exploitative for all involved. I don't know if that makes it brilliant or dangerous, or maybe both, but frankly, I think these people get way too much attention as it is, and if you are concerned about the overrepresentation of Fundamentalism in American cultural politics, the best thing to do is to ignore crap like this.

Do as I say, not as I do, and I'd love to hear suggestions for better things to watch on Tuesday nights on basic cable.

Table for 12
The newest of TLC's FrankenFamily lineup, this show is the only one that deals with a seemingly middle-class family. Because it's the newest, I've only seen a few episodes. They're from South Jersey (I'm from northern NJ and Thom is from South Jersey), so I guess I'm predisposed to like them more, but at the end of the day it's the same thing as the other 2 shows. The show's episodes do little more than answer gawker questions like, "How do you do _____ with ZOMG TEN KIDS including one with cerebral palsy?" This show at least addresses children with special needs, and I think TLC should be commended for that. However, at the end of the day, this is still another freak show based on scale. Nobody's interested in watching a family of four have a pizza dinner; a family of 12 does it and suddenly, you get a reality show.

I do want to reiterate that my problem is not with any of these families' lifestyle choices. I really believe that like virtually all parents, they truly have what they think is best for their children in mind. My problem is with TLC for reiterating, fetishizing, and promoting this stuff as though it's perfectly natural, feasible, and sustainable. I think most people realize it's not, but TLC could use its position to promote more positive change in the world. They could add shows to their lineup that promote more sustainable lifestyle choices, or that address issues of world poverty and empower the viewer to take action, even by doing something token like donating to a charity. I realize it's a classic liberal move to tell people what I think is best for them, but that's not really what I'm doing. I hope. I think. I think most people will agree that the problem of world poverty is serious, and that it needs to become real to people - even Americans, who mostly experience the non-American world through the television set. I think TLC can use its position as a popular network to actually help people learn about things - not just Big Serious Issues, but, geez, I, at least, would appreciate some shows about basic home plumbing skills or how to hang a picture frame or how to mend clothing or just, you know, Things I Always Wanted to Learn But Got Cut Out of my School's Budget when I was in High School.

Ahem. Breathe. Sorry.

While I hate to resort to contemporary mainstream media cliches like "in these times..." Well, in these times, while our conspicuously consumptive way of life has clearly been demonstrated as environmentally and economically unsustainable, I don't think these shows need to show the BIGGERBETTER American way of life. I don't think I"m an authority on What America Needs, but I'm American, and I personally would strongly prefer to see shows privileging adopters, rather than those who reproduce like bunnies, everything else be damned. These shows are about the (human) Hummers of basic cable, when what the public is interested in is the Prius. God, I can't believe i just used car metaphors.

Therefore, my nefarious, secret recommendation is...Write to TLC and ask for programming that does not fetishize conspicuous consumption. Ask for shows that valorize the heroes who take in the children nobody else wants, or at least programming vaguely in keeping with their name as "The Learning Channel."

And, I recommend you keep reading, because eventually I'll talk about the train wreck that is Toddlers & Tiaras.

wow guys! this is so totally tl;dr. Thanks if you read all this.

spin the black circle.

2009-04-13T23:49:00.006-04:00

Hey everyone. I just had a superlatively shitty day that involved severe headaches, a massive one-hour clusterfuck of timesheet fail, leaving work early, finding that I wasn’t leaving work early at all (long story), probably having my car hit in a parking lot (another long story), and being surrounded by police cruisers in my parking lot (don’t even ask). The point of this preface is just to say that if it seems like my writing is lazy or not up to snuff, or like I’m phoning it in today, that is why.

Basically, one good thing happened to me. One thing. Okay, so I’m exaggerating. But still. I received a shipment from UPS today. There were three things in this shipment. I am going to write about one of those things. Today, I would like to recommend to you the Audio-Technica AT-PL120 Direct Drive Professional Turntable.

Some background would probably be prudent at this point. For at least the last 10 years, I have been using an Aiwa compact bookshelf system for my home listening needs. It was an all-in-one system – tuner, dual cassette deck, 5-disc CD changer, and a turntable. None of the individual components were really remarkable in any way, but overall it was a solid little system with some decent speakers. Plus, it had a turntable, which was quite uncommon in those days – hipster vinyl fetishizing culture had not emerged yet back then, but since I constantly hung out in an independent record store that dealt in vinyl (R.I.P., Full Circle), I had become enough of a record geek to get really into vinyl.

Anyway, a couple of years ago the CD changer started to go. By this point I was buying things on vinyl whenever I had a chance, so it wasn’t really a big deal. I reserved listening to CDs for the car or, if it was absolutely necessary to listen to a CD at home, I would use the computer. Not the ideal setup, especially when I was used to the sound of vinyl on some fairly big speakers, but I was willing to deal.

When I moved into this apartment a couple of years ago, I tried listening to one of my tMG tapes and found that now the cassette decks had gone to pot. Oh well, I thought, I still had the turntable. Of course, it did sound to me like perhaps the drive mechanism was starting to go in the turntable, as the pitch seemed to increase after a few minutes of play – almost as though the drive on the system took a few minutes to warm up and get itself up to speed. Again, I dealt with it.

When I mentioned the state of my stereo to my parents, my father gave me an old Fisher receiver and cassette deck that he had lying around in the basement, saying that they were good components with a lot of power. I don’t doubt that they were good components in their day, but unfortunately, when I got them home and tried them, I found that the cassette deck had completely died, and the receiver had completely lost sound in the left channel.

At Christmas, my parents gave me some money for the specific purpose of either getting my existing stereo equipment repaired or helping to purchase new equipment. I put the money aside as I tried to decide what my next step would be. As I tried to decide, I purchased yet another cassette deck from Goodwill, testing it at the store first to make sure the machine functioned. It did, so I brought home a Pioneer deck. I finally hooked it up and tied it out last week, when I decided to give a listen to a Franklin Bruno cassette I had recently purchased on eBay. It sounded beautiful for about the first half of side 1. Then, the warble as the drive mechanism began to steadily slow to a halt….

I think as soon as that deck died, I had made my decision. In a rush of depression or mania (I’m still not quite sure which it was, really), I went and pretty much purchased an entirely new stereo system (I am keeping the old speakers for now) component by component, using both the money my parents had given me and leftover tax refund money. Due to availability, user reviews, and price, my system will be a bit of a Frankenstein, with three different manufacturers being represented. But when it is done, it will be glorious.

So all of this brings us up to the actual recommendation – the turntable. There’s a catch, however: the receiver I ordered does not actually arrive until Thursday, thanks to FedExFail. In other words, I have not properly experienced the turntable yet. I have been able to hook up the turntable to the computer and listen through laptop speakers, but, as has already been discussed, NOT THE SAME! But, I can give a conceptual/anticipatory recommendation, anticipating the further recommendation of stereo equipment that is almost sure to appear on this blog at some point this weekend.

I can try to describe to you the graceful sleekness of the tone arm, the gentle bend that looks so unnatural but so zen-like at the same time. I can try to convey to you the tactile pleasure of setting the tone arm balance, which is something that I had never done before, having only ever owned cheap, low-end turntables. I was not even aware of such a thing until today!

I can try to make you understand just what that feeling is when you actually lift the tone arm, transport it over to the spinning grooved platter, and gently let it down onto the disk. It’s almost like a spiritual experience for an agnostic, really. There’s a solemn reverence to it. It feels almost like a ritual. Those first few crackles before the first note sounds? Those are perhaps my favorite sounds in the world.

I can try to make you see the device the way I see it. How skeletal it is. Its leanness – how is something that can look so unsubstantial be so solid and heavy? The cartridge and headstock look to me like components for a scale model of an alien spacecraft. This machine is a wonder of design and style and utilitarianism.

The thing is, I can try to tell you all of this stuff, but in the end I can’t help but fail. This is the kind of stuff you can’t tell somebody. One either already knows it or one don’t, and if one doesn’t already know it, then one never will. All hipster fetishizing aside – there is something almost sacred or holy about pulling out a piece of vinyl, laying it on the platter of the turntable, and lower the stylus into the groove. This is why I’m always tempted to buy vinyl reissues of albums I already own on CD. CDs just feel so cheap and crass and impermanent next to a good record.

Okay, so this post is truly all over the place, so I should really wrap it up. I do want to add that this turntable has tons of additional features, which you can read about on the product page linked above and which I will probably blog about this weekend. Also, I should point out that I have plugged the turntable into the computer to test it out. The line-level output seems a bit loud – I obviously won’t be ripping any of my vinyl for portable listening through the direct input. But, even in this inferior listening situation, I can already hear how superior this turntable is to any that I have ever owned. Before beginning this entry, I listened to side 1 of Grizzly Bear’s Sorry for the Delay, and this blog was written to the tune of the No New York compilation and Cat Stevens’s soundtrack to Harold and Maude (which, for the record, sounds fucking amazing, even on these tiny speakers – such a rick sound!). All this bodes well for the arrival of the receiver and the experience of actually listening to these records on a real stereo system. N.B.: I did not pay $400 for this turntable, as the product page would have you believe. Based on just these results, however, I would be willing to do so.

And just take a look at it. Isn’t it beautiful?

here they do it spiritually.

2009-04-13T09:25:00.004-04:00

Good morning, Internet! I'm sitting here with my coffee, pondering what it is I should recommend to you today. After all, I'm trying to stick to no more than one (1) recommendation a day; therefore, they're all very special.

And it seems my better half way outclassed me yesterday with his totally incredible, well-written, well-argued post arguing for human rights. So I feel the ante's been upped. I watched a movie yesterday, in the hopes that I could recommend it to you, but it was truly awful. All you need to know about Venom (1982) is: Klaus Kinski sort of stars in what could be called Snakes on the Thames.

Hmmm...Kinski...always makes me think of Werner Herzog...oh! Of course!

***

Today's recommendation is: Stroszek (Herzog, 1977).

Oh, the love poems I could write about this film. Oh, the incomprehensible over-educated squealings I probably will write about this film.

I saw Stroszek for the first time in the second semester of my first year of college in the first film class I ever took, and I could argue that it's one of the main reasons why I devoted my life* to film. There are many early examples of this; I will recommend each of them to you at a later date.

I had seen Kaspar Hauser in high school (It was one of about 10 "foreign" VHSes our local Blockbuster had), but I had no idea who Bruno S. really was, and it barely penetrated my entitled skull that it was the same director.

But seeing Stroszek on a big screen like that in the teaching auditorium - complete with the faded color palette, the impossibly vertical shots of Berlin, the expansive horizontal shots of Midwestern USA - really changed something for me. At the time, I wanted to be a lawyer or a translator or something, something having to do with words (and, implicitly, power; I did grow up in the suburbs of New Jersey). All was words to me, and I knew plenty, in several languages.

I couldn't have explained it this way at the time, but the film showed me the fallacy and weakness of language. The primacy of jargon in the film, of specialized and privileged languages, demonstrate to me the privilege of the image, which in turn somehow filled me with hope. Auctioneers, prison officials, bankers - it didn't matter what they were saying; you could figure it out from the image. For the first time in my life, words seemed a weak failure. They do right now.

Maybe images are in and of themselves simply another language; I don't know. A greater encompassing universe existed outside of the artificiality of words. This had always been true, but I had never noticed until I'd watched that film.

Herzog's mordantly funny dirge for the American dream was resplendent with tacky roadside Americana, hyperbolic accents, and anonymous countryside, but it also showed seedier parts of Berlin life. Only subtle aspects of the film are temporally-bounded at all - fonts, cars, hairstyles - so it seems a general paean to 20th century Americana, or at least, a very specific kind of Americana - one that may or may not have actually existed. One you see hints of in abandoned roadside stands and places where newer paint is peeling. The characters in Stroszek - Eva, Bruno, and Scheitz - move, cross an ocean, dream big, and the same systems, problems, and power structures follow and consume them. It was both incredibly depressing and awesome, in the old-fashoined, awe-inspiring sense. The world created was so perfect, so believable, so close to mine, yet different. I could watch the sad stories forever.

The film seemed charmingly enamored with its subjects. I really don't believe that Herzog had an exploitative intent. The sadness and absurdly tragic trajectory of the characters' lives seemed, to me, somewhat affectionate.

I don't know what it says about me that I can't find this film as anything but life-affirming and quietly wondrous of the big, big world, that it fills me with a conviction that most of us have a strong survival instinct no matter what - but there you have it.

I won't wreck the ending for you, but I think you will probably disagree with me after you see it. But if you see it after reading this I have more than achieved my goal.

*measured in terms of X, where X = years of educational attainment AND units of tens of thousands of dollars of educational indebtedness.

***
Coda:

I had no way of knowing it when I first saw this film, but the year after I graduated from college, I had the opportunity to go to Germany. It was a strange and alienating year, full of drifting, being privy to much I could not understand, and twice during that year I spent months living in Kreuzberg, one of Bruno's old haunts. I never saw Bruno, I'd wander through the alleyways, getting slightly lost, always imagining I could hear sad accordion music just in the next courtyard.

The New York Times had an article last Christmas about Bruno, complete with a video.

sometimes, you just have to forgo the witty title.

2009-04-12T14:27:00.008-04:00

Today, in honor of ~~Zombie Jesus Day©~~ Easter, I am going to join countless other blogs (not to mention Massachusetts, Connecticut, the Supreme Court of Iowa, and the legislature of Vermont) and display what I would (non-radically and non-ironically) interpret to be traditional Christian values, and recommend Same-sex marriage rights.

It goes without saying that there are some problematic dynamics at play here – namely, the fact that I am heterosexual, and therefore this is not necessarily my issue (N.B.: the tendency of some to claim ownership of an issue and not allow those outside of it to either stand in solidarity with them or to show them how the issue has an effect on the larger culture/society has always been a pet peeve of mine) – and because this is currently a widely-debated and complex issue, I suspect that my writing about it will ultimately be somewhat redundant with writings on other blogs and also incomplete (and quite possibly disorganized and incoherent). Perhaps one day I will take these ramblings and hone them into a more thoughtful and focused piece, but for now, I want to express my feelings on the issue and hopefully do so in an idiosyncratic way that can stand out in some way from the rest of the discourse.

(N.B.: All I have written so far is my opening paragraph and a disclaimer/statement of intent, and this post is already tl;dr. So it goes.)

A few years ago, I got into a pretty intense debate with a close friend of mine concerning this topic. My friend is fairly progressive, stands where I do on a lot of the issues, and shares a lot of the same friends and acquaintances, some of whom are homosexual or bisexual. He is African-American, and a single father. He was also strongly opposed to same-sex marriage.

I had trouble wrapping my head around this, and we argued back and forth for about half an hour over the telephone about it. The definition of marriage, he said, was a man and a woman. When I asked why it couldn’t just be two people, he responded that that is just the way it is. Besides, New Jersey had legally recognized civil unions. Shouldn’t they just be happy with that?

My head was spinning to think that a friend of mine with whom I shared so many political platforms would use such an argument. I invoked another argument from the past, one that I perhaps shouldn’t have, but it just seemed so apropos – separate but equal. Isn’t this the same mentality that enabled legal segregation in the south? Wasn’t it found that separate was not, in fact, equal? At all? Wasn’t excluding homosexuals from certain rights tantamount to racial segregation? He said no, it wasn’t. It was different. In the end we agreed to disagree on this topic.

But here I am several years later insisting that no, it isn’t different. And honestly, it has filled me with an immense sense of both pride and vindication to see the developments of the last couple of weeks. I have heard before that Iowa gets overlooked and lumped in with the Bible Belt states, to which it supposedly does not really belong. But still – did anybody really see this coming from Iowa? I certainly didn’t. Vermont was not a big surprise. And D.C. – well, I’m just trying not to get too far ahead of myself.

These are exciting times. There is a lot to be gloomy and depressed about, but when things like this are happening in real time, I feel the optimism with which I was imbued in November has been justified. I really do feel that the country is turning a crucial corner. No, everything will not be perfect. However, it is victories like these that make me believe in our system in spite of myself. I am, and I remain, standing in solidarity with those who have been denied this right, and will continue to do so until this wrong has been reversed.

Remember, the point here is not for me to be politically correct. This is about just, decent, and equal treatment and rights for fellow citizens and human beings.

* * *

Appendix

So I was initially planning on responding to all of the usual arguments against gay marriage rights in the main body of my post, but I decided against for a few very good reasons: 1) it was too obvious, 2) my answers would likely be too obvious and too redundant when compared to other blogs on the subject, and 3) I have to admit I have not done a tremendous amount of research on the topic, so I thought it would be better to have a passionate personal response rather than an unresearched pseudo-intellectual one. There are, however, a couple of anti- arguments that I want to mock, and one very big and often overlooked point that I want to make.

We will start then with the point I want to make, in response to the separate but equal argument. There is one very, very, insanely big way in which civil unions are inherently unequal from marriage: financially. With so many federal laws on the books making reference to marital status, the inability to marry presents a large financial liability to same-sex couples, particularly in the current economy. Again, I have not done all the research here, so I can’t go into detail, but if anyone is interested in finding out more about this issue, Dr. Lee Badgett, an economist who teaches at UMass Amherst, has done some extensive research and publishing in this particular area.

And now on to the mockery, much of which will be obvious. First off, the idea that the sanctioning of homosexuality will be a “gateway” to the sanctioning of pedophilia, bestiality, etc.. I understand why the fear-/hate-mongers chose to associate homosexuality with pedophilia, but really, when will this stop? Aren’t we past that? If I were less classy, I would argue that the sanctioning of Catholic priests is a gateway to sanctioning pedophilia. But I’m an adult and I refuse to lower myself to those kinds of tactics, so I won’t say that. What? Did somebody say something?

The whole argument that homosexuality is a sin and that “God hates fags” is just ridiculous. Can we please make those people go away? First of all, I thought Christians were supposed to believe in the kind and loving and benevolent God 2.0 from the New Testament, not the vengeful, fire-and-brimstone beta testing version from the Old Testament. If there is a God (and I do mean God in the capital-G sense, along with all the bells and whistles that implies), I can practically assure you that he does not care with whom you are sleeping. The world is a really big place, and there’s a lot of more important shit to worry about that will keep you busy. Yes, even if you’re God. There are still only so many hours in the day. Besides, the idea that this country was to be founded exclusively on Christian values is just plain wrong. This has been documented extensively by so many sources that I’m not going to do the work for you.

Another frequent argument is that same-sex marriage will somehow destroy traditional marriage. Bullshit. Same-sex marriage should have no impact whatsoever on what heterosexuals do. You know what's destroying traditional marriage? Divorce. You want something to outlaw, well, there you go. Logic, people. Use it!

I was going to say something else, I think, but I forget what it was, so now I will just give you this, which you have likely already seen:

Not much to say about this that you can’t say yourself, but I do want to draw your attention to the 0:47 mark.

A RAINBOW COALITION???? Really???!?!?!

Just think about that one for a while, because the National Organization for Marriage obviously didn’t.

"and it's all because of...."

2009-04-12T09:23:00.007-04:00

In honor of Zombie Jesus Day, I thought I'd recommend something a little less crass and commercial than that. I thought about recommending the word "monetize," because in the past 24 hours, it has rapidly become my new favorite word, and I had lots of exciting dreams last night about playing it in Scrabble.

But, I have to slow down before I can make blogging moves like that. Both in Scrabble and on my blog. As it is, right now, I am barely a piece of flotsam floating through the storied "blogosphere," and it'd be in poor taste to make an opening gambit into a bingo. I think I just mixed games there. Um, where was I? Oh yes.

Anyway, apparently not everyone was on board with my attempt to give a crowd-pleasing recommendation yesterday. Some people get migraines from coffee; some people just don't like it (...). Some people are just contrarians. So let me try again.

Therefore, today I am recommending an old favorite of mine.

Today's recommendation is...
The (Your Name Here) Story (Calvin Communications) is a 1960 film made for a convention of industrial filmmakers. I first saw this film in an excellent course on industrial and sponsored film that I took as part of my Master's degree.

(n.b.: I can't get this to embed properly; to see it in its full glory please click here & sorry for the inconvenience & ~~please come back & click on some ads!~~

It is a brilliant piece of insider commentary that raises a lot of theoretical questions (I am trying to write a paper on this in another window. Like right now. unfortunately, my paper adds more questions than it answers, and does so both naively and inarticulately).

Most films of the sort that they are parodying - industrial films pre-1960 - do not survive, at least not in forms where lay people can readily see them. I think many were disposable objects, never meant to be viewed outside of their immediate context. Their contribution to history is all the more fascinating because of their stubborn situation as objects totally situated in their present.

But unlike most of those films, The (Your Name Here) Story addresses future and past in its acknowledgment of the greater body of industrial films and attempts to make summing statements in its parody, which attempts to create an all-purpose industrial film. Its parodic rewriting of hegemonic Western history speaks volumes. Its slippage of address and proto-interactivity are both hallmarks of postmodernism and antecedents of hypertexts.

Also, the hats worn in this film have little parallel in modern cinema.

The way this film dances around the central characteristics of these films - the way it plays with the edges of what can and cannot be said - the way it implies a lot, says very little directly, and still manages to make us laugh, even nearly 50 years after the fact - is one of the reasons that The (Your Name Here) Story is my recommendation for today. Ironically, if you have never seen any other industrial films, this one really is an all-purpose film, and as so many others have faded and crumbled - literally! - it has inadvertently achieved its goal.

Watch, enjoy, and let me know if you like this better than Coffee or Clicking on Our Ads. Also let me know if the embedding doesn't work.

yr. humble servant,
Miranda

Let me licorice!

2009-04-11T22:28:00.013-04:00

Hello. I’m Thom. Apparently, I will be recommending things to you. How exciting.

I feel like this should be more of an introductory post on my part, but unfortunately for you (or maybe it is, in fact, fortunate), I do not do introductions well. Therefore, we shall dive headfirst directly in with my first recommendation.

Today, I formally recommend Aaron Moyer, aka 87Hizzetfield, of Maple Heights, Ohio.

I first became aware of Aaron through a link I came across somewhere, proclaiming to be the worst Neutral Milk Hotel cover of all time. Being a voracious fan of covers, embarrassingly intrigued by internet detritus, and notoriously masochistic (that’s what she said), I naturally clicked on it. This, ladies and gentlemen, was my reward, which I promptly watched three times in a row.

After the third viewing, as well as reading over the comments, I got to feeling that this was not a terrible cover at all, but some sort of commentary on the anyone-can-do-this-at-home philosophy and aesthetic of the lo-fi scene. The fact that he got approximately 67% of the lyrics wrong seemed like less of a flaw to me and more a play on the rather impenetrable impressionism of a lot of NMH’s lyrics, not to mention the lyrics of a lot of other indie sacred cows. (Let’s be honest here, you know it’s true.) Furthermore, what was with the random Sunn O))) reference at the beginning, and the assertion that they had made/gave him the amp onto which he had so obviously (and rather obnoxiously) attached the Sunn O))) name? This was looking more and more to me like a brilliant piece of performance art. It may have been unintentional, but in a way, wouldn’t that make it all the more brilliant?

Of course, by this point, my attention span had been exceeded and I did not investigate any further. Last night, however, I found myself revisiting the video, and this time I clicked on 87Hizzetfield’s channel to investigate further. I don’t think I quite have the words to describe to you the bounteous treasure trove I found there, and so I will let two of the results speak for themselves.

Regardless of what you think of his, erm, performance style, you’ve got to admit that the dude knows his shit. He’s dropping Sunn O))) and Dillinger Escape Plan references and prank calling The Best Show on WFMU. Maybe he’s just making these videos on a lark, and I’m reading way too much into them. But ultimately, isn’t the end result and worth of art dependent wholly on its context and audience reaction, and not the authorial intention (with a nod to Wimsatt and Beardsley)? It doesn’t matter if he does not necessarily understand the implications of what he is saying when he says, “You don’t need to know how to play an alternative rock solo, you just play a note;” what does matter is that he said it, and in the context of what he is doing with these videos, it just seems perfect to me. And for the record, I believe that he does understand those implications and that we are laughing along with him, and that we are laughing partially at ourselves.

Sorry this got a little tl;dr. I do that.

Anyway, you can visit Aaron’s YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/87Hizzetfield. Please do peruse, as there are some other gems that I withheld. I can’t give away all the good stuff that easily, after all.

Aaron has a MySpace music page here: http://www.myspace.com/moy3r. The best song he has up there is obviously “Masturbate in Space.”

Dude also has a Twitter account, but it does not seem to be as relentlessly entertaining as his videos and music. Sadly, The Anal Blisters do not appear to be on tour.

benediction of blog

2009-04-11T09:12:00.001-04:00

this is the point in the semester wherein i have more to do than i can comprehend or fully appreciate, much less achieve, finish, get done. therefore, this is also the day i have decided to finally realize my lifelong dreams of being a really famous blogger. i mean, why not? at the moment, it seems significantly easier than that PhD.

you might wonder, just what is it that we'll blog here about? the answer is....stuff. We will blog about things, ideas, concepts, stuff you can buy, works of media, and other things that, due to our superior taste, we think you need in your life.

so let's start this off right.

Today's Recommendation: Coffee. I realize this is not a very radical suggestion, but I hear the best bloggers start off somewhat moderate before they get all radical on you and recommend, like, movies, books, and records. Plus, they might need to finish their coffee before they think about those things; therefore, I thought it was a fine enough place to start.

I'm drinking coffee right now. It is cheaper than gasoline. It both wakes and warms me every day. It allows me to utilize some of the 50+ coffee mugs I inherited from my grandmother.

I know you might be thinking, but i have a heart problem! or, but I'm a Mormon! These are concerns you should leave at the wayside. Being awake, alert, and jittery should more than compensate for any health or moral concerns.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to finish drinking this coffee before it gets cold.