I have been pretty busy for the past few days, but I will have a long-ish post up soon about what happened yesterday in Boston, among other things. In the meantime, I suggest you watch the following little documentary from Pitchfork about Belle and Sebastian‘s album If You’re Feeling Sinister. If you are not yet a fan, it will make you want to go out and buy the album. If you are, it will make you like the album and the band even more. I hope Pitchfork continues to make films like this. [h/t to Adam Ted for sharing this with me]
Saturday Links
A collection of ways to distract yourself from your friends and lovers this weekend.
- Be sure to check out Kobe Bryant’s unintentionally hilarious Facebook screed that he wrote while hopped up on painkillers after tearing his Achilles tendon in a game against the playoff-bound Golden State Warriors. My personal favorite line is “This anger is rage,” which sounds like the title of a Sharon Olds collection.
- If you enjoyed watching Peep Show by yourself last weekend, I suggest you follow it up by ripping through Whites, another English comedy about the hilariously inept. It ran for only six episodes, but each one is brilliant. It stars a bunch of people you might recognize from other shows (Sherlock, The IT Crowd , Peep Show, Jonathan Creek), and it was written by Peep Show‘s Super Hans!
- Are you an aging hipster who decided not to go to Coachella because the thought of being out in the desert for three days surrounded by twenty-year-olds is revolting? Fair enough. However, that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the music. YouTube is running live feeds of many of the acts all weekend. It’s like being there without all the dust and vomit.
- These articles aren’t exactly new, but Steven Hyden’s “Winners’ History of Rock and Roll” series at Grantland is fantastic. You may not like the bands he profiles (Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Metallica, Linkin Park, and The Black Keys), but the fact that they all became and remain popular has something to tell us about the popular art marketplace over the last forty years. Not everybody loves a winner, but at least we remember them.
Epistolary Blues
Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House is one of the best American novels of the twentieth century, and if you haven’t read it, you should do so as soon as you can. It’s a book about disappointment: the disappointment of family life, the disappointment of consumerism, the disappointment of academia. But more than this, it is about the disappointment that comes from having to continue on living after the death of someone who made you realize that life could be other than midddling. The Professor’s House came out the same year as a book with a similar theme, The Great Gatsby, and I have a theory that one of Cather’s earlier works, 1919’s My Antonia, was where Fitzgerald got his idea to tell Gatsby’s story from the perspective of someone who was both skeptical of and probably hot to bone the novel’s titular subject.
Anyway, as a Cather lover, I am excited for the long-awaited release of some of her letters. The reason why her letters haven’t been made public until now is a fairly predictable: she didn’t want them to be, and so she placed some steely gatekeepers in charge of her estate. Jennifer Howard documents all of this very well in a recent article in The Chronicle, but I was particularly struck by the article’s opening:
In November 1938, buffeted by the death of her dear friend Isabelle McClung Hambourg, Willa Cather poured her heart out to her brother Roscoe in a letter. She sent it from the Shattuck Inn in New Hampshire, a spot Isabelle had first taken her years earlier.
“You cannot imagine what her death means to me,” Cather wrote. “No other living person cared as much about my work, through 38 years, as she did. As for me, I have cared too much, about people and about places—cared too hard. It made me, as a writer. But it will break me in the end. I feel as if I couldn’t go another step.”
Let’s table the fact that Roscoe Cather is an incredible name (ideal for someone born in the nineteenth century). The second paragraph sounds like something Godfrey St. Peter, the professor of The Professor’s House, would have said after the death of Tom Outland, the rough but brilliant youth who wandered into his life only to die in World War I. It also sounds like what Nick Carraway is trying to avoid feeling when he puts on his false hard-boiled act at various points throughout The Great Gatsby. Cather and Fitzgerald both understood that caring too much is the source of great art. Any artist who claims not to give a shit about people and places is either fronting to avoid crying in public, or not a real artist. Caring means inviting disappointment to bed down with you from time to time. The fact that Cather tried to hide her letters from the public for so long couldn’t keep those of us who love her work from seeing how well she understood this often uncomfortable twinning.
Updating the Environment
Haven’t we all been to beautiful places and asked ourselves, “How could I deface this?” Whether it’s throwing a Starbucks bubble-cup into the La Brea Tar Pits* or putting out your cool yellow American Spirit against a fig tree downtown, Americans like to play with trash, especially when that involves getting rid of it quickly in places where one doesn’t live.
Unfortunately, some garbage gets deified as edgy, radical art.
And you get things like this. No, really, people are scrawling graffiti on ancient trees and spray-painting rocks that modern California’s ancestors inscribed. Good to know.
But as the reporter points out, most normal people are outraged, high-school kids are helping fix the problem, and “‘the rash of graffiti at Joshua Tree National Park defies the trend at parks nationwide, where vandalism has been on the decline over the past decade,’ said park service spokesman Jeffrey Olsen.”
Also, here is a cool book (written by a retired UCSB prof) about why Americans like rugged land so much.
*Well, into the brush at the tar’s edge. But still. The man had on clean shoes and expensive jeans and even though there were dozens of other visitors around, nobody–myself included–said anything. I still kick myself for that.
Talk About Burying the Lede…
Gee, Wall Street Journal (via Yahoo!), you say the service at McDonald’s is terrible? I wonder why that could be. Maybe it’s because they pay next to nothing to the people who actually seem to understand why their business has problems. From the middle of the article:
Monica George, a McDonald’s employee in Brooklyn, N.Y., said she can understand why customers complain, and that there are frustrations on both sides of the counter. “Let’s say I’m in front at the register and the grill’s not pushing out food quickly enough. So you have to wait on food, and the customer is getting aggravated at you because you’re not giving them the food quick enough, and the grill gets aggravated with the cashier because we’re asking where the food is,” she said.
Ms. George, who says she earns $7.25 an hour, said one problem behind slow service and inaccurate orders is that employees are trained to do specific tasks and don’t always understand what other employees are doing.
Meanwhile:
McDonald’s shares have also rebounded since they took a hit last fall. In 4 p.m. trading Wednesday, they were up 43 cents at $101.49, near their record of $102.22 in January 2012.
Someone’s loving it. Just not the wage slaves who cook the food. Or the people eating it.
Speaking of Non-Majority Rule
Piggy-backing off of Ryan’s piece, I thought many of you might find this article from The Week interesting. I am not a very good liberal when it comes to gun control, but not because I have any special love of guns. I have only fired one a couple of times, and frankly didn’t get the appeal. The fact that people can talk about “gun culture” is bizarre, and doesn’t square with 2nd Amendment defenders’ claim that guns are simply tools. They’re not. Spatulas are tools, and there is no such thing as “spatula culture.” Guns are something altogether different.
So no, guns aren’t my thing. The reason why I am a bad liberal on gun control though is because I don’t think much of what the government can do will decrease the number of guns in this country or the prevalence of gun violence. By some estimates there are almost as many firearms in America as there are people, and nearly half of U.S. households own at least one gun. We’re too far down the rabbit hole to simply ban most guns and think it will accomplish anything. While I believe that there should be background checks on every kind of gun sale, even this won’t stop the kinds of mass shootings we saw in Connecticut or even Colorado. And that really shouldn’t be our priority. What is needed is a change in “gun culture,” and that starts not with pieces in Mother Jones (although everything written in their article is true, they’re preaching to the choir), but with gun owners like Paul Brandus standing up to the NRA and its minions in government. Brandus writes:
The NRA has also spread the false notion that the Second Amendment was designed to protect you against government tyrants. Unless you’re a constitutional scholar, you’ve probably bought this one hook, line, and sinker. Someone who is a constitutional scholar, Professor Robert Spitzer of the State University of New York College at Cortland, points out that Article I of the Constitution allows militias to “suppress Insurrections,” not cause them. If you think the Constitution allows you to rebel against the government, guess what? The Constitution says you’re a traitor. Writes Spitzer: “The Constitution defines treason as ‘levying War’ against the government in Article III and the states can ask the federal government for assistance ‘against domestic Violence’ under Article IV.”
It’s not your fault that you don’t know this. How would you know to wade through a giant appropriations bill from 2011, or to sift through the Constitution’s fine print? And it is this — your lack of knowledge — that the NRA and its toadies on the Hill are banking on. One of my favorite quotes from the father of our Constitution, James Madison, comes to mind: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.”
As with everything, culture matters. The NRA claims to speak for all gun owners, but it doesn’t represent even a majority of these people. Not even close. And yet the NRA seems to determine how both sides of the gun control debate talk and think. The left gets itself in a tizzy every time Wayne LaPierre says anything, which is exactly what he wants. The NRA feeds on a collective sense of powerlessness that many people feel. If liberals really want to decrease gun violence in America, they’ll stop overreacting to everything the NRA does, stop demanding legislation that won’t accomplish anything, and start building a culture where kids are better educated, more employable, and less likely to buy the bullshit the NRA is selling.
Alterna-Winning
You just wouldn’t expect the twenty-first-century GOP to stoop this low.
As we all know from school, democracy is important to America. But as you might also know, if you had a good history teacher, anti-democratic wankery is as American as apple pie, too. Jonathan Chait puts it lucidly in a recent edition of New York (one of the cool city’s cooler mags):
The tradition of expanding the scope of American democracy commands all the retrospective historical glory. But the counter-democratic tradition—a concerted advocacy not of dictatorship but of restraints to prevent the majority of citizens from exercising political power—runs just as long and deep. It runs through John C. Calhoun, the titanic nineteenth-century theorist who defended the rights of the white South against the growing majority in the North. (“The first and leading error … is to confound the numerical majority with the people, and this so completely as to regard them as identical.”) Our history books record the arguments of the crusaders for voting rights for women and blacks and overlook that they were, necessarily, arguing against something. Women’s suffrage, warned former president Grover Cleveland in 1905, would “give to the wives and daughters of the poor a new opportunity to gratify their envy and mistrust of the rich.” In 1908, New York City tried to suppress voting by Jews (who held notoriously left-wing views) by limiting voter registration to Saturdays and Yom Kippur. It took a hotly contested constitutional amendment in 1913 to allow people nationwide to vote for their senators, who previously were appointed by state legislatures.
American history has always tugged back and forth between a more pure democracy and some constricted facsimile thereof. “In the very long run, to be sure, we have become more democratic,” Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar has written, “but there have been numerous moments in our past when the pendulum swung in the opposite direction.”
Nice of a journalist to know a lot about history. Hey, kids: take that little seminar where the professor makes you write a 25-page paper. You might end up a contend-uh.
Fabulous
Fifty years from now, people will likely consider Steven Soderbergh the best American filmmaker of his era. While he hasn’t also written, shot, edited, and produced all of the over thirty films he has directed (slacker), his contributions to both mainstream and independent cinema so far outpace most of his contemporaries that the Academy should probably just give him the Lifetime Achievement Award now. The fact that he is retiring from feature filmmaking is a cultural bummer. However, he is leaving us with one final feature that may hint at a new direction in his career. Behind the Candelabra is a biopic about Liberace starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon that is going to be airing on HBO because it was deemed, according to Soderbergh, “too gay” for any studio in Hollywood to give it distribution. That sounds like the punchline of a particularly blue Borscht Belt joke, but it’s apparently true. My hope is that that this move by HBO means they will give Soderbergh a TV show on the network, as his talents seem well-suited for what TV has become in the last few years. It would be a shame to simply lose such an artist to posterity.
The General Reader 