Reading List

10 Books on Race you haven't read (or maybe even heard of). (The Root)

What is “the treatment”? When it comes to books, it’s the New York Times review, the conversation with the author on Morning Edition, placement upfront at Barnes & Noble. And for every book on any subject that gets “the treatment,” there are a couple of others that get lost in the shuffle—and it’s not always because they aren’t equally worthy of attention. This is certainly true of race books. Yes, there are so many books and so little time. Top-name authors get attention for whatever they write, which crowds out the lesser-known names. Plus, hot-button issues—hip-hop, Obama—can distract us from equally vital ones that aren’t as sexy. Here are 10 books on race that should be more widely read. Some of them got something like “the treatment”—but haven’t taken their place as fundamental sources in the way that they should. If I ever taught a course on black issues, these would all be on the syllabus

Friday Music: Dirty Projectors - "No Intention"

Blogging may be impossible on Sunday, so here's an acoustic take on my favorite track from Bitte Orca. I'm also loving this recently released B-side. (PMA)

The Men Who Stare At Goats

The giant wink at the audience that is The Men Who Stare At Goats boasts a strong cast and unusual source material (Jon Ronson's book about the U.S. Army's parapsychological warfare efforts) but winds up being as smug and dramatically inert as an episode of Frontline. The film, directed by Grant Heslov and coproduced by its star George Clooney, quickly forsakes any interest in examining how and why the military studies techniques like "remote viewing" (psychically "traveling" to other locations). If you're curious about any of the practices described in Goats then you have got one up on those who made it. There's never any serious question about whether there is any validity to what the Army is doing after a Special Ops agent named Cassady (a very funny Clooney) tells reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) that attempts to train men in invisibility were "adapted to finding ways of not being seen." Heslov and Clooney are more interested in a capital-M Message: the methods practiced by free-spirited nutjobs like Lt. Col. Django (Jeff Bridges) were twisted into the tortures applied to Iraqi prisoners of war in U.S. custody.

If the filmmakers committed to their premise then Goats might have been something new, but Heslov and writer Peter Straughan can't even commit to a consistent tone. Wilton stumbles onto the "New Earth Army" after a chance meeting with Cassady in Kuwait. While the two make their way through Iraq in search of something never quite specified Wilton narrates a history of how Django convinced the post-Vietnam Pentagon to fund a secret unit that seeks to create better soldiers through telepathy with long hair, dancing, and drugs on the side. (There's also a banal subplot about Wilton getting over his divorce) Clooney and Bridges are a bit too obviously having a ball but the party is spoiled by the arrival of careerist officer Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), who foreshadows the military's turn towards private contractors in Iraq and the eventual perversion of Django's unit. At least I think that's what Spacey's character foreshadows; it's hard to tell since he disappears for a long stretch of the film. It all adds up to a counter-history of the Iraq war in which the worst excesses of the American military can be undone by a reporter and a half-senile old hippie with access to a stash of LSD. Except of course that they can't be. It's a debatable point whether too many films have taken on Iraq too close to the conflict, but The Men Who Stare At Goats sacrifices storytelling for satire and wish fulfillment while the history its lampooning is still being written.

Wheezer

Like you (probably), I was a fan of Weezer's first album - the one with "Buddy Holly" and the funny videos. Everything the band has done since has struck me as cold and self-satisfied and it appears the new record is no exception.

Indeed, the record is so uniformly lacking that it's easy to wonder whether perhaps there isn't some subtext at work: Is "Raditude" a cry for help? An ironic experiment, or a satire of by-the-numbers studio rock? Or is frontman Rivers Cuomo just messing with the band's fans — tossing off a shallow album on a lark to see what the reaction will be?

It's tough to tell. But whether or not Mr. Cuomo is joking, it's not funny — and certainly not worth listening to.

Another flame out for me: Ben Folds. Any dissenters out there? (Washington Times)

Do it, don't be it

A.S. Byatt has a view I like regarding how artists should think of themselves in relation to their work. (Marissabidilla)

Even though she is an acclaimed and prolific novelist, Byatt says that she still has a hard time thinking of herself, or describing herself, as "a writer." Instead, she says, she thinks of her career in terms of "there's work to be done, something that needs to be said, a new chapter that needs to be written." I am beginning to think that Byatt might have the right idea--that it might be healthier to say "I write plays" instead of "I am a playwright." Putting the emphasis on the work, not on your own ego and identity. (And an active verb like "I write" is always stronger than the verb "to be.")

On the subject of "good hair"

Under the heading of things I can't believe I've missed, there's a minor Web brouhaha over the hair of Angelina Jolie's adopted daughter Zahara. Alison Samuels of Newsweek rounds up blog posts on the issue and suggests that there's a concern that Jolie hasn't properly educated herself on how to take care of African-American hair and thus allowed Zahara to go outside looking unkempt. In Chris Rock's Good Hair there are discussions of children as young as 3 getting perms with dangerous chemicals (Rock correctly points out that products marketed as "kiddie perms" are really no different from "kiddie beer") It's true no one is suggesting Jolie get Zahara a weave (though she could afford to), but leaving aside the fact that Zahara is too young for anybody other than her parents to worry about her hair the whole matter stinks of identity politics. There are plenty of mothers who don't comb their children's hair and also fail to do other essential things which no one disputes Jolie is doing quite nicely. Samuels' professed concern for Zahara's self-esteem hides the reductive and deeply insulting argument that Zahara can't mature properly without hair that meets some received cultural standard. The Newsweek piece mentions Madonna's hair care favorably, but Jolie has managed to raise and grow her family without Madonna's self-aggrandizing nonsense; Jolie deserves the same privacy Alison Samuels would want afforded to her own family.

Address unknown

A rare look at Wilco's recording space. (LoftLife/Muzzle of Bees)

Just last year, musician Andrew Bird spent four days recording at the Loft. He spent the entire first day arranging the studio space just to get the right violin sound. Using microphones placed around the room, he was able to pick up the acoustics of his violin as well as the sound of the amps bouncing off the walls. The sixty-plus guitars sitting around the room all hummed along, as the vibrations from everything else shook and resonated the steel strings, adding even more texture to the sound. The Loft is, essentially, an instrument of its own.

Somehow getting the strings of 60 guitars to vibrate together, without ever touching them, might seem fantastical, but the Loft’s “brick box” layout allows for such playful effects. “The stairwell, elevator, and bathroom have all been utilized for specific sounds while recording,” says Tobias. Grocery-carrying neighbors have been known to take the stairs when Wilco is recording in the elevator.

Welcome to the club

The problem with gatekeepers, or "Who decides what books are worth talking about?" (Bookslut)

I should maybe state that I don't think of myself as a critic, nor do I have aspirations to become one. As such, I feel free to ignore the wider culture at large, rather than suffer through a William Vollmann book just because his books contribute to the larger cultural conversation. I, and this website, exist outside of all of that, and happily so. I think briefly I thought I might try it on the inside, so I got myself elected to the board of the NBCC. I resigned five months later. Bookslut may have its own value (like I said, it goes month to month) but respectability is not where it is.

Sunday Music: R.E.M. - "Driver 8"

This is the second R.E.M.-related Sunday Music in a row,which is unusual, but I loved their new live album and couldn't resist this video chestnut from 1984.

Kristen Stewart in The Cake Eaters

There's something dark and interesting lurking in Mary Stuart Masterson's The Cake Eaters, out on DVD and playing On Demand and on various cable outlets. Kristen Stewart plays Georgia, a young woman with a terminal illness whose mother (Talia Balsam) has achieved some critical cachet as a photographer by taking semi-erotic shots of her daughter. (The name of Sally Mann is invoked for comparison) An award for the photos comes at the same time Georgia begins to pull away; she develops an attraction to Beagle (Aaron Stanford), an aimless early-20's man whom she meets at a fair and decides to give her virginity to. The question of the mother's careerism vs. Georgia's grasp at a normal teenage experience is brushed aside in favor of the tale of Beagle and his Dad (Bruce Dern, underplaying) getting past the shared grief over the death of Beagle's mother. By choosing the wrong protagonist The Cake Eaters wastes its most surprising character and ends up being a very thin slice of life.

Good Hair

The ostensible jumping-off point for Chris Rock's documentary Good Hair was a question from one of Rock's young daughters about why she didn't have "good hair," which in the context of the film means a straight or European look as opposed to an Afro. While Rock, who serves as narrator and onscreen host, leavens Good Hair with plenty of jokes the film (Jeff Stilson directed, Rock cowrote and produced) is an unexpectedly pointed look at the economic and social effects of the quest for "Good Hair" on the African-American community. Rock has three central points: a. The $9 billion dollar a year African-American hair business is largely controlled by Asians and whites, b. The chemicals used on women and young girls (Rock shows a 6- year old getting a perm) in "relaxer" and other products are corrosive and dangerous, and c. (and the weakest point) The money spent on "weaves" by women who want their hair to look fuller drives a wedge between men and women in the African-American community. Interviews with celebs like Eve and Ice-T are interwoven with documentary segments both funny (men in a barbershop detail the obstacles a weave presents to good sex) and Michael Moore-style stagey (Rock attempts to sell black hair on the streets of LA to dealers who only want to sell weaves made from Indian hair). A side trip to India produces disturbing footage of temple goers (babies included) having their heads shaved in a religious ceremony. Untold millions are made when that hair is sold to the States, but the question of who exactly pockets the money is never answered. If Rock lets a few interesting points lapse, he still succeeds in shining a light on a portion of African-American culture that a fiction film couldn't without some kind of heavy-handed metaphor. Good Hair extends the length and breadth of Rock's social commentary to impressive new heights.

Dear Natalie...

How are you? It has been awhile and today's posts have been unusually serious and unillustrated. Just wanted to say hello....

Print v. Cyber

Bloggers v. Journalists, and the role of "passion." Good comments too. (Ta-Nehisi Coates)

Incredible journalism is like incredible baby-making--it starts with passion. The guy combing through the city budgets because it's his job, isn't the same as the guy combing through them because it keeps him up at night, because he thinks about it when he shouldn't be. Institutions support that passion--but they don't create it. When my old Howard buddy was killed by the cops, it was all I could think about, and it was all I wanted to write about. And I did it almost for free, because it helped me sleep at night. I was burning to get it down. I deeply suspect that the bloggers you love, and the reporters you love, are similarly on fire inside.

I don't have a strict allegiance to "journalism," as much as I have one to the written word. Perhaps there's no difference. But my point is that to the extent blogging makes it possible for more people who are "on fire" to employ the written word, than it's good for the written word. It's true that it creates a situation in which anyone, for $15 a month, can say their piece. But I have more faith in the market of ideas, than in a brain-trust of editors, to separate the wheat from the chafe.

Maybe Jenny McCarthy will pay your kids medical bills

How the anti-science, anti-vaccine crowd is endangering children. A must-read. (Wired)

Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).

That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

A tale well told

Why stories won't die. (Wash Post/Tomorrow Museum)

To understand the magic of narrative, you have to ponder the rise in Japan of "mobile phone novels." These are novels written on a cellphone keypad. The reader uploads the novel one cellphone screen at a time. The Japanese, always technophiles, find themselves reading their phones the way Westerners used to read the daily newspaper.

There are two ways to look at this situation: One is to make the electronic gadget the star of a heroic tale called The Changing Media. New gadgets can do anything! They can not only put you in touch with friends, they can store your photo album, tell you your longitude and latitude, and write fabulous novels. But another way of describing the situation is to say that you can't keep a good story down. The story, not the gadget, is what's irrepressible. So powerful is the story as a way of communicating that it will even sprout in a cellphone.

My literary inbox

Although I really don't have time to spend a month reading Herman Melville, I can identify with the feelings expressed in this post about how Internet use changes one's reading habits. At the moment I'm working on books by Ian Rankin and Peter Carey and according to Goodreads I'm reading a book about digital music by Greg Kot that I haven't even started yet. (About Last Night)

It's the observation that the Internet for all its virtues -- and let me interject here and say that I love the Internet, some of my best friends are the Internet, etc. -- has given me an overly inflated sense of my own ability to learn and appreciate new things. I've always liked to read several books at once (do you want to read a book about volcanoes tonight, or a novel? Who knows? Better have them both with you!), but this weekend I counted and I had some twenty books in different stages of being read around the house, ones I felt I couldn't bear to return to the library or put back on their proper shelves because "I'm reading it." I've fallen into the habit of bringing a stack of three to four into bed with me at night -- picking them up from around the house as I turn off lights like a grocery shopper ambling through the produce section picking whatever pretty fruit strikes the fancy.

We're here, but otherwise...

Christopher Hitchens is a secularist and will tell you why. (Slate/Kottke)

Thanks to the foolishness of the "intelligent design" faction, which has tried with ignominious un-success to smuggle the teaching of creationism into our schools under a name that is plainly stupid rather than intelligent, and thanks to the ceaseless preaching of hatred and violence against our society by the fanatics of another faith, as well as other related behavior, such as the mad attempt by messianic Jews to steal the land of other people, the secular movement in the United States is acquiring a confidence that it has not known in years, while many of those who put their faith in revelation and prophecy and prayer are feeling the need to give an account of themselves. This is a wholly good development, and it is part of the pluralism and polycentrism that distinguish the sort of society that we have to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.