Tom & Alissa

One more Postman quote:

In any case, the point I am trying to make is that only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium. How is such media consciousness to be achieved? . . .

The nonsensical answer is to create television programs whose intent would be, not to get people to stop watching television but to demonstrate how television ought to be viewed, to show how television recreates and degrades our conception of news, political debate, religious thought, etc. I imagine such demonstrations would of necessity take the form of parodies, along the lines of “Saturday Night Live” and “Monty Python”, the idea being to induce a nationwide horse laugh over televisions’s control of public discourse. But, naturally, television would have the last laugh. In order to command an audience large enough to make a difference, one would have to maket he programs vastly amusing, in the television style. Thus, the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television. The parodists would become celebrities, would star in movies, and would end up making television commercials.

Not so nonsensical, Neil, and perhaps more effective than you’d like to think:

I’ve been reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death for a class (oh yes, and I get to move onto McLuhan later tonight). Postman, for those who aren’t aware, is writing in 1985 and is not a big fan of the television. To put it mildly. He spends most of the book explaining how television is completely destroying religion, education, and politics, and though he has some excellent points and I’m sure it seemed at the time that the world was coming to an end, in hindsight it seems a little overblown (though I am no fan of televised “news” unless it emanates from the mouth of Jon Stewart).

So anyhow, I’m near the end of the book, and in chapter eleven, there’s this statement:

To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.

And next to it, in old handwriting, is this handwritten gem:

The TV is not a Cylon, people. Seriously.

Michael Lewis says that even in this financial mess (to use a much weaker word than I’d like), we can look on the bright side. Sort of.

A lot of attractive office space seems to be opening up in midtown Manhattan, for instance, and the U.S. government is now getting paid to borrow money. (And with T-bills yielding 0 percent, they really ought to borrow a lot more of it, and quickly.

Lewis wrote Liar’s Poker, a startlingly engaging and scary story about the birth of mortgage-backed securities (otherwise known as, the Legalized Gambling That Is Screwing Wall Street And Everyone Else Over Right Now) in the 80’s. When I started training before beginning my job at Banc of America Securities in June of 2005, our instructor insisted that we read Liar’s Poker before we start work, and it was fascinating but really and truly frightening. I sat reading it and feeling like our whole financial system was just a house of cards waiting for a little puff of air. And what do you know? Two years later.

Having spent a couple years on Wall Street myself (though, obviously, not trading), I’ve been vaguely keeping tabs on the falling sky for the last couple days. I have mixed feelings and opinions, but I thought yesterday’s David Leonhardt column in the Times was insightful and instructive.

Now should come the harder part: a much more serious attack on our economic problems. Earlier this week, I called Mr. Hart, who has written some thoughtful things about the economy lately, for his take on all this. “We’ve been consuming more than we’ve been producing. We’ve been spending more than we’ve been earning,” he told me. “It’s been a big holiday.”

In what I thought was an Onion headline, but isn’t, Stephen Colbert’s DNA is being sent into space. That way, if the human race is wiped out, the aliens can recreate us from his DNA.

On second thought, that’s not such a bad idea.

Gideon Strauss, who is, well, my boss at Comment, has a review of Andy Crouch’s excellent Culture Making in the latest Books & Culture.

And correspondingly, Andy kindly posted about The Curator on his site when it launched on Friday. I’m not just saying this, though: please read his book.

There was almost no traffic on this blog yesterday, which was confusing until I realized the server was down. Thanks, Dreamhost. We’re back up today.

I head south tomorrow morning for a long weekend in DC, which will involve festivities of various kinds, none of which are very nailed down. Just having a vacation outside the (well, this) city for a few days should be refreshing.

Lastly, this article on being a writer in Brooklyn is kind of awesome, especially this part:

I have a hard time understanding all the hype. I dig it here and all, but it’s just a place. It does not have magical properties. In interviews, I get asked a lot, “What’s it like to write in Brooklyn?” I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it’s like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan, but there aren’t as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It’s like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French. What do they expect me to say? “Instead of ink, I write in mustard from Nathan’s Famous, a Brooklyn institution since 1916.” “I built my desk out of wooden planks taken from the authentic rubble of Ebbets Field. Have I mentioned how I still haven’t forgiven the Dodgers for moving to Los Angeles?”

I skim a lot of blogs relating to arts and culture during the day, and things catch my eye, but I hate to repeatedly blog little links here. I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr and I think it’s the right way to do it, leaving this blog for stuff that’s actually about us (hence the name, right?).

Ergo, I give you Culture Log.

I’ll be blogging several links and quotes and things per day that I find interesting. It’s all completely subjective. Tumblr doesn’t provide commenting features, which I’ve fallen progressively more out of love with anyhow, and it makes it very easy to quickly blog all kinds of media. Culture Log has an RSS feed, so feel free to subscribe . . . or not. This is mostly for my own edification and for anyone else who wishes to look over my shoulder and see what I’m reading.

I have never received a paper newspaper in my life, except for a mystery three months when I lived with Katie in which we got the Times every day. It wasn’t long after I moved to the city, and I have happy memories of pilfering the Arts section and reading it with coffee on Saturdays. I felt very urbane, and I suppose that technically is.

But now I read the Arts section obsessively, if online, and my recent subscription to Audible came with six months of the New York Times hour-long audio daily digest. So I started listening and realized, man, I love that newspaper.

So after some careful consideration, and the discovery of a 60-percent-off discount because I’m a student, I subscribed to the Saturday & Sunday editions of the Times for home delivery, for the summer (and I’ll see if it’s worth it in the fall). And happily, it was very cheap. Because, frankly, cuddling up with a cup of coffee and my laptop on a Saturday morning just doesn’t cut it. And my newish-and-not-yet-announced ventures are making me feel a need to be up on what is going on in the ever-so-broad world of Culture And The Arts.

To be honest, I’m really excited.

Iron Man: the review, in far too few words. As Tom summarized over dinner last night and I briefly mention in the review, the genius of the film is that Stark has no real superpowers except privilege and wealth. Tom pointed out that he’s a prototype for what we all want, for those with power and privilege (that’s us, folks) to stop pointing fingers and take responsibility for righting wrongs.

I read the always intriguing Malcolm Gladwell’s article on simultaneous discovery and some other stuff this morning on the way to work. I always find this phenomenon fascinating. Though he does make a distinction between artistic and scientific discoveries, it does happen in Hollywood, too, and I wrote briefly about it at WORLD a few weeks ago in the midst of a film review. It’s simultaneously comforting and unnerving to think that if you’re on the brink of a big idea or new discovery, someone else probably is, too.

I just have to ask . . .

Why, oh late filers, do you wait for the last minute to file your taxes? I ask in genuine curiosity. Is it the intimidating paperwork? Is it lacking vital pieces of information? Fear of the result? Your accountant? Procrastination? Or some other reason I just don’t know of?

I ask only because Facebook and blogs have revealed that this is a relatively widespread phenomenon. I have always filed mine as soon as all the W2s come in, usually in January, because I want to know if I’m getting a refund - if I’m not, I want to know how much I owe so I can save the money by April 15, and if I am, I want the return as soon as possible. Since I started using TurboTax, even filing our highly complicated taxes - a dozen W2s, two small businesses, deductions on business-related equipment and rent space, plus NYC municipal taxes - took about an hour and a half and we had the refunds directly deposited into our bank account within a week, so there didn’t seem to be a good reason to wait.

Granted, after growing up without much money, I’m always hyperconscious of making the bills (and taxes seem to be just one more bill). But I feel like most other people must be concerned about having enough money to pay their taxes. I’m really just intrigued. Talk to me.

Stephen Colbert was just nominated for a Peabody.

Here’s the Peabody nominating staff’s reasoning for nominating the Colbert Report:

“Let none dare call it “truthiness.” Colbert, in his weeknight Comedy Central send-up of politics and all that is bombastic and self-serving in cable-news bloviasion, has come into his own as one of electronic media’s sharpest satirists.”

Colbert responded:

“I proudly accept this award and begrudgingly forgive the Peabody Committee for taking three years to recognize greatness. On a personal note, I’d like to say that I’ve long been a fan of Mr. Peabody, as well as his boy Sherman.”

They’re rating the movie critics (book critics, too) at MoreIntelligentLife.com, and like me, Anthony Lane is their favorite (though we all acknowledge he’s more of a humorist than a critic).

But this quote on David Edelstein caught my eye:

Back when I was an intern, I sent him a piece of fan-mail, sandbagged with reviews of my own. He responded immediately. I sent him a piece of fan-mail, sand-bagged with reviews of my own. He responded immediately and reassured me that he, too, began his career spending “48 hours writing a 400-word review”. “My advice is simple”, he wrote: “Write.” ~ EMILY BOBROW

Good to know.

Brief things, written in a tearing hurry:

I wrote a bit about apartment hunting in New York City at ConversantLife.com, and the site appears to have finally, officially launched!

On Monday night we saw Purple State of Mind, met Craig Detweiler, and went out afterwards with a handful of random people who were at the premiere, from musicians to journalists to doctors to famous playwrights. We were up very late, but it was worth it.

Yesterday after work and class I had dinner with my friend Umbereen from college, who I don’t think I’ve seen since I graduated, and eight of her co-workers (IT consulting). We went to a French steakhouse in the financial district, and my French dip sandwich was rather tasty.

Tonight is dinner with the Strauss, of Ontario and Comment.

I mentioned several months ago that Blueprint, my favoritest woman’s magazine (and the only one I really could stomach, because it was for people just like me!), stopped publishing. Its subscriptions folded into Martha Stewart Living, which started coming last week. It’s a nice-looking magazine, but I can tell I’ll never re-subscribe. It’s clearly aimed at the suburban housewife with a lot of time on her hands and decent resources at her disposal, and though I don’t have any particular problems with suburban housewives - though I don’t think I’d make a very good one - nothing in there pertains to me. The recipes are far beyond anything I have time or patience to make, with ingredients I don’t buy, and I don’t have space for things like gardens or sewing nooks. Oh well. The pictures are lovely. :)

But, I’ve made these cookie bars several times from the Martha Stewart website, and they’re great. And very easy.

Last night I made pumpkin ravioli in melted butter (with a little fresh sage and garlic) and asparagus, blanched for a minute in boiling water, drizzled with olive oil, and seasoned with a few cranks of the salt and pepper grinders. The asparagus (which I made up out of my head because I didn’t have enough pots to melt any more butter) was actually kind of brilliant. I will definitely be making it that way again.

And we watched Catch Me If You Can, not because it’s particularly Valentine-y but because we just wanted to. The last time I saw it, I was in Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea (if memory serves me correctly, it had Finnish subtitles too). And Tom had seen it before. But it was great, and I now agree with him, probably one of the better endings to a Spielberg film.

Tonight is Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart! And I have Monday off. I am not sure if we’re doing anything in particular this weekend. I should think we may try to see Atonement since we still haven’t seen it. Also, I have many books to read (one for a RELEVANT piece, three for fun) and about a hundred pages of readings by such estimable folks as Jurgen Habermas and Susan Sontag about “The Critic”, which should be fascinating since I am kind of a critic myself. Our assignment, in fact, is to write a critical review of something - and a film is on the list.

Lastly, and I think this is via Annie - sage advice for writers looking to get published from an agent.

This came across my feedreader late last week: Vanity Fair Does Hitchcock. Will definitely be trying to nab this issue.

Yes, this is Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem:

And this one made me laugh:

Interesting article in the Times about online academies.

Quite frankly, this is not news. Homeschooling families jumped into the virtual education world long ago with academies like the Potter’s School. (I was homeschooled from the fifth grade until graduation, but I was always just a little too far ahead of where the online programs were; my brother, on the other hand, almost enrolled in Potter’s and only didn’t because our rural internet connection was wildly sub-standard.) These schools are only different because they’re technically virtual charter schools, and therefore accredited, as far as I could tell from the article.

This last statement from the article is really rich:

The ruling infuriated parents like Bob Reber, an insurance salesman who lives in Fond du Lac and whose 8-year-old daughter is a student at the academy. “According to this ruling, if I want to teach my daughter to tie her shoes, I’d need a license,” Mr. Reber said.

Not so, said Mary Bell, the union president: “The court did not say that parents cannot teach their children — it said parents cannot teach their children at taxpayers’ expense.”

Oh, right, but parents can teach their own children at their own expense and pay taxes to educate others’ children. That makes so much sense.

I chatter a little about books at Conversant Life.

It took about five hours of work, but our apartment is now clean, relatively brick-dust-free, and has half a brick wall on one end (which was intended - it’s the chimney). Our landlord stopped by and we got to talking about the building. Apparently it was built in 1890, and at one point in the past there was a family with seven children living in the building, both apartments. Even with both apartments, though, you’d have to be impressed. That totals about 800 square feet. For nine people.

The brick is very old and all different colors, probably because bits have been replaced in the last hundred-and-twenty years, but I love it. It has so much character and it looks great against the blue walls and adds a lot to the room. Maybe I can get a picture up at some point.

Tonight I have class. I’m looking forward to it. The readings this week were long and arduous but interesting, and I’m one of the few who doesn’t have a background in art history, so I think this seminar format really helps me learn and explore what I’ve read. Also, having class around a table is so much more fun than a lecture hall or one of those hideous industrial classrooms at RPI (which gratefully did NOT include the IT building, but unfortunately did include pretty much everywhere else I had class).

As part of next week’s work for class, I have to make it either to MoMA or the Met. I really need to go early in the week so I have time to write about it, but unfortunately they both close at 5:30 pm until Friday, after which they are opened in the evenings and more crowded to boot. I’ll probably end up at the Met on Friday night or Saturday morning. It’s just bigger, and therefore less annoying when it’s crowded.

I’m reading Slow Food: The Case for Taste (by Carlo Petrini) in my spare moments, and I’m really enjoying it. , I think you’d really like this book. It’s not a cookbook. It’s a history of the slow food movement and a case for thoughtful, flavorful, healthful meals and eating as a communal activity, which is a rather Biblical idea, when you get right down to it.

Which, of course, I say as I’m about to finish up at work and wolf down a Clif bar on the way to class. But though I long for a really yummy meal, prepared with love and served around a table with friends, I’m okay with the Clif bar for now. It’s just a phase of life.

Oscar noms are out. There are some travesties in here (particularly in Best Foreign film), but I like the Best Picture nominees, which includes four of my top ten films of the year - I haven’t seen Atonement yet.

I muse a bit on internet aesthetics and online kindness, prompted by this week’s New Yorker article about the MySpace-prompted (sort of) suicide of thirteen-year-old Megan Meier.

Last night Tom had to work late (he got home around 12:30am, and had to be back up at 5am - good thing this job is nearing its end), so I nabbed Alisa and we headed to the U2 3D screening. Well! It was pretty awesome. It wasn’t gimmicky - more like you were watching everything on the highest-definition TV you can possibly imagine, but with image layering. If you don’t like Bono’s take on politics and religion, you probably would get annoyed by the concert - it is pretty preachy around the middle - but the music is sublime, and with a great set list (that included “Beautiful Day”, “Vertigo”, “Yahweh”, “With Or Without You”, and a bunch of other great ones). I hope more bands try this 3D concert thing. Very cool.

It’s Wednesday. We can get through it.

We live in a world impoverished of story; so it is not surprising that many of us have picked up the bad habit of extracting “truths” from the stories we read: we summarize “principles” that we can use in a variety of settings at our discretion; we distill a “moral” that we can use as a slogan on a poster or as a motto on our desk. We are taught to do this in our schools so that we can pass examinations on novels and plays. It is no wonder that we continue this abstracting, story-mutilating practice when we read our Bibles. “Story” is not serious; “story” is for children and campfires. So we continuously convert our stories into the “serious” speech of information and motivation. We hardly notice that we have lost the form, the form that is provided to shape our lives largely and coherently. Our spirituality-shaping text is reduced to disembodied fragments of “truth” and “insight”, dismembered bones of information and motivation . . .

It takes the whole Bible to read any part of the Bible. Every sentence is embedded in story and can no more be understood accurately or fully apart from the story than any one of our sentences spoken throughout the course of the day can be understood apart from our relationships and culture and the various ways in which we speak to our children and parents, our friends and enemies, our employers and employees - and our God.

- Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book

We’re in this mode of eating all the stuff in our cabinets, mostly because we’ve both been too busy to go grocery shopping during the last few days. The co-op is a wonderful place to buy groceries, but you do have to plan your trips strategically, lest you end up in line for half an hour. I try to go when they open at 8am, but haven’t been able to make it.

In any case, when I got home last night, we rooted through the cupboards and decided on minted peas (frozen peas + sauteed in a little butter + add chopped fresh mint), garlic-parsley-butter pan-fried shrimp, a couple pieces of breaded cod from Whole Foods, and half a package of orzo (rice-shaped pasta that cooks up fast). I am finding that I really enjoy cooking lots of random things at once. It’s kind of fun to do mentally.

In another life I probably spun plates on sticks balanced on both my hands, feet, nose, and forehead.

We watched La Vie en Rose - well-acted, lovely to look at, and overall well-made, but a little confusing due to a really scattered narrative structure, but then again, I’m not French and don’t know much about Edith Piaf to begin with.

Today is heart-breakingly lovely outside. I can hear someone playing saxophone on the sidewalk, and everyone’s out in just a sweater (which is really unnecessary, but it is, after all, January).

I’m heading out in a couple minutes to rush over to Film Forum and see I’m Not There at long last. This is the good thing about January - all the good films are out and there aren’t a lot of must-see new releases, so it’s time to backtrack and see everything I missed in the fall and early winter. We’re also hoping to see Atonement before it leaves theaters, which shouldn’t be hard since it’s probably going to be nominated for a bunch of Oscars.

I’m about to finish my book (Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews), which has been fascinating. This morning I read interviews with Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates. I’m a bit ashamed that the only author besides Joan Didion that I’d read in any kind of recent past was P.L. Travers, whose most famous work is the Mary Poppins series - much darker than the movie, of course, and containing many books, all of which I read somewhat uncomprehendingly as a child. But I shamefacedly admit that I have not read anything by Toni Morrison, or Dorothy Parker, or Eudora Welty (aside from a few short stories in high school), or Maya Angelou, or Elizabeth Bishop, or Susan Sontag, or Joyce Carol Oates. My list is slowly growing.

It’s also interesting in the interviews to see the three authors that everyone cites as the best or most influential: Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf. I’ve read a book or two by each, but they merit more attention. Joan Didion actually said she was “paralyzed” by all the possibilities that James’ books presented to her.

I feel so young.

No! Blueprint got the axe! I finally find a women’s magazine I like and it disappears. I just got a subscription for my birthday. Well, phooey. I don’t want Martha Stewart Weddings.

I rather enjoyed this New York Times’ writer’s take on the architecture at the Times’ new building. He says some great things about skyscrapers and about what architecture says about ideals.

I’m beginning to doubt more and more that I’ll finish the NaNoNovel, not because I don’t want to but because I keep getting (paid) work thrown in my direction. Which is awesome! But I want to do my best on it.

But still, maybe I’ll just keep going and see what happens. I ran out of story suddenly yesterday but I’m keeping it all in the back of my head. If you have a good idea for a somewhat realistic story in which the protagonist is a smart six-year-old boy living in Greenwich Village, let me know.

In other news, this has been a crazy week at work and I got home around 9pm tonight, forced to forgo the IAM event I was going to both attend and photograph. In lieu of that, I watched a screener of Sand and Sorrow, a George Clooney-narrated documentary about the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur and into last year, and I’m now thoroughly outraged. I do highly recommend seeing the film when it comes out (next month?) but I can’t say much more because I’m supposed to write a review this week.

I am hearing nothing but the biggest and best of raves about There Will Be Blood. P.T. Anderson is probably my all-time favorite filmmaker (I kid you not, it borders on worship sometimes), so I was expecting this, but I didn’t anticipate the almost deliriousness of every review. Now I absolutely cannot wait to see this film.

But, this is not the weekend. (I think it comes out right after Christmas.) So this weekend, we were thinking of seeing Beowulf, but we may see something else. I am very prejudiced against this Beowulf - from the first time I saw the trailer, I knew I was going to hate it, it’s all wrong - but whatever. They’re calling it a “must-see” and so I must. I guess.

Also, we are going to a SeptokberfestinNovember party (don’t think about that too hard) at Kevin & Laura’s tomorrow night, which will undoubtedly be awesome, and I really need this weekend to recuperate. I am very glad that next week is a short work week, even if it means spending a lot of time traveling. Also, stuffing and gravy make everything much better. And Christmas can officially start. We can get our (tiny little) tree!

Last random observation: on my way to the IAM reception/lecture last night, I passed bagpipers on the steps outside of Cipriani and a whole lot of men in kilts for what felt like blocks. Sometimes I think that writers in New York are actually at a little bit of a disadvantage, because we get so used to the unusual that it barely registers and therefore rarely makes it into the notebook.

P.S. Amanda, I read the Zadie Smith book today, and I’m swooning.

Sometimes I suspect I live in more of a bubble than I realize, because my first reaction to this article is, “This is news?!”

From the article - this sounds like a patently awful idea:

SYFs (Single Young Females) are also looking for wheels, and manufacturers are designing autos and accessories with them in mind. In Japan, Nissan has introduced the Pino, which has seat covers festooned with stars and a red CD player shaped like a pair of lips. It comes in one of two colors: “milk tea beige” and pink.

Anyone SYF out there (single, hip, urbane young woman in her twenties or thirties) who might buy that? Really? Or does it sound like a car made expressly for pre-teens?

There’s an excellent article in Comment this week about Taproot Theater in Seattle and their development, from the creative to the spiritual to the business side. I’m pretty sure I’ve met some of these folks last year at the IAM conference.

“There is a surprising consistency between our founding intentions and where Taproot is at right now, thirty-one years later,” Nolte says. When you see one of Taproot’s shows, “it’s not about didactic measures or an altar call. It’s the delivery of a story and counting on the audience to be responsible enough or bothered enough that they’ll go away and sort through what the story had to say.”

Still hunting for an equivalent in New York. (Intriguingly, though, I recognized the article’s authors as Redeemer people right off the bat. So maybe we’re getting somewhere.)

In Germany, book prices have been fixed (i.e., no discounting) for years. But that’s all changing. Read the article.

A few excerpts to whet your appetite:

“It was in the middle of nowhere, only 20,000 steel workers,” he said, “but we could order any book in Germany and have it within a day. The whole post-fascist idea was that we needed books, along with universities and schools, to fix society.”

If you want proof that a cultural divide separates Europe and America, the book business is a place to start.

“I feel relatively calm for the simple reason that here almost everyone agrees,” Mr. Rodig said. “We want to make sure that a large number of books can be produced and distributed in Germany.”

Why? I asked.

For a second he seemed baffled that I would even ask the question.

“Because we need them,” he answered.

So I was reading this article about new theories concerning the death of Edgar Allan Poe. Interesting, but this made me laugh out loud.

There are numerous competing theories about the Mr. Poe’s death—the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, even has an exhibit dedicated to all of them. Some Poe experts believe it was the result of drink. Others think he had rabies. A few argue he was poisoned by corrupt political operatives. But Mr. Pearl—a 32-year-old graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, whose 2003 debut, the international best seller The Dante Club, prompted Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown to declare him, “the new star of literary fiction”—told The Observer recently that he has unearthed new information that suggests a less sensational answer: Mr. Poe, it seems, may have died of a brain tumor.

Um, ouch?