An ongoing review of politics and culture

What I've Been Enjoying

The Walking Dead: A brutal, terrifying, funny, heartfelt, heartbreaking, and surprisingly gripping post-apocalyptic zombie serial set in the South, it’s easily the best long-running genre serial in any medium I’ve come across in any medium since Battlestar Galactica. Indeed, although the obvious touchstones — Romero’s zombie films, 28 Days Later, Y: The Last Man — can certainly be felt, BSG seems like closest parallel. Like Ron Moore’s grim space serial, it’s about a small group of people who attempt to rebuild some semblance of a comfortable life in the aftermath of total societal destruction. So it’s a mix of large scale zombie action (frequent attacks are a way of life) with smaller, character-driven moments — pair-ups and break-ups, the pleasure of finding good food, the frustrations and follies of building new communities from the group up. As with BSG, it’s the sort of thing you might not think is going to be any good. I mean, zombie comics? Really? But writer Robert Kirkman and artist Charlie Adler (whose panel layouts are hugely important to the series’ success) have such a great grip on character and pacing — the series is incredibly intense at times — that I found, to my surprise, that I both actually cared for the people in the story and could not tear myself away. I blew through the 1100 page compendium, which collects the first 48 issues, in two days, and I’ve got the final three collections sitting on my desk ready to read.

Ravelstein: Sure, it’s old news to you lit nerds, so I probably don’t need to tell you how good, how warm, how almost indescribably human it is. I don’t get too much chance to sit down with ordinary, reflective fiction anymore — it takes a sort of stress-free mental quiet that I often have a hard time mustering these days — but Bellow is an inviting enough author that I can read him in small chunks, over the course of, say, a week, and always feel totally engaged.

Borderlands: One of the under-appreciated qualities of video games, I think, is how funny some of them are. Fallout 3 and Fable II were both smart RPGs, and recognized as such. But what was often overlooked was that they were surprisingly quirky and funny — not classic works of comedy, maybe, but delightfully screwy and absurd at times. Borderlands is another action-RPG (this one much more focused on action than most), and it, too, manages to be funny — in its own crude, bizarre way — a lot more often than you might expect. It’s also a thoroughly — perhaps dangerously — addicting RPG/shooter combo, made even more addicting by the fact that, thanks to the stream of downloadable add-ons, you can keep going pretty much forever.

Astonishing X-Men: Joss Whedon’s two-year run on this flagship X-book is everything you’d want from both a Joss Whedon series and an X-Men comic, and it really makes me sad that his X-Men movie script — which, as I recall, was supposed to feature a final showdown inside a Walmart — was never produced. And yeah, I know it’s old news for those who follow these sorts of things more closely, but since I basically didn’t read comics from about 1995 until 2008, I have a lot of catching up to do!

Repo Men is Really, Really Bad

Honestly, there’s no other way to put it. There’s a scene at the end that’s so ill-conceived, over-the-top, bizarre, and repulsive that it sort of begs to be seen, if only to illustrate the incredible — and incredibly expensive — creative follies to which Hollywood can succumb. But by and large, it’s just an atrocious, stupid, shallow, and thoroughly uninteresting film.

Poorly Drawn Cartoon of the Day

Shades of Gray

I’m quite disinclined to insert myself into the middle of the Douthat-Larison discussion (see here, here, here, here, here, and also – whew! – here) of Hollywood’s depiction of U.S. foreign policy, but I do want to make one small point that deserves some emphasis: namely, that narrating the push for war in a way characterized by the right sorts* of sympathy for the motives and actions of those behind it has the capacity to serve a powerfully anti-war function, too, by reminding us that not all unjust wars are the product of greedy business executives and lies and backroom dealings among warmongering neocons in the DoD. This is not to say that the drive to war in Iraq wasn’t characterized by well more than its share of that sort of thing, but we do well to remember that even the best of intentions – which I can say with great confidence were had by a significant body of war supporters – don’t make an action right, and so that we can’t immediately discern the unjust wars from the just ones simply by scrutinizing the honesty or inner purity of those who would lead us into it. It’s for this reason, I think, that the “Bush lied, people died” account of the Iraq war can be so unhelpful: not because it’s false, and not just because it’s polarizing or lacking in tragedy or ambiguity, but because it gives the impression that the lying – which is not that uncommon, mind you – was the primary place where things went wrong, whereas in reality the war in question would have been unjust and disastrously executed even if everyone had been perfectly forthright about why we were getting into it.

• Addendum: I should emphasize that “right sorts” is doing quite a lot of work here, since in a world where good intentions are commonly thought to excuse the wrong sorts of sympathy for certain of its subjects will quickly make one’s film into an anti-war one. It may just be that the lack of historical distance makes it impossible, or at least nearly so, to strike the appropriate balance; thus Christopher Browning’s account of the German draftees who carried out the “Final Solution” in Poland helps us see that these were men just like us without giving us any inclination to think that Nazism might not have been so bad after all, whereas any filmmaker’s attempt to sympathize with Bush & Co. will immediately be seized on by certain factions as a film that shows how the war was really all right. If this is all that Daniel is saying, then perhaps we don’t actually disagree.

Recommendations Game

Apropos of Suderman’s last: here’s another game. What books are you most likely to recommend to others that they read?

The point of the game is to chuck out the stuff that both everybody knows is great and therefore tells them nothing about either you or the relevant work (“one of my favorite movies is ‘The Godfather’”) and the stuff that may have profoundly affected you but that most people won’t care about (“Frank Moore Cross’ ‘Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic’ was the book that convinced me to abandon my original plan to become an underwater welder and instead pursue a PhD in bible criticism”), leaving you only with those works that lots of people you meet or know might be interested in if only they knew about them.

My way-too-quickly-constructed-list of novels, nonfiction books (including memoir and biography), and movies, limiting myself to five of each.

NOVELS:

Housekeeping, by Marilyn Robinson. Robinson is what a truly great stylist ought to be: someone whose style you don’t even notice until you think about it. This is also one of the most terrifying books I’ve ever read, and similarly, you won’t even notice it’s terrifying until you stop and think about it.

The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro. This dreamlike doorstop about a conductor on tour in an unnamed central European country for a concert is a bit of a personal favorite, and I keep recommending it to people who don’t wind up finishing it. I’m not going to stop, though; it’s just too wonderful a book.

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, by G. B. Edwards. By contrast, everyone I’ve ever recommended this first-person novel about a man born and raised on the island of Guernsey to has fallen in love with it. You won’t want to part with this very distinctive voice, and the funny thing is that nobody even knows who wrote it.

The Bat Poet, by Randall Jarrell. “A bat is born, naked and blind and pale . . .” Technically a children’s book, both an instructive book about poetry, and a delightful book of poems, and a touching book about being a poet.

Watership Down, by Richard Adams. Actually, enough people I’ve recommended this one to have already read it that it probably doesn’t deserve to be on this list, but boy is it a fabulous book.

NONFICTION BOOKS:

Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, by Yossi Klein Halevy. The memoir of a man who has really thought about his life. Which is true of surprisingly few of them. Plus, one of the more insightful books I know about a particular kind of American Jew, a kind that has had more than a little influence on recent history.

Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, by Stanley Cavell. Proof that you can be profoundly influenced by a book you read in your late 30s. I’m recommending this to everybody who would ever consider reading a book of literary criticism. The essays on Lear and Othello are still ringing in me.

Rites of Spring, by Modris Eksteins. The first book of cultural history that I ever read, and I don’t think I’ve read one since that measured up. A tour-de-force interpretation of modernism as a cultural phenomenon, its origins and its consequences.

A Worker in a Worker’s State, by Miklos Haraszti. A book that deeply moved me in college, a rare instance of what I’d have to call romantic left-wing criticism of Communism by someone actually from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Democracy and Distrust, by John Hart Ely. A bit of an odd-man out in this collection, but Ely’s book, which I read in college, was probably the best effort to make sense of our liberal constitutional order with minimal resource to eternal verities metaphorically handed down from Sinai. Still worth grappling with.

MOVIES:

“Babe: Pig in the City.” Imagine Taxi Driver directed by David Lynch . . . as a kids’ movie. Yeah. But there are scenes in it that will absolutely break your heart. (“Thank you for waiting.”)

“Vanya on 42nd Street.” The best production of Chekhov I’ve ever seen, and some of the best acting by a phenomenal cast led by Wallace Shawn and Julianne Moore. Plus the most creative use of an intermission in a cinematic treatment of a play.

“Flirting With Disaster.” A very personal movie for me, but also riotously funny. Deserves to be placed alongside the great Hollywood comedies of the 1940s. (In fact, I wonder if Stanley Cavell has seen it . . .)

(Wow – three movies from the 1990s? Yikes . . .)

“After Hours.” Never ceases to amaze me how many people haven’t seen this one. Scorsese’s hate-letter to Manhattan and the entire downtown movie aesthetic. Will give you nightmares, but your nightmares won’t be as entertaining.

“One-Two-Three.” Another one I’m amazed so many people haven’t seen. Jimmy Cagney in Billy Wilder’s Cold War comedy about a Coca Cola executive in Berlin out to conquer the Russian market just before the Wall goes up. “Is everybody corrupt?” “I don’t know everybody.”

Whittling these down to five each wasn’t easy, let me tell you. If I did this again next week, I’d probably make a different list. But hey, the above are all really, really worth reading/seeing. So no regrets.

For those wearing the green today . . .

Check out Ireland’s new national anthem".

A Hastily Compiled, Non-Definitive List of Books That Have Influenced Me

Tyler Cowen has posted a list of books which influenced him the most, and, on Twitter, Mr. Gobry has asked for similar lists from TAS contributors. Happy to oblige! I’m not sure if the books below are truly the absolute most influential in my life, but they’re certainly the ones that immediately stick out in my mind as having stuck with me over time.

Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury: I’ve always been a little perplexed by the book’s reputation as a defense of free speech. It is, of course, but that’s not its most important point by far. Instead, it’s a novel about mental debilitation and loss of empathy induced by media overload — in particular, overload on shallow, visual, electronic media. It’s also a novel about the love of stories, and the way written stories in particular can provide humans with meaning, purpose, and escape; by the book’s end, the hero joins an outcast community in which individuals devote themselves not only to learning works of literature, but to immersing themselves in them, fusing their identities with these works and, in a sense, becoming them. For reasons that should be obvious, I’ve long found this wonderful and tremendously appealing.

Videohound’s Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics: Before the Internet, and thus before easy access to IMDB and the rest of the digital cinemaverse, cinephiles had to rely on incomplete reference books in order to familiarize themselves with back catalog films. For years, I poured over Videohounds’ cult film guide almost daily, and its sensibility — a quirky mix of giddy, passionate, erudite, snarky, and critical — helped shape my appreciation of and attitude toward pulp ever since.

The Caves of Steel — Isaac Asimov: As an eight year old first reading the book, I loved Asimov’s cleverly constructed murder mystery story, and as an already-devoted sci-fi geek (Star Trek was a staple in my household), I loved the intricate future world Asimov designed even more. But what stuck with me most was the slightly detached, slightly cranky, cerebral-but-not-stuck-up quality of both the detective protagonist, Elijah Baley, and the storytelling itself. As with most of Asimov’s characters (and, as I understand, Asimov himself), Baley was a hyper self-aware invert somewhat vexed by people and social situations, but who solved problems by thinking them through as thoroughly as possible and accepting whatever results, often imperfect, came of this method. Perhaps to my detriment, I related to this quite a bit and found it a useful model for understanding human relations.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns — Frank Miller: I got my first copy of this at nine or ten years old, and I literally read and reread it until it fell apart (for a while I held it together with duct tape, but eventually I lost so many pages that it was no longer worth saving). Miller’s fusion of gruff noir sentiment and comic book action helped define the way I think about pop art and genre storytelling; sure, it’s low culture — frequently crude and base — but it’s executed with such verve that it somehow makes it into the upper middlebrow (or near enough) anyway.

Ender’s Game — Orson Scott Card: Speaking of hyper-cerebral! Scott Card’s later books descend into a near-parody of the Asimovian worldview, with protagonists who presume (and act upon) an absurdly concrete and knowable understanding of human behavior. But while you can find hints of this in Ender’s Game, it works anyway, in large part because of the young age of its heroes. These days, I prefer the first two sequels, Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, both of which are more mature in their outlook. But the original is the one I’ve read most often, and the one I think of most.

The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger: Yes, another novel about a social outcast who spends too much time in his head. But it’s a classic for a reason, and an enduring portrait of adolescent questioning.

American Pastoral — Philip Roth: Probably the finest work of prose in the bunch, and arguably also the most mature, it’s one of those novels that’s both impressive and gripping — not only do you admire it, but you can’t stop flipping pages as you do.

You may have noticed that except for the Videohound guide, it’s all fiction. For a reason! While I read a lot of magazine-length nonfiction, I read very little in the way of nonfiction books. And what I have read came later: In my formative, pre-college years, I probably read fewer than a dozen non-fiction books (not counting school text books, although I suppose I didn’t actually read most of those either). It’s not that nonfiction books haven’t influenced me — think of obvious libertarian touchstones: The Road to Serfdom, The Law, Capitalism and Freedom, The Calculus of Consent — but I read them most of them post-college and, as a result, I suppose I don’t feel like they’re really, well… as much a part of me in the Fahrenheit 451 sense.

Nothing Is Written, Even In Code

Catching up on Ross this morning after writing yesterday’s account at Pomocon of how technology really threatens (small-l) liberalism was a nice synergy, if by no means a destiny. For Ross has excerpted a fascinating but awful mental exercise, by a particularly futurist David Gelernter, that shows even better than I could hint what loomed behind the themes of my own, closer-to-the-ground account.

For the sake of conversation, I will limit myself to five points:

1. Gelernter’s cheery fatalism on the private machines-vs-Cloud debate unnerves me greatly. It’s not that I hope for, or would fight for, a world without clouds. But I do hope for, and might even fight for, a world without a Cloud.

2. The Cloud problem is itself merely a symptom of Gelernter’s insistence on seeing the internet as a single, universal System — driven, as I suggested at Pomocon, by a captivation with the vast possibilities unleashed by treating the internet as a System. This element of geek psychology is a serious problem — less because the field of human possibilities can and should be dramatically reduced, and more because I detect, paradoxically, a failure of the imagination among geeks who gravitate with such pubescent enthusiasm to technological unitarian universalism. I’m profoundly unconvinced that the possibility-maximizing framework is, and must be, the unitary and universalist one.

3. This is to leave aside the whole issue of the inadequacy of our theory of possibility itself. Gelernter is hard on today’s internet for greatly increasing the quantity of information and transactions without increasing their quality. For some, quantity IS quality, or is quality’s main ingredient; Gelernter would therefore seem not to be one of these people, but his relentless fantasizing about our uni-uni System Destiny seems to me to undermine our confidence that this is the case. There are imported assumptions about what a possibility IS that need to be, in the parlance of our times, ‘unpacked’ and ‘interrogated’.

4. The revealing characteristic about the fantasy that there can be a singularity — the point at which the uni-uni System Destiny is consummated or realized — is its apparent inability to theorize possibility outside the frame of destiny itself. We are told repeatedly, and I think exclusively, that the singularity can exist only because it must. Any causal theory of omnipossibility that requires destiny already fails, doesn’t it? What’s more, any theory of possibility that imagines it even possible for all possibilities to be contained within a single system depends on the logically defective assumption that no possibility requires system plurality, or at least binarity. At least some possibilities are being excluded from any uni-uni System that contains even all the possibilities that an open-ended number of human beings can experience ever.

5. This implies that our experience as human beings points to the realization that the scope of experience is of necessity narrower than the scope of possibility. Though this realization has fueled secular unitarian universalist projects since Saint-Simon, Comte, and Hegel — if possibility must be limited even when it functions for us as infinite, then why not opt for the System? — there are well-known problems that re-present them in this post-internet context. The model for a unitary universal system of dramatically limited possibility is, of course, Biblical creation and the Biblical God. The attempt to escape the good judgment of God — both as a consequence of our being and its cause — leaves us with two choices: the judgment of particular humans and the judgment of the System. The destiny theory of singularity ultimately fails because it claims that the System Destiny has already escaped the good judgment of the particular humans who have created the system — in other words, that the singularity has already happened in the future, has come back to the present from the future to make itself happen. Whose standard of good judgment would ratify this as our best point of departure for figuring out what to do with the internet?

Photo of the Day

Photo of the Day

Iraq Veterans Keep Sniping at 'The Hurt Locker,' Missing the Point

The chorus of military criticism of The Hurt Locker keeps getting louder. A slew of Iraq veterans have dissected the its accuracy without, in my opinion, making a serious argument against it as a film. Now, a former infantryman has taken to the Atlantic to say it shouldn’t win Best Picture because its license with reality is essentially the same as soldiers who lie about their military exploits to appear heroic. (Really.)

I understand the urge for people with firsthand experience to nit-pick the movie’s accuracy, particularly as critics rave about how “realistic” it is. But that’s different from imposing an arbitrary moralism on a movie—insisting The Hurt Locker shouldn’t win an award because it did the things the medium is known for, namely making things more exciting and or condensing the timelines. The movie doesn’t purport to be a true story, and even with a journalist screenwriter and actors that underwent military training in preparation for their roles, is still very obviously a work of fiction. (One could work up a similarly lengthy list of that-would-never-happens for any of its rivals in the Best Picture category.)

Brian Mockenhaupt, the soldier writing in the Atlantic, admits that movie “nails” the setting—the heat, dust, sweat, trashy streets, curious Iraqis, etc. Which is essentially what it was trying to do. I would wager Bigelow cared more about a realistic “feel” than precisely realistic plotting. It’s sequenced like an action film, and her shaky camera is meant to convey a sense of running alongside the squad, not the phony factual authenticity Mockenhaupt imagines. We are supposed to feel like we are in the middle of one of Will James ill-advised escapades, never mind the fact that it probably wouldn’t have happened exactly as it does on screen. We feel the danger and emotion of a very intimate situation, which most war movies, with their giant casts and swelling themes, fail to capture.

The strength of The Hurt Locker is the very adrenaline rushes its military critics are complaining about. Call them Hollywood-concocted scenarios if you must, but surely they can play a role in helping us “outsiders” grasp the sensations of being on the ground in Iraq without having us believe everything we see on TV. Its punch has little to do with its alleged factual weaknesses. Thanks to this film, I now understand a tiny fraction of the terror of disarming a bomb that could dismember me at any moment. I have a glimpse of what it’s like to shift from that deadly environment to the humdrum reality of American daily life. I was not, contrary to Mockenhaupt’s read-in analysis, told “that war, as experienced by so many Americans, isn’t meaningful enough as is, but must be gussied up with outsiders’ interpretations of what makes the experience profound.”

The Hurt Locker is, as Dana Stevens wrote, “without question the most exciting and least ideological movie yet made about the war in Iraq.” None of its Best Picture competitors (other than maybe Avatar) can lay claim to such a superlative, and that’s why it deserves the statue. The Oscars are about exciting movies.

Rock!

Since Matt and Turnbuckle brought up the subject of rock’s lack of, uh, rock (rocking? rockingness? rockosity?), here’s some good old fashioned rock-yer-ass-off rock:

As tough-guy sludge rock goes, this is solid stuff — technical but not too wanky, speedy enough but paced with a sturdy groove, gruff and gloomy without descending into self-parody. I find myself subtly headbanging — fine, it’s just nodding my head, but that’s because I’m in my home office by myself — as I listen along. But here’s the thing: I spent a fair amount of time listening to grumpy, brutish rock just like this as a high schooler, and even on into college, but I’m not sure I could really see myself rocking out to HOF on my walk to work or at the gym or while reading The Hill on my laptop in the morning. It’s not that I’m embarrassed (I still read comic books and play video games!), or that I think it’s bad — like I said, it’s good, solid sludge. It’s more like this sort of music doesn’t seem like the right soundtrack to my life anymore. Maybe (probably) that’s kind of lame, but I suspect it’s true of a lot of recent punk, hardcore, and metal fans who’ve settled into amiable lives as young professionals and, perhaps in doing so, traded shoe boxes full of handmade Dillinger Escape Plan and Swarm of the Lotus tapes for iPods packed with Grizzly Bear and Dave Bazan.

(Thanks to TAS contributor James Poulos for alerting me to this album’s existence via the Tweeting machine.)

Douthat on the Health Care Summit

Ross offers an excellent take.

More Vampire Economics, Please

I’ve been woefully remiss on my moviegoing recently, but last month I did manage to catch a screening of Daybreakers. The best compliment I can pay it is that it reminded me a lot of an early 80s John Carpenter film — not one of his best, but sturdy and pulpy and entertaining — and, most surprisingly, genuinely inventive in the all-vampire society it conjured up. The problem, though, is that clever as that society was, it was obviously designed by people without serious understanding of governments and markets manage resources.

That sounds like a really obtuse criticism, and it is, in a way. Like I said, I thought the movie was a hoot. But it’s also a reason the film was only a hoot, and not a matinee classic. The movie is based around the problem of diminishing natural resources in a market-oriented democracy; without a basic understanding of how those things work, it’s hard to craft a really compelling vision of a world suffering from those problems. The film’s premise is that vampires have taken over the world, converting most of the world’s human population into fanged, deathless nightwalkers. So there are all sorts of retrofits for vampires who love blood and can’t stand sunlight: an underground “subwalk” to get around, vehicles with blacked out windows and camera systems for daylight driving, food vendors that sell coffee with a hint of blood.

Neat, right! Well yeah, but the film’s story really focuses on the politics/economics of the blood shortage; one company has been snapping up the whole human population and bleeding them dry, leaving blood in short supply. That’s a problem, because vampires can’t survive without a supply of blood. But how is the blood rationed? Who makes those choices? What are the various policies that the vampire government has proposed to deal with the problem? Early in the film, we see a debate between two vampire politicians, one who thinks that humans should be bled dry — after all, they’re food, right? — and another that thinks that people are vampires, too (basically), and should be treated humanely, with respect. The most interesting thing, though, is that there’s a news scroll at the bottom of the screen, and as the debate is wrapping up, a headline noting the blood shortage scrolls by, followed by the line, “Vampire economists say…”

And then it cuts away.

This happened at the beginning of the film. And it drove me COMPLETELY. NUTS. for the following 90 minutes. What do vampire economists think about the blood crisis? I really want to know! Is there a vampire central blood bank? Are there interest rates? Does it get used as currency? Maybe they went off the blood standard at some point?

Okay, that’s probably getting a little too nerdy. But the implication is that there’s this whole social structure organized around blood allocation. Yet all we see is a single company that stupidly burns through its resources without any interest in, say, setting up more efficient, long-term sustainable blood farms; surely a ripe human should be able to pump blood into the system for 60 or 70 years. The movie takes place just a decade or so after the vampire takeover — has no one bothered to try bleeding the humans a little more slowly, to keep them alive, and creating new blood, for longer? How many people does it take to keep one vampire alive for a year, or a lifetime? Wouldn’t there be a move for a blood entitlement, and how would demographic factors shapethat program?

Yes, it’s wonky stuff, and far too wonky, in this form, for a major motion picture, but you see where I’m going with this, right? Framed properly, questions like these could have driven in a much more interesting direction, making for a film that not only had some neat ideas, but actually had something to say.

Those shiftless indie-yuppies

Influential pop music critics like Sasha Frere-Jones, Jody Rosen, and Ann Powers have put a lot of effort, in the last decade or so, into bringing down the general critical estimation of indie music, especially vis-à-vis hip hop. Frere-Jones has flogged a theory that indie music represents a sort of cultural retrenchment by middle class white kids in reaction to the cultural primacy of hip hop, the creation of a specifically white music, or, as Frere-Jones had it, whiteness music. This mode of theorizing blew up in Frere-Jones’s face when he called Stephen Merritt a racist and got so roundly slapped down for it that he didn’t even try to defend himself. But, even as Frere-Jones and Rosen seem to be rediscovering the virtues of brainy pop music, the urge of to pose as a friend of the oppressed by hating on the white indie hipsters remains. David Prince of Billboard.com was on Marketplace the other day talking about how the recession appears in contemporary music, and, well, note how glibly he gets to an explanation of why indie music is so “elitist”:

Ryssdal: What about indie music? I mean some of the folks out there just doing their own thing.
PRINCE: You know, I think of indie music in a lot of ways as the most elitist and the most ignoring the recession and the economic realities. Because if you have the opportunity to really pursue a music career in this day and age and do nothing else, then you probably have some expendable income.
Ryssdal: Expendable income. So it’s kids who have some money, basically.
PRINCE: Indie yuppies is a phrase I think of a lot when I’m reading Pitchfork.

Really? “Indie yuppies” is a phrase you think of? Maybe you should think of a different phrase, because that one’s pretty stupid.

"I Feel Like My Whole Life is Ridiculous, Really."

Jezebel brings us the funniest Judge Judy segment ever. (Side question: Are these people hipsters? Sub-side questions: Are they faking it? And if they are, does that make them more hipster or less?)

Once Again, I Have Opinions About New Music

I’ve really been enjoying the entirety of Surfer Blood’s Astrocoast, and I’m stoked to see them play later this week. Pitchfork already made the appropriate Weezer reference, but they also remind me a lot of the (Neko Caseless) New Pornographers. The combination is a very, very good thing.

The new Spoon record, Transference, is also excellent — easily their best since, um, maybe ever? (Okay, maybe not, but usually when I hear a new Spoon disc, I think, this is great! Sounds just like the last record, which was also great! Transference, though, has a vibe that’s all its own.)

And I’m pretty sure that, so far, single of the year goes to Local Natives for “Sun Hands.”

(Certain tracks from the Gorilla Manor, like “Shape Shifter,” remind me quite a bit of The Snake, The Cross, The Crown, which is great, though perhaps not so much from the band’s perspective, seeing as I can’t recall ever meeting anyone else who’s even heard of that group.)

Various live versions here.

Contractually Obligated to Wear an Eye Patch and Always Be A Badass

The Vulture has details on the probably unnecessary Escape From New York remake. The best part concerns the agreement that John Carpenter, who directed the original, made New Line sign before putting together a new version of the film:

And more importantly, good ol’ Snake remains largely the same. Legally, he has to be. We learned that in order to land the rights, New Line had to sign a contract with John Carpenter stipulating, among other things, that Plissken “must be called ‘Snake’”; “must wear an eye patch”; and that he would — and we’re not making this up — “always be a ‘bad-ass.’”; So, if you ever catch the new Snake watching Grey’s Anatomy or complaining that the senator isn’t “emotionally available,” just know that somewhere, some poor development exec is about to be carted off to jail.

Is The PhD Trap a Trap? (I)

Thomas Benton’s Chronicle article on the trap of academic life describes the hopeless professional situation of graduating Ph.Ds in the humanities accurately enough, but I agree with some of the more skeptical commenters that he overstates the structural or conspiratorial aspects of the problem. To summarize his depiction of the liberal arts Ph.D. as a professional decision: Getting a Ph.D in the liberal arts is the stupidest f***ing thing a person can do. Even with a degree from an elite program in hand, a new Ph.D. faces grim job prospects (stable academic jobs are wickedly elusive, and returning to the private sector leaves you at a disadvantage against the dumb undergrads you were justing giving B-minuses to, or so Benton tells it). But then Benton puts the pedal to the vaguely conspiratorial metal:

Most departments will never willingly provide that information because it is radically against their interest to do so.

And

Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.” That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students….

The implication is that graduate programs keep accepting too many grad students for financial reasons. This is a familiar line of argument by now. Grad students provide cheap labor, freeing up tenured faculty to do research and freeing universities from the budget burdens of replacing old professors. One of the problems with this line of argument is that it paints a picture of institutions so vested in these backwards practices that they will never change. But I think a key feature of the problem exists outside of this self-reinforcing circuit of material incentives and is thus amenable to the type of criticism Benton is leveling.

A big reason why academic departments maintain Ph.D. programs in the liberal arts and resist shrinking or eliminating them – beyond all the hard-headed talk about money – is that professors like having graduate students. A common selling point of jobs at “research universities” is the opportunity to “teach graduate students.” Why, given the low esteem in which we hold the sniveling grad student?

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Things To Watch For If--And This Is a Big If--Google Buzz Catches On

1) Will bloggers start to use Buzz as a lab for post ideas, testing them out on a trusted audience before opening them up to ideological opponents, trolls and the Internet at large? At the moment, some of this function is being served by email and Twitter, but both have their limitations. Email requires you to know in advance which of your contacts might have helpful input; Twitter, obviously, makes it difficult to elaborate. I always thought this was an underutilized side function of Google Reader, my preferred Google toy, but the use of stand-alone notes hasn’t really taken off. In my limited experience, people haven’t been posting things directly to Buzz either — unless they’re about Buzz — so this would probably look more like long comment threads on tweets.

2) Will bloggers who get tired of the slings and arrows of an unruly and unilluminating commenter community retreat by posting their thoughts in Buzz?* I suspect that the bloggers most likely to do this are those a) with day jobs/other careers and/or b) who write for a specialized audience. In an extreme scenario, this could lead to a bifurcation of the blogosphere, with professional bloggers and bloggers with extremely small/negligible audiences using public platforms, and those with regular but not-overwhelming audiences on Buzz.

I don’t have any confidence that either of these would come to pass. But it would be interesting if they did!

*I know that Buzz makes it tricky for your feed to be private and your followers controlled, but it’s not impossible, and it seems to me to be the sort of thing someone with a not-huge email contact list could perform as a regular maintenance task quite easily. I won’t pretend to be an expert on the privacy issues here, and I’d rather not go into them in depth at the moment — I’ll just admit that I could easily be wrong about this and leave it at that.