On the Third Beer

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I thought this notation, from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, was too beautiful not to share (also, I’ve been too busy to write and appropriating the words of Nobel prize winners seems like an easy alternative to actually, y’know, coming up with original content). Context unimportant:

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?

The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories

Edwin Turner3 Comments

There’s something fun-but-not-too-fun about James McConnachie and Robin Tudge’s The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories, a lovely little coffee-table encyclopedia that investigates everything from the strange death of playwright Christopher Marlowe to the disputed Apollo 11 moon landings to the sinister happenings at Bohemian Grove to the 9/11 attacks. The book is dubious and skeptical in all the right places, yet never snotty or wholly dismissive of the marginalized ideas it presents. Also, none of the lurid tabloid earnestness that marks the work of lifers like Alex Jones or David Icke can be found here (Icke does get his own five paragraph section, however). For the most part, the 450 or so pages of Conspiracy Theories are evenhanded, concise, and well-researched. A bibliography follows each section, and at the end of the book there’s a “Conspiracy Archive” suggesting books, websites, and films for those who can’t get enough paranoia. Conspiracy Theory devotes a good number of pages to recent events like Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, a choice that will perhaps date the book eventually–but of course, by that time we’ll need a new edition to record all the nefarious invisible acts committed by the Bilderberg Group, NWO, Masons, and, uh, reptilian beings posing as European royalty. Good stuff.

The updated U.S. edition of The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories is available this fall from Rough Guides.

Abolish No Child Left Behind

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I teach at an inner-city school, and I’ve witnessed first hand just how awful NCLB has been: it basically aims to make zombies out of kids. Here’s a personal anecdote that best sums up how NCLB’s rigid testing processes work to attack the fostering of free thought: I was administering an FCAT practice test, and a young lady of about 15 years or so raised her hand for my assistance. Her problem was that the answer box for a short response question was far too small to accommodate her answer (her handwriting was also large). We are teaching kids to literally “think inside the box”; we are also mandating that there is always only “one right” answer to problems, which is plainly false.

Please take a few seconds to sign the online petition to abolish this heinous crime against our young people.

More information–far more salient than my anecdotal ranting–from Stan Karp’s excellent critique of NCLB (via the ANCLB Facebook Group):

Claim: Annual standardized testing is the key to bringing school improvement and accountability to all schools. “For too long,” says the Department of Education, “America’s education system has not been accountable for results, and too many children have been locked in underachieving schools and left behind. … Testing will raise expectations for all students and ensure that no child slips through the cracks.”

Reality: A huge increase in federally mandated testing will not provide the services and strategies our schools and students need to improve. Most states and local districts have dramatically increased the use of standardized tests over the past two decades, but this did not solve the problems of poor schools. Some estimate that the new federal law will require states to give more than 200 additional tests at a cost of more than $7 billion.
Many studies show that standardized testing does not lead to lasting increases in student achievement and may in fact reduce it. Researchers at Arizona State University recently completed the largest study ever done on the issue. They concluded that “rigorous testing that decides whether students graduate, teachers win bonuses and schools are shuttered, an approach already in place in more than half the nation, does little to improve achievement and may actually worsen academic performance and dropout rates.” (New York Times, 12/28/02)

Continue reading “Abolish No Child Left Behind” →

“Some Principles of Democracy and Deconstruction—American or Otherwise” by A. S. Kimball

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“Some Principles of Democracy and Deconstruction—American or Otherwise” by Sam Kimball.

1. Democracy and deconstruction name the namelessness of a we, the people in relation to this people’s unimaginable possibilities of collective self-identification to come.

2. For this reason democracy and deconstruction locate the we in a future that transcends any possible transcendence of time, and therefore that remains utterly contingent and extinguishable, able to be obliterated in an apocalypse of the name.

3. Democracy and deconstruction attempt to respond to a demand—untraceable to any face or mind, to any consciousness—for absolute justice.

4. To this end, and because “we are all heir, at least, to persons or events marked, in an essential, interior, ineffaceable fashion, by crimes against humanity” (Derrida, Of Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 29), democracy and deconstruction demand of the citizen to come an attitude of radical forgiveness and hospitality.

5. To this same end, and for similar reasons, democracy and deconstruction also entail a radical affirmation—that is, they are ways of saying “Yes?” or “Who’s there?” in the absence of any determinate voicing.

6. This means that democracy and deconstruction respond to a call that comes from an unimaginable and indeterminate future.

7. For all these reasons as well as the fact that “all nation-states are born and found themselves in violence” (Of Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 57), democracy and deconstruction are provisional names for an historically unrealized ideal.

8. Thus, democracy and deconstruction require an incessant work of critique.

9. Democracy and deconstruction are ways of working toward forms of community that must necessarily exceed, transgress, transcend, and therefore remark all political borders, most especially those that define the sovereignty of the nation-state.

10. The spirit of the spirit of democracy and deconstruction has no single emotional marker, cannot be contained within or encompassed by any single emotional apprehension, is not identifiable as an affective state.

11. Democracy and deconstruction are inseparable from the fictionalizing, virtualizing power of literature.

Underworld — Don DeLillo

Edwin Turner2 Comments

Don DeLillo’s Underworld explores American culture and psyche throughout–and immediately after–the Cold War era. The book centers loosely on waste management exec Nick Shay, but diverges in constant achronological loops, employing dozens of different voices and viewpoints in order to handle a variety of themes and subjects that are, frankly, too massive to get a grip on. At all times though, Underworld seems aware of this inability to document its subject’s vastness, but, like Ishmael in Moby-Dick who attempts to systemize the unknowable whales, the characters in Underworld nevertheless try and try again to find order and meaning in a paranoid and increasingly disconnected world. The real center of the book is a baseball, the ball pitched by Brooklyn Dodger Ralph Branca to New York Giant Bobby Thomson, who won the game in a hit known as “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World.” However, this ball, this center, is repeatedly transferred, deferred, shifted, and even characters who claim to own the “real” ball understand that the validity or “realness” of the home run ball is always under question. DeLillo seems to suggest that finding fixed, stable meaning is an illusion; the best that people can hope for is to find solace in their family and friends in open, honest relationships.

By the time DeLillo had published Underworld in 1997, he had already established himself as a canonized saint of the American postmodern literary tradition, yet Underworld, in its massive size and scope (it weighs in at over 800 pages) seems primed to be the author’s “big book,” destined to fit neatly in the new canon of large and long American postmodern novels next to John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Underworld utilizes nearly every postmodernist trope, including a nonlinear plot, myriad, discursive voices, and a willingness to engage historical figures. The novel also manages to contain a bulk of themes and devices DeLillo has employed throughout his body of work: find here the paranoid alienation of The Names, the shadow of assassination-as-spectacle from Libra, the intersection of art, violence, economics, and politics of Mao II, and the exploration of the new American religion, consumerism, that underpinned White Noise.

Ultimately, all of Underworld‘s themes–garbage, art, war, insulation, paranoia, drugs, death, secrets, baseball, identity, etc.–threaten to crush the narrative under their sheer weight. Unlike Pynchon, Barth, Coover, and DFW, DeLillo is rarely playful or even fun; most of the humor here serves to alienate rather than connect the reader to the characters. The book is masterfully written, and any number of the little vignettes, like the sad life of the Texas Highway Killer, or the Space-Age compartmentalization of a 1950s suburban family, expertly delineate DeLillo’s handling of concepts and motifs. However, the book’s prologue, “The Triumph of Death” (the title alludes to Bruegel’s painting), an account of the 1951 Dodgers-Giants pennant game is easily the most passionate, intense, and engaging moment of the novel. This assessment isn’t meant to suggest that the remaining 700 pages or so of Underworld aren’t as rewarding, they just aren’t as fun. Underworld is probably a work of genius, and the sum of its many, many parts do add up to more than the corpus, only that sum will probably leave a lot of readers feeling cold.

Great American Heroes

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Teddy Roosevelt was the best American president. Just look at this guy. TR: the original rough rider. Painting by Tadé Styka.

Great American Heroes

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Biggie Smalls is basically a metaphor for America. This painting is by Kehinde Wiley. We love it.

Great American Heroes

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Who is more heroic or more American than Henry Hill, Jimmy Conway, Paulie Cicero, or Tommy DeVito? No
one, that’s who! Also, for that matter, is there anyone more American than Joe Pesci? No way, Jose! Painting by William Parsons.

Great American Heroes

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Okay well so, we’re more or less “off” this week, because we love America sooooooooo much that we’re going on vacation. Still, because we are totally American, which is to say totally industrious, and because “the U.S. is the greatest, best country god has ever given man on the face of the Earth,” we’ll be leaving you with a series of fantastic images of great American heroes over the next week, starting with this stunning portrait of Superman himself, Christopher Reeve, by talented painter Adam Brooks. Great stuff.

Brundibar — Maurice Sendak

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Adapted by playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, Brundibar retells Hans Krása’s children’s opera about a brother and sister who go on an adventure to get their ailing mother some fresh milk. The penniless pair decides to sing in order to earn milk money, but the cruel organ grinder Brundibar chases them away. However, they triumph with the help of a sparrow, a cat, a dog, and a cadre of helpful children.

The original opera was first performed by the children-inmates of a Nazi concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia. The symbolic overtones of the story are pretty straightforward, and Sendak emphasizes the point, marking his Brundibar with a Hitlerish mustache and a ridiculous Napoleon Bonaparte hat. Political symbolism aside, Brundibar is simply a great book, full of little songs, beautiful art, and a unique narrative style in which individual characters get their own speech bubbles and even street signs tell a story. This isn’t my one-year old daughter’s favorite book–yet–but it’s certainly one of my top picks from her little library. Good stuff.

On Rereading

Edwin Turner3 Comments

So I just read Blood Meridian again. And–

Like many bibliophiles, I have a stack of books marked “to read,” both a physical and a mental one, a stack that only grows, one that my book-buying addiction feeds and that the reader in me can in no way deplete. The saddest thing in the stack–or about the stack, really (about is the proper preposition, not in) are all the books that I’m sure are just totally great (Atonement, The Sot-Weed Factor) and the ones that I’ve started at least half a dozen times yet never finished–yet (Gravity’s Rainbow, The Wind-up Bird Chronicles) that might not ever get read because of all the new books that get thrown on the stack.

The saddest thing though, is that we–and the “we” here is not editorial, folks, it refers to bibliophiles–we simply don’t reread enough. Because I teach high school, there are dozens of books that I get to reread every year. Every time I read Macbeth or Of Mice and Men or Their Eyes Were Watching God, I’m amazed by how rich and complex and just downright masterful these books are. Each new reading produces new insights, layers, new motifs unraveled, new details, once seemingly mere happenstances, reveal themselves as key to the whole ship and shebang. Rereading is good. And yet we don’t reread enough, precisely because of the stack, the insane egomaniacal compulsion to read all of the great books before, uh, death.

And so well and so thus I reread Blood Meridian. I read it a few months ago, put it down in a daze, read a few more books, all etiolated by comparison, and then, despite the stack I picked up Blood Meridian again, a strange ineffable compulsion forcing it into my hands; I didn’t want to reread the whole thing, just a few passages, and then, and then, well and then so well and thus I was just rereading the whole thing, a whole new book there under the book I thought I had read, had known, knew. I had experienced this before: when I first read Holden Caulfield, we were the same age; five years later I was five years older and he was a jerk. A decade passed and he was an alien (maybe I was a phony). Now, well, now I’m afraid to read the book

We can’t ever really know a book because we change. The book doesn’t change but the reading of the book changes. Because I get so much out of a rereading, because I know that reading in itself is not enough, the stack–which, I should probably emphasize, is a very real, physical presence, a little mound by my bed–because of this, there is a second distress, a pain of not only not being able to read all of the books, but also not being able to not reread many of them that deserve it.

So and well, after I reread Blood Meridian, I do something that I do after I finish every book–I go pick up a couple of books that I’m desperate to reread, as well as a few from the stack. The feeling is strange and breathless and giddy, and ultimately overwhelming. I uncover over old bookmarks, shocked that I made it so far on the last attempt, or stumble over the first five pages. I lie to myself, reading sections of Finnegans Wake, as if.

Right now I’m halfway through DeLillo’s masterpiece Underworld. It’s huge and unwieldy and really fucking good, and I will finish it–this time–but even as I read it I know that I’m missing half of it, that I can only really “get it” in the rereading. And yet and well this is a book that’s been in the stack for years. I have no solution, and I guess there’s no point to this post, only that I wish I had more time to read and then to read again.

Icarus Falls, No Big Deal

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“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

“Musée de Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Feed the Animals

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The new Girl Talk album, Feed the Animals just came out via Illegal Art. It’s about time. We were almost ready to remove Night Ripper from the Subaru’s six-disc changer where it’s been firmly lodged for almost two years, so this is fantastic news. We just finished listening to Feed the Animals (are we said animals?) and there’s much to love here; we particularly like the emphasis on classic pop hits. Excellent craftsmanship. Our friend Jordan, sequestered in pristine Singapore, hipped us to the release, which he describes as “slower paced [with] more power-hits,” adding that “he uses whoomp-there it is…. finally.” Finally.

AFI’s Stupid Lists: No Love for Horror

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The wankers at the American Film Institute just released their lists of top ten films by “genre” (full lists after the jump). Everyone loves to quibble with lists, and there’s plenty weird with theirs. First off, “Animation” is a medium, not a genre. That’s like calling comic books a genre, or TV a genre. But whatever. Also, Shrek on anyone’s top ten is always a bad sign–still, they give Blue Velvet its due and give Groundhog Day some props). What I thought was really odd was that AFI finds room to recognize a “Sports” genre (and on that end, are Raging Bull and Caddyshack really sports movies?), and even a “Courtroom Drama” genre, but doesn’t make a list of the great horror films. Why?

Here’s our list of the great American horror films. We’re sure we’re forgetting a bunch. This blog has been a slapdash affair lately.

1. Night of the Living Dead (the original)

2. Psycho (clearly, not Van Sant’s remake)

3. Alien

4. The Shining

5. Dawn of the Dead (the original)

6. Rosemary’s Baby

7. Re-animator

8. The Thing (John Carpenter)

9. Evil Dead 2

10. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the original)

Continue reading “AFI’s Stupid Lists: No Love for Horror” →

Poster Making

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If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the ‘Fuck you’ signs in the world. It’s impossible. –Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye

Royal Art Lodge piece from Lots of Things Like This, a slim volume of pictures with words (or words with pictures?) included with McSweeney’s #27 (two other books comprise the issue: a volume of short stories including pieces by Jim Shepard and Stephen King, and a really cool notebook of weird doodles and crazy thoughts by Art Spiegelman). Other artists represented in Lots of Things Like This include Magritte, Goya, Warhol, Raymond Pettibon, Jeffrey Brown, Leonard Cohen, David Mamet, David Berman, Basquiat, and more.

Be Kind Rewind

Edwin Turner3 Comments

Sweet and silly, Be Kind Rewind, Michel Gondry’s fourth film (fifth if you count his 2005 documentary, Block Party) recounts the adventures of Mike (Mos Def) and his pal Jerry (Jack Black) as they recreate films from memory. When Mr. Fletcher, owner of the Be Kind Rewind video store, goes away for a week to a Fats Waller convention, he leaves Mike in charge of the store. Unfortunately, after a bizarre accident, Jerry becomes magnetized and consequently demagnetizes the store’s entire collection of VHS tapes (no DVDs here, folks). When number-one customer Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow) asks for Ghostbusters, the pair are forced to create their own version from memory (along with help from local laundress Alma (Melonie Diaz)). Miss Falewicz’s nephew and his friends see the bizarre results and must have more, hence the birth of “sweding“–the process of remaking film favorites. The neighborhood citizens go crazy for the sweded films, clamoring for their own favorites to be made. By the end of the film, the entire neighborhood has moved beyond copying other people’s movies. Instead, they make their own film, the (kinda invented) biography of Fats Waller.

Be Kind Rewind is full of goofy fun laughs, and despite its lighthearted tone it never half-asses–or overplays–handling its dominant themes of creativity and community. Jack Black never overdoes it as Jerry, the zany paranoiac, and Mos Def is fantastic as the slightly anxious, slightly slow Mike (his version of Chris Tucker during the sweding of Rush Hour 2 is worth the price of admission alone). Danny Glover plays Mr. Fletcher poignantly, and the character comes to serve as a kind of elegiac totem for the death of highly-specialized local video shops with knowledgeable, cinephile-employees. Be Kind Rewind is a funny, giving film, and never self-indulgent; it moves the viewer without a trace of schmalz. Plus, it never drags. Highly recommended.

Be Kind Rewind is out on DVD today.

Dad’s Little Helper: Malt Liquor for Grownups

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So my wife gave me Rogue’s Dad’s Little Helper Malt Liquor for Father’s Day. The back of the bottle tells the history of Father’s Day, which is fortunate, because I love reading copy with my food and drink. Here is the history:

After the death of his wife, Henry Jackson Smart was left to raise 6 young children alone. His courage, love, selflessness and dedication inspired his daughter, Sonora Smart Dodd, to organize the first Fathers Day on June 19th, 1910. In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed the third Sunday in June as Fathers Day. President Nixon, in 1972, established it as a permanent day of national observance.

Nixon! What a softy. Anyway. I’m going to drink this now and write about the experience in real time.

Malt liquor is traditionally served in its selfsame bottle or can, with the special accoutrement of a brown paper bag. However, out of respect for Rogue Brews–they make great beers–I’ll pour it out into a nice glass. Here goes.

7:56pm: Open the bottle. The nose is reminiscent of, uh, like a quart of Mickey’s (the “gentleman’s malt”). Not a good sign.

7:57pm: Pour. The color is gold, of course, a little darker and more opaque than a standard American lager.

7:58pm: Taste. First impression: This isn’t Olde English, but it’s hardly Rogue’s Juniper Pale Ale.

7:59pm: Oh shit! The Simpsons is going to come on (yeah, I still like The Simpsons).

8:00pm: I missed the couch gag. Hang on, a trailer for Hellboy 2. This looks pretty good. But back to the malt.

8:03pm: The beer has a good taste in the mouth, but it has that undeniable corn-burn aftertaste, which is kinda unpleasant, and kinda makes you want to keep drinking the beer. Homer kills his father–but it’s just a “wonderful dream.” Dark.

8:08pm: I haven’t had malt liquor in a long time, actually, probably like seven years. When I was a college student I used to scrape together seventy cents and go to the gas station next door and get myself a quart of Hurricane (to more cosmopolitan readers: in Florida we don’t have beverages in the forty ounce variety, popularly called “forties” –we have quarts. Because that extra eight ounces will, like, really tear you up). The trick with Hurricane–or really any quart, especially malt liquor, is to drink it really, really fast, before it gets warm. When it gets warm, it’s really, really bad. Also, the last portion is no good to drink, but may be respectfully tipped out in memory to one’s fallen comrades (the “homies,” if you will). Lisa said “southern-fried succubus.” Excellent.

8:17pm: A little internet research reveals that Anheuser-Busch still makes Hurricane. Also, Hurricane received a 2.125 rating (5 is the best) at BeerPal. What kind of a loser takes the time to review malt liquor online? Dad’s Little Helper got a 3.0. Here’s a quick control: My go-to beer of choice, Sierra Nevada IPA earned a 3.355, and Budweiser, the self-proclaimed “King of Beers” earned a 1.866.

8:26pm: The Dixie Chicks, Colonel Homer…and Major Marge! Seriously, the show is way past due for being taken out back and gently shot between the eyes. Seriously.

8:30pm: King of the Hill. This show is still good. And “What Would Hank Hill Do?” is a personal motto of mine.

8:35pm: This malt liquor is only 22 ounces, not 34, but it’s never taken me this long to drink one before. I’m kinda old, I guess, or I just don’t drink that much anymore.

8:36pm: My wife appears from the baby’s room. She has put the baby to sleep (that’s not a metaphor. We’re excellent parents). She asks about the malt liquor. “It’s a malt liquor,” I say. “It’s pretty good.” She asks me why I’m smiling. I think the brew is working some magic on me.

8:40pm: Micturition imminent.

8:43pm: God, I hate Peggy Hill.

8:45pm: My wife informs me that this Rogue beverage costs the same as other Rogue beverages (like five or six dollars). So, there. There’s some info in the review.

8:46pm: I haven’t talked about the label. Who is this guy? He’s on a couple of the Rogue bottles, but it strikes me now that he looks like Tom Selleck. Or, really like Magnum (P.I.). Magnum in three ties.

8:50pm: It occurs to me now that my best friend gave me a subscription to a microbrew of the month club, where I’ll receive several microbrewed beers in the mail every other month. So, I could do reviews like these, you know bimonthly (I suppose there’s nothing to stop me from doing them all the time–still, there needs to be an occasion. I’m kinda rambling now).

8:56pm: Okay–so, as it warms, Dad’s Little Helper conforms to standard malt liquor rules–but with greater resistance. There’s a possibility of this tasting like ass pretty soon, though, I fear. I need to pony up and get down to brass tacks.

9:02pm: Final verdict: This beer will give you a buzz, but so will Hurricane, paint thinner, and standing up too fast. A lovely Father’s Day gift–who wouldn’t want malt liquor?–but not on par with Rogue’s other brews.