From a very funny letter to Earthlings by Paul Simms:
A little bit about us: our males have two penises, while our females have only one. So, gender-wise, if you use simple math, we’re pretty much identical to you.
The movie Missing.
The 1982 drama Missing with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek is a great movie for Americans who want to take a few steps down an alternate memory road. The Cold War had both bad guys who were really bad and good guys who were almost as bad. Meet some of the latter.
“First Asian-American to build a high-rise hotel in Manhattan,” etc.
Bootstraps and the real economy: Sam Chang’s Budget Hotel Empire in New York City in the NYT is a great, brisk read.
The decade ahead.
Admittedly not the best story to read while having trouble sleeping:
Finance will be costlier and investment weak, so the stock of physical capital, on which prosperity depends, will erode.
…Before the crisis the overpriced assets held by banks and households were accompanied by vast debts. After the crisis their assets were shattered but their liabilities remained standing. As Irving Fisher, a scholar of the Depression, pointed out, “overinvestment and overspeculation…would have far less serious results were they not conducted with borrowed money.”
…Fisher, again, put it best: “I fancy that over-confidence seldom does any great harm except when, as, and if, it beguiles its victims into debt.” There is no better example of that than American consumers.
As they say, “hope is not a strategy.” To which we must add “debt is no sure tactic.” I think the financial experts have had a come to Jesus moment about leverage. I’m not sure the American consumer has yet to fully embrace the lie of the last decade – or two. That moment of truth will necessarily be political. It always is.
I’m optimistic about the foundations of our nation. Our political culture is a complex yet elegant mechanism. It has allowed us to travel so very far so very quickly (what’s two hundred years, really?) It will be an interesting next decade.
Was it all the rain in September?
The October 5th edition of The New Yorker is not happy.
Movies: “As a piece of moviemaking craft, ‘A Serious Man,’ is fascinating; in every other way, it’s intolerable.” Theater: “You feel as though you were watching not the play you’ve read but a sketch for an idea about a play.” Opera: “[H]e has failed to find a clear angle on ‘Tosca,’ and instead delivered an uneven, muddled, weirdly dull production that interferes fatally with the workings of Puccini’s perfect contraption.” Fiction: “Powers has for some time been writing fiction by dictation, with the help of speech-recognition software. Not enough help, alas: on the current evidence he also needs bullshit-recogntion software.” Television: “The forensic evidence so far indicates that a kind of death is taking place before our eyes; the only question is whether what we’re witnessing is an accident or a crime scene.”
The arts feature is about Michael Haneke and his sadistic movies. The news feature is about violent gangs in Rio de Janeiro. The opening essay, about the financial system, concludes: “The next time the structure starts to lurch and sway, it could all fall down.”
The happiest piece is a Letter from Tehran.
Hilton Als, breaking it down.
I seldom laugh out loud while reading The New Yorker but this closing sentence is sharp:
Instead of working to make us ask ourselves [“Whom haven’t we betrayed?”], Hoffman works to make us see how hard he works. He takes up as much space as a white man can, if you let him.
Is all science fiction religious writing? Er, yeah, probably.
In a meandering discussion on MetaFilter I had occasion to note that, as a genre, science fiction is closely related to religious writing.
If science fiction grants the reader access to an alternate reality, so does religious writing. Both are most powerful where fantasy (infinite) and reality (finite) overlap. Both are self-conscious: science fiction asks the reader to contemplate reality as such, religion allows the believer to transcend reality as such. Both promise the comfort (or horror) of a self-contained and/or complete world; the totality of time and space.
If anything, science fiction is the religious impulse articulated in a modern context.
Lammy.
We made lamb souvlaki last night. I have sheep on in my mind.
L: Untitled # 137 by Simen Johan, R: Gordon Ramsay by Jillian Edelstein.
The Kashiwa Mystery Cafe.
Cabel Sasser tells the story of the Kashiwa Mystery Cafe. A wonderful if transient place.
True story. There’s a bee buzzing inside a light on our deck.
Tonight, as I sat outside, a dying bee flew into a light above me. It buzzed against the hot bulb for a while before falling out and landing on the floor, still. Ater a few quiet seconds it flew up again, into the light, buzzing intensely in the sconce before falling out and onto the floor. Where it lay still. It repeated this futile flight again and again and was still at it when I finally got up and walked away, ashamed for life and full of pity for the bee. “That’s no way to go,” I thought. But the bee had more hope than me. It flew into the light. I walked away.
Thirty minutes later, a green preying mantis shows up and steals the scene.
Water restrictions in LA lead to waterline ruptures?
The NYT:
The rash of blowouts began in June, when a new drought-induced water policy went into effect, a circumstance leading outside engineers and analysts to question whether water restrictions are contributing to the problem.
Under the policy, residents are permitted to water their lawns only on Monday and Thursday, causing a surge in water flow those days that may be taxing the system, said Richard G. Little, a policy analyst at the University of Southern California who studies public infrastructure.
So much for models.
WTF is happening in Guinea?
Over 100 people were killed after soldiers began firing on a pro-democracy rally in Guinea yesterday. The demonstrators were protesting over rumors that military leader Moussa Dadis Camara, who took power in a coup last December, plans to run in presidential elections.According to reports from Human Rights Watch, soldiers stripped and raped female protesters in the streets and stabbed others with bayonets.
Moussa that the soldiers were acting without orders. “Even I, as head of state in this very tense situation, cannot claim to be able to control those elements in the military,” he said.
More on Guinea – formerly French Guinea.
A social animal, indeed.
Ms Wokhwale prospered because being able to make and receive phone calls is so important to people that even the very poor are prepared to pay for it. In places with bad roads, unreliable postal services, few trains and parlous landlines, mobile phones can substitute for travel, allow quicker and easier access to information on prices, enable traders to reach wider markets, boost entrepreneurship and generally make it easier to do business. A study by the World Resources Institute found that as developing-world incomes rise, household spending on mobile phones grows faster than spending on energy, water or indeed anything else.
At the UN, stating the obvious.
My one genuine LOL moment of the day: “Berlusconi referred several times to President Obama’s speech today. However, he avoided reference to Qaddafi’s diatribe, in which he was one of the few world leaders to receive praise.”
The psychology of poverty, or, things I’d rather read about than experience.
“Poverty makes some people insane,” writes Michael Gold, as quoted in an inspiring review of Depression Era art in a recent issue of The New Yorker.
I wonder if some modern cultures are more adept at dealing with poverty than others. For example, Mexico. India. China. And if they are, what are the characteristics of a culture that affords dignity in the face of deprivation?
(Dominant religious narratives of fatalism; predetermination with and without signs of grace. Hard social stratification. Wonderful parties.)
One side has Fox, the other has YouTube.
Dear Mr. Joss Whedon and your compassionate legions of nerddom: please consider making your next viral hit a musical comedy about the eighth circle of Hell. And please title it “Main Street USA“: “Former U.S. vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, criticized for her lack of foreign policy experience, emerged in Asia on Wednesday to share her views from ‘Main Street U.S.A.’ with a group of high-flying global investors.”
“Emerged,” indeed.
The privileges of being a political refugee and the son of political dissidents.
The privileges of being a political refugee for me are many. Not least of which is my U.S. citizenship. But the one that I have in mind tonight is more immaterial and, perhaps, more important.
When I was child and lived in New York City, my parents took me to see a documentary. It wasn’t shown in a movie theater but rather the offices of a human rights group. The movie, Mauvaise Conduite, chronicles the mistreatment of homosexuals in Cuba. It was my introduction to Néstor Almendros but also to the political implications of sexuality and the universality of human rights.
Not to many kids get taken to see a documentary, let alone one so just. To survive a totalitarian regime is to get a second lease on one’s political life. You can’t but strive to make the most of it.
On the benefits of a state-run media agency.
Perhaps, one of the benefits of having a state-run media agency – which competes, however unfairly, with private media agencies – is the possibility of accountability, not to shareholders but voters.
The BBC:
Ex-director general Greg Dyke says the BBC is part of a “conspiracy” preventing the “radical changes” needed to UK democracy…
Dyke: “The evidence that our democracy is failing is overwhelming and yet those with the biggest interest in sustaining the current system – the Westminster village, the media and particularly the political parties, including this one – are the groups most in denial about what is really happening to our democracy.”
(Obviously, a state-run media agency is not the same as the prime minister outright owning most of the media as is the case in Italy.)
What will America look like in 30 years? Perhaps, like Canada in three.
Once it gets going, Adam Gopnik’s profile of Canadian Michael Ignatieff’s political philosophy is captivating. Anyone wondering, as I am, what America might look like when it becomes a majority minority country will enjoy reading the many passages on the individual versus the collective.
(If you have my email and would like me to pull the full text for you, let me know.)
Pie-chart: the racial composition of my friends pool on Facebook.
There are many caveats to the following graph, which is about as scientific a description of my person as my astrological sign. (Cancer.)
First, I am a very bad Facebook user: I don’t seek out old friends and I don’t pay much attention to invitations. Second, race here is somewhat arbitrary: more than a few of my friends are multi-racial. Also, race is not ethnicity nor cultural affinity (e.g., sorting friends by their parents’ educational attainment might be more informative.) Finally, for the last three-and-a-half years, I’ve worked for a media company that targets Hispanics, per se, and my workplace is probably the most Hispanic public environment I’ve ever lived in.
That said, here’s one look at the racial composition of my friends on Facebook:
I would love to see how this graph has changed during the course of my lifetime. Perhaps, my children will get to see such a dynamic graph.
Should this be a Facebook or iPhone app? Sure, why not.