Armchair Onanism

Is the semicolon girlie?

2008-08-21T03:11:00.000-07:00

Writers and Salon book critics debate the idea that some punctuation marks are more feminine than others.

Aug. 21, 2008 | Recently someone asked me what my favorite punctuation mark was. I did not even hesitate. The semicolon. Duh. To me, the semicolon has a certain elegance, like a vodka martini; I don't whip it out every day, but on occasion, and with great relish. So it was with shock that I read a recent Boston Globe article suggesting that my favorite punctuation mark is ... girlie? An excerpt:

The credit probably belongs to Trevor Butterworth, who in 2005 -- citing Truss as partial inspiration -- wrote a 2,700-word essay on the semicolon in the Financial Times. Butterworth, who had worked in the States, wondered why so many Americans shared Donald Barthelme's sense that the mark was "ugly as a tick on a dog's belly." His answer: As a culture, we Yanks distrust nuance and complexity.

Ben McIntyre, writing in the Times of London a couple of months later, added to the collection of semicolon snubbers: Kurt Vonnegut called the marks "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King, said McIntyre, "wouldn't be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don't use semi-colons."

And Kilpatrick, in a 2006 column, restated those sentiments at a higher pitch, calling the semicolon "girly," "odious," and "the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented."

Well. I asked our Broadsheet writers -- and our eminent book critics Laura Miller and Louis Bayard -- to chime in with their opinions. -- Sarah Hepola

Page Rockwell: I love the semicolon. But then, I also love the eyelash curler.

Catherine Price: I'd never really thought of punctuation as gendered, though I suppose the wink of the semicolon could be considered more girlish and coy than the straightforward, masculine em dash.

Tracy Clark-Flory: Clearly, men find the em dash a reassuring phallic symbol, while the semicolon reawakens their Freudian castration anxiety. What better way to cope with penis envy than to make frequent use of the semicolon?

Judy Berman: The em dash actually has feminine connotations for me. It could have something to do with Emily Dickinson, or my former boss (a woman), whose em-dash habit I eventually picked up. Either way, semicolons do tend to result in longer sentences, and I think those have long been seen as the "feminine" answer to short, abrupt "masculine" sentences. Generally, though, the attempt to declare any type of punctuation masculine or feminine seems pretty reductive to me.

Kate Harding: Seems to me they're arguing that complex thoughts and nuanced self-expression are chick things, and I'm not touching that one.

Katharine Mieszkowski: Confidential to the Boston Globe: The semicolon is so not "girly." It's obviously transgender. It's neither a colon nor a period, with its own unique significance. Have these people never heard of "America's Next Top Model"?

Laura Miller: I love semicolons. They represent a certain development of thought, however, and a degree of emotional nuance that I would not associate with the writers [in the above block quote], especially with the superficially stoic but actually sentimental Hemingway (and, to a lesser degree, Chandler). To the degree that a writer is crude and relatively simplistic in the representation of psychological states and emotions, I can see why he would eschew the semicolon. None of these guys are especially precise in that department.

Nicholson Baker, on the other hand, wrote a whole essay on the colon-dash and semicolon-dash, two now obsolete forms of punctuation that he thought should be revived.

Louis Bayard: Not only do I use semicolons, but when I see someone else use them (correctly) I elevate that person to a private pantheon. As Laura says, it's a very nuanced thing -- a test of ear and eye -- but delightful when done right. I haven't read it in 20 years, but in "The World According to Garp," I believe Garp warms to another character when she uses a semicolon in her letters.

Lynn Harris: Wait. And the period is manly?

This article first appeared in Salon.com

Saudi accused of having six wives

2008-08-05T05:14:00.000-07:00

That's just like cheating at the Olympics..:)

A member of the Saudi religious police has been accused of having six wives at the same time - two more than allowed under religious laws, reports say.

The 56-year-old was detained in south-western Jizan province, according to the Saudi newspaper al-Watan.

Three of the women involved were Saudis and the other three were from Yemen, just over the border, it reported.

The accused denies the women are all currently his wives and says he has divorced two of them.

Muslim men can keep up to four wives at a time under sharia, or Islamic law, which is applied in Saudi Arabia.

Members of the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice are expected to enforce the kingdom's strict interpretation of Islam, particularly regarding relations between the sexes.

Last month, the Saudi authorities were reportedly considering introducing compulsory pre-marriage courses for engaged couples in order to cut the kingdom's growing divorce rate.

If you ever doubted Batman was gay

2008-07-29T02:34:00.001-07:00

Le Destin

2008-07-29T02:11:00.001-07:00

In news arguably more germane to the subject of this column, Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, the leading figure in Arab cinema, died in Cairo on Sunday, at age 82. Chahine's story is both one of tragedy and triumph, and given his cultural and historical surroundings, it could scarcely be otherwise. When Chahine began his filmmaking career in 1950, Egypt was still a British colony; he had the distinction of making movies that appeared to criticize virtually every current in his nation's recent history: Western imperialism, pan-Arab nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism and religious intolerance (Chahine himself was a Christian), and the autocratic post-Sadat regime of Hosni Mubarak.

He also made movies in almost every genre you can imagine; I've seen only a few myself, and most remain hard to find or totally unavailable on North American DVD. His most famous work is unquestionably "Cairo Station" (1958), a neorealist classic in which Chahine himself starred as a disabled newspaper boy obsessed with a pretty lemonade seller. His better-known work also includes "Saladin" (1963), a left-leaning biopic about the 12th-century sultan who defended Jerusalem against the Crusaders; the Aswan dam documentary "Once Upon a Time on the Nile" (1978); and two films sharply critical of the Sadat era, the murder mystery "The Choice" (1970) and the oft-banned political drama "The Sparrow" (1973).

A Roman Catholic and an eclectic sexual adventurer in a puritanical Muslim country, Chahine grew up as an upper-class kid who spoke French and English better than Arabic. All over the Western world, people who have seen few or none of his movies will write respectful obituaries today; one can only hope the response in Egypt is not the official silence that greeted so much of his work. Chahine is but one more example of the universal rule that real artists are exiles from their own culture, by choice or by force. The man or woman who offers to show society its true face, rather than flattering its vanity, is never welcome.

2008-07-25T04:23:00.001-07:00

2008-07-25T03:05:00.001-07:00

Numbskull

2008-07-23T06:38:00.001-07:00

Mark Kilner created this phenomenal sculpture, titled Numbskull. It's a plastic skull covered in 630 tablets of paracetamol (aka acetaminophen).

The Goop Scoop

2008-07-23T06:28:00.001-07:00

This Swiss goop ("Cyber Clean") is a viscous slime that you roll around on your keyboard, so that all the food particles and fingernail parings are swept away, while the germicidal surface de-germifies your icky, filthy, disgusting keyboard.

Carpe Dien in Tel Aviv

2008-07-21T04:10:00.000-07:00

By H. ALFORD

I’m riding bikes along the beach with my friend James. James is 12, and moved to Tel Aviv from New York with his Israeli mother two years ago.

“That’s the separated beach,” James tells me matter-of-factly, pointing at a group of some 30 Orthodox men on the edge of a placid, gorgeous Mediterranean not far from the Hilton. I read a sign that states: “The Separated Beach. Bathing days for women: Sun, Tues, Thurs. Bathing days for men: Mon, Wed, Fri.” Then, pointing at a different group of men just 50 yards down the sand, James adds, “And that’s the gay beach.”

A couple of hours later, eager to see what other strange bedfellows I’ll find huddled on the edges of the water, I conduct an informal census: I walk the two miles or so of beach from the Orthodox section all the way down to Jaffa, the old Arab port of Tel Aviv. Just south of the gay section I find a stretch of sand-and-sun worshipers that I instantly dub the Ambiguous Male Friendship beach; just south of that I find the I Hate What I’m Wearing beach. I walk farther, and proceed to find concentrations of, variously, surfers, young families, volleyball players, Ethiopians, hippie drummers and irritable girlfriends.

I’d earlier been told by the illustrator and author Maira Kalman, who was born in Tel Aviv and still has an apartment there, that I’d find “old men in their underpants” on the beach in front of the Dan Hotel (“Old men in their underpants: what can be wrong with that?” she’d said with some excitement). So, in front of the Dan, I search for boudoir chic; I find only one such exhibitor, but many examples of dermal creping.

Down toward the southernmost part of the beach near Jaffa, the population turns increasingly Arab, and I see more and more head wraps on the women. On the beach’s edge, I sit on a park bench and fall into conversation with a warm, bearded 54-year-old gentleman who tells me he’s an imam and a muezzin. We discuss the auspiciousness of the date — the day before, on Independence Day, Israel had celebrated its 60th anniversary with a semi-terrifying dazzle of air force maneuvers over the water — and the man tells me: “Peace is good for us all. Jews, Christians, Muslims. ...”

Just then a young beachgoer zooms by us on his Vespa, his surfboard ingeniously strapped onto the side of the motorbike, so I add, “... and surfers.”

The man exults, “Everyone!”

Tel Aviv is a home at the end of the world. Celebrating its 100th year in 2009, the capital of Mediterranean cool has been getting more and more practice at being a host over the years, and it’s starting to show.

First came the brain trust: many say that the Israeli economy’s growth of 5 percent a year since 2003 is a result of the million or so highly educated and entrepreneurial Russians who immigrated in the early 1990s and buoyed the country’s auspicious high-tech sector. (Ms. Kalman says, “Babies had cellphones in Tel Aviv before the U.S. did.”) And then came the builders: current or recent construction in the city has brought a small swirl of brand-name architects and developers like Philippe Starck, I. M. Pei, Donald Trump and Richard Meier (and meanwhile the foodies of Tel Aviv are already buzzing about the projected 2010 arrival of a Nobu restaurant and hotel in the suburb of Herzilya).

All these new people and buildings add to the city’s fundamental charms: good flea markets, terrific food and lots of witty and complicated natives. As Ms. Kalman would say, What could be wrong with that?

But if the intermingling of many different kinds of people is what gives Tel Aviv its pulse, it’s the clash of old and new that still gives this city its surprising and slightly uneven gait. On trendy Sheinkin Street, a store called SeXso Jeans is cheek-by-jowl with the Kabbalah store; on the edges of Neve Tzedek — the first neighborhood the Jews started when they left Jaffa in 1887, and now the loveliest and most villagelike part of town — a 44-story skyscraper looms like a gangly, unwanted bodyguard.

The modernist feeling you get from walking around what is the largest collection of Bauhaus buildings in the world is unmoored by the realization that you are just a mile or two away from the ancient port of Jaffa, from which Jonah sailed en route to his intimate encounter with a whale. Or consider Agenda, a restaurant devoted to the age-old practice of skewering meat. A sign hanging on its facade — “Agenda: The Shawarma” — sounds like a Tom Clancy book about some very, very dangerous pita.

Tel Aviv is “half Iran, half California; it’s a synagogue meets a sushi bar,” says the writer and lifelong Tel Aviv resident Etgar Keret, whose mordant and hilarious short stories in books like “The Nimrod Flipout” have often won him the encomium “the voice of young Israel.” The son of Holocaust survivors — his father saved his own life by living in a hole in Russia for two years — Mr. Keret is party to his own dichotomy: his brother is an extreme left-wing anarchist who is head of the Israel’s movement to legalize marijuana, and his sister is an ultra-Orthodox mother of 11 who formerly lived in a settlement.

“This is a country that on the one hand is so conservative that we don’t have public transportation on Saturdays, but on the other hand is so open that we sent a transsexual to the Eurovision Song Contest,” says Mr. Keret. “Israel is full of contradiction. In Jerusalem, this contradiction means separation. But it doesn’t in Tel Aviv.”

For Israelis, the 45 minutes that separate Jerusalem from Tel Aviv are a fitting metaphor for the cultural gulf they see between, on the one hand, the hidebound, pious cradle of world religion and, on the other, the libertine, nightclub-filled Mediterranean idyll. But for us visitors, the proximity of the two cities is a huge boon — it’s rare that you can pair a beach vacation with 5,000 years of history. And while the memories I developed during the course of my weeklong, first-ever trip to Tel Aviv are pleasant and strong, the ones I concurrently made during my eight-hour-long, first-ever trip to Jerusalem are permanently scarred into my brain.

You don’t have to be devout, or even a believer, to be moved to tears by a visit to Jesus’ Stations of the Cross or to the Holocaust Museum of Yad Vashem. At the latter, the Children’s Memorial is a single room in which five candles are reflected in 500 mirrors, creating the impression of an infinity of candles; meanwhile a voice slowly intones the individual names and nationalities of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by Nazis. The effect is bone-chilling.

Tel Avivans are quick to point out that their city is less suffused with history than Jerusalem, and that that is what makes their city so hospitable to newcomers and to people who don’t fit in elsewhere. Perhaps, like others in the Middle East, Tel Avivans must perforce set their gaze on the present.

“People always say, ‘Live every day as if it’s your last,’ and in Tel Aviv it might actually be true,” says Mr. Keret. “The fear of the future makes the present more vibrant. But you cannot ignore that your existence is fragile.”

Indeed, when I contacted James’s mother, the former fashion editor Ricky Vider, to tell her that I was going to Tel Aviv, she wrote back that I better hurry “before they push the button.”

A single mother — Ms. Vider lost her husband, James’s father, on 9/11 — she says she moved back to Tel Aviv with her son because “I needed some sunshine and a change”; the move also put her back in close proximity to her mother and sister. For Ms. Vider, this home at the end of the world is one filled with golden-hued restaurants offering wonderful, innovative Mediterranean cuisine (Herbert Samuel, Toto), hip places to meet for a coffee or drink (Brasserie, Coffee Bar) and a city safe enough that she can let James ride his bike for hours unsupervised in certain areas.

Ms. Vider trafficks in the ambivalence so endemic to the region. She says, “James and I are only here temporarily,” yet when I ask her to show me her favorite part of town, the unstated theme of our tour quickly reveals itself to be Landmark Buildings I Have Tried to Buy Into.

We start on the leafy, Bauhaus-lined pedestrian walkway in the middle of stately Rothschild Boulevard, and hang a right on becalmed Nachmias. Ms. Vider says of one building: “This beauty was bought by a son of the mayor. I snuck in while they were renovating.”

On this same block we also see Ms. Vider’s favorite building in the city (No. 25, where episodes of the Israeli version of “In Treatment” were shot), its immediate neighbor (“I call the architect daily”) and a building with interiors by Andree Putnam (“I’ve tried to get in. It cannot be done.”).

Perhaps an intense connection to real estate and its attendant comforts is only logical in a region where the threat of uprooting looms. In fact, some of your best experiences in Tel Aviv may very well be real estate based. It was thoroughly heartening, for instance, to come back to the balmy, sun-dappled roof deck of the Cinema Hotel after a day of sightseeing or beachgoing. The Cinema, a handsome Bauhaus building from 1930 and a former cinema that offered the first central air-conditioning in Tel Aviv, provides its guests with a lavish spread of teas and cakes every afternoon; to sip and snack on the walled rooftop terrace is to know a wonderful and high-caloric form of succour.

AN equally relaxing way to spend an afternoon is to poke around the tiny, space-starved boutiques and cafes that have sprouted up in the Greenwich Village-like Neve Tzedek, a tranquil area of about a dozen tiny streets. I tell a woman who is selling jewelry in the ground floor of the building that she lives in that I am impressed that she doesn’t work in her pajamas, as I would do in her situation. She tells me: “I have to be dignified. For jewelry, dignity.”

On the eve of Independence Day, Ms. Vider takes me to the building in the basement of which James’s surfing instructor, Shay, and his girlfriend, Naamah, live. On arriving at the building, Ms. Vider and James and I gaze over a sunken garden filled with impossibly good-looking 20-something surfers and hipsters — Shay and Naamah and their friends.

Ms. Vider says: “There are two parties going on in this building. Upstairs will be dinner and fireworks-watching. And this ...” — she casts her eyes downward, where we see the stirrings of a hootenanny featuring two guitars, improvised singing and the mournful tones of the didgeridoo — ”... will be a den of iniquity.”

Mr. Keret says: “It’s a city where the dominant age group is 20 to 40. Most people don’t realize that it’s a city that many people just pass through. Very few people are born and die here.”

This impermanence can be an intensifier. I think of the hour I spent at a club called Levontine 7. Started by three musicians (including Ilan Volkov, the Israeli-born conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra), the dark and underdecorated two-level club is in Gan Ha Hashmal, Tel Aviv’s former unofficial red-light district, which is sprouting those kinds of hyper-groovy stores — one was selling a lamp made out of forks and spoons — that fascinate but baffle. For the recent national basketball finals, Levontine 7 hired two groups of six musicians who each improvised music to go with one team’s movements, in the manner of a silent movie.

The night I went to the club I lasted only an hour — it had been quite an exhausting afternoon lording over the baked goods on the Cinema roof deck — but somehow the fact that I wasn’t hip or hardy enough to last till the 11:30 p.m. offering of difficult, John Zorn-like noodling only made my one hour that much more potent. I felt like a very happy, twittering bird in some other species’ nest.

The other comfort-providing commodity that one attaches oneself to in Tel Aviv is, of course, food. Ms. Kalman had told me about a restaurant directly on the beach called Manta Ray. (“It’s where Madonna ate,” she’d said. My brain instantly brought forth Madonna’s Hebrew name, and I said, “You mean, Esther?”)

Like a haut beach shack on stilts, Manta Ray is a fan-shaped pavilion that opens onto the sea. One of the five mezzes that we order is an elegant column of four layers of ingredients that sound all wrong for each other — crabmeat, feta, dates, harissa peppers — but are in fact Il Divo of food. I order a gin and grapefruit juice, and the juice is fresh-squeezed. Happiness trickles through my body as my companion and I watch the sun slowly slip over the edge of the Mediterranean; I contemplate having a T-shirt made that says, “I’m with Esther.”

Eager to see what other unlikely ingredients would be served with seafood, I order calamari on subsequent trips to Toto and Herbert Samuel. At Toto, it comes with red and yellow cherry tomatoes, chick peas, slivers of onion and radish, mint and cilantro; at Herbert Samuel, with white beans, mint and tahini. The next time I see a plate of tumescent, foreskin-like calamari shrivelings, I will laugh knowingly in the manner of a French prostitute. Because I can.

In Tel Aviv, you hold onto what you can hold onto. Which, when I go bike riding with James, happens to be my dear life. We zoom over the dips in the wooden boardwalk up in the Old Port area, where the recent addition of restaurants and kid-friendly shops — all in vast hangarlike warehouses — has given the area a South Street Seaport kind of feel and made it popular with the local tzfonim (yuppies, or, literally, “Northerners,” since the affluent neighborhoods are in the north of the city and the poorer in the south). The pedestrian traffic is thick, and at one point a mother with a double-wide stroller almost clips me. I whoop with alarm, and James counsels, “Dude, trust me — you’re not going to get in an accident.”

I ask James if he wants to stay in Tel Aviv or move back to New York, and he says: “I want both. When I think of the surfing, I want to be here. But most of my friends are in New York.”

We whiz past a cafe, a sporting goods store, a jazz club. I ask James, “And do you feel like an Israeli, or do you feel like an American?”

“I feel like this is home,” he says. “For now.”

AT HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD

GETTING THERE

Continental, Delta and El Al fly direct to Tel Aviv from Newark Liberty and Kennedy airports. A random Web search in July for mid-August flights turned up a $1,502 nonstop on Delta.

WHERE TO STAY

Cinema Hotel (2 Zamenhoff Street; 972-3-520-7100; www.cinemahotel.com) is a short walk from the beach and well situated near the center of town. Bikes are available free. This 82-room hotel, converted from a theater, is decorated with movie posters and equipment from its previous incarnation. Doubles from $163.

Nina Cafe Suites (29 Shabazi Street; 972-52-508-4141; www.ninacafehotel.com), wonderfully located in the heart of the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, is a newer hotel that is long on charm but short on efficiency. There’s no front desk per se — you walk into the cafe and then they lead you back to a desk inside the crammed space full of espresso sippers. The décor is a little Greenwich Village-basement-apartment-circa-1972, but you’re a five-minute walk from the Suzanne Dallal theater, 10 minutes from the beach and the Manta Ray restaurant, and 20 from the Jaffa flea market. Doubles from $270.

WHERE TO EAT

Herbert Samuel (6 Koifman Street; 972-3-516-6516; www.herbertsamuel.co.il) is just across from the beach at the southern end of the city near Neve Tzedek. The high-ceilinged space manages to be warm despite its spare, minimalist look. Mostly new Mediterranean cuisine, with lots of fish. Seats by the windows are booked well in advance; if you sit at the bar, you can still look out at the sunset. Dinner for two about 300 shekels (about $90 at 3.35 shekels to the dollar).

Toto (4 Berkovich Street; 972-3-693-5151) is behind the art museum, and offers Mediterranean cuisine with an Italian influence. Dinner for two about 285 shekels.

Manta Ray (972-3-517-4773), is right on the beach behind the Etzel House Museum. Plenty of fresh fish, but it’s possible to eat only mezzes. Dinner for two, about 295 shekels.

Abu Hasan (also known as Ali Karavan), at 1 Hadolphin Street, is a hole in the wall that serves the best hummus in Israel, according to Food and Wine magazine and every cabdriver you talk to in Tel Aviv. Some opt for the masabacha — crushed chickpeas and tahini, with spicy sauce on the side; dishes come with pita, raw onions and a zippy lemon-garlic sauce. Abu Hasan opens at 8 a.m. every day except Saturday and stops serving when the food runs out, usually in midafternoon. Lunch for two, about 30 shekels.

WHAT TO DO

The Bauhaus Center (99 Dizengoff Street; 972-3-522-0249; www.bauhaus-center.com) offers tours of Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus architecture in English on Friday mornings at 10. The tours last about two hours and cost $15.

The Jaffa flea market is the only remnant of the bazaars that surrounded Jaffa’s clock tower in the mid-19th century. This blocks-wide hagglefest is better for tchotchkes and effluvia than for treasures, but it’s great fun to browse, and to see women trying clothes on directly over their clothes. Local lore has it that vendors, first thing Sunday morning, like to make a quick and not-to-their-advantage sale to give them good luck for the coming week.

This article appeared originally in the New York Times.

Remembering Disch

2008-07-11T02:21:00.000-07:00

In his many dark, satirical, heretical books, the pioneering science fiction author contemplated death with elegant despair.

By E. Hand

Few people make a successful career of contemplating death and suicide; fewer still approach the subject with the genuine ebullience and elegant despair of the prolific, criminally underappreciated writer Thomas M. Disch, who shot himself in his Union Square apartment, in New York, on the Fourth of July. Disch was a seminal figure in science fiction's New Wave, the iconoclastic 1960s movement that gave the genre a literary pedigree and popularized the term "speculative fiction." His books influenced writers such as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem; his dystopias "Camp Concentration" and "334" are considered science fiction classics, along with his greatest novel, "On Wings of Song," a beautiful, dark meditation on the power and limits of transcendence through art.

An openly gay man for most of his working life, Disch wrote mysteries, historical novels and neo-gothic satires; children's books, including "The Brave Little Toaster" and its sequel; at least five collections of short fiction; 15 volumes of poetry, always as Tom Disch; plays and libretti; four volumes of nonfiction; screen adaptations, novelizations and one of the first interactive computer games. He edited anthologies; he wrote book reviews, theater reviews, art reviews, music reviews. He wrote collaboratively and pseudonymously; he kept a popular blog, Endzone, in which he shared new poems, some unpleasant post-9/11 screeds, and witty discourses on the meaninglessness and minutiae of life. In his most recent novel, he wrote in the voice of God, and on his publisher's Web site answered questions from readers. He wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, for the sheer joy of it and for an even more primal impulse: to tell a story to the dark.

"Storytelling is just absolutely natural to me. It's my way of getting along with people, I guess," he told an interviewer at the Web site Strange Horizons in 2001. He'd call friends and, after an exchange of pleasantries, ask, "May I read you something?" The answer was always yes and his voice would lift as he read a sonnet or villanelle, or perhaps the section from "The Word of God" where Disch's deity wonders whether His father was in fact Thomas Mann.

He had a wonderful speaking voice, fluid and seductive. He sounded like John Malkovich, and he looked a bit like Malkovich too, in his prime. I grew up reading Disch's work, starting with "The Roaches" as a 12-year-old and devouring the novels as I got older. I first met him casually in the late 1980s, but only got to know him and his partner, poet Charles Naylor, during the last eight years or so -- far too brief a time. Tall and physically imposing, in public Disch could project a slightly threatening aloofness, with his shaved head, impressive tattoos, bodybuilder's mass. The silken voice that emerged from that intimidating form made him seem even more dangerous, one of those wizards who is subtle and quick to anger.

But then he'd dissolve in laughter and it would all suddenly seem to be a pose, a disguise, part of a vast elaborate joke that you were in on -- maybe. He could be irascible, scathingly dismissive; he held grudges and burned bridges. In recent years he'd put on weight, which exacerbated other problems: diabetes, sciatica, neuoropathy, depression. He had difficulty walking and was almost housebound.

And since the turn of the millennium he'd endured a Job-like succession of personal tragedies, beginning with a fire that severely damaged the apartment he shared with Naylor, his partner of 30 years; frozen pipes that caused a mold infestation at his house in Barryville, N.Y.; Naylor's long illness and eventual death from colon cancer; and, finally, eviction proceedings begun by the landlord almost immediately after Naylor's death.

During this siege Disch struggled with crushing grief and depression -- only a real deity would not -- yet he also had a humorous resignation that seemed very close to valor. He once said, "I am certainly a 'death of God' writer," and much of his work seems fueled by the rage and sense of betrayal of a former believer, as well as a refined sense of the ridiculousness of religious institutions, and the ultimate, absurd realization that we all die alone. His best work builds on Eugene Ionesco's dictum: "We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously."

Death was the subject Disch returned to again and again, in his fiction and his poetry. Sometimes it was murder, spurred by passion or twisted religious or political fervor. Sometimes, as in his early novel "The Genocides," or his later satirical novel "The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft," it was simply a detached, clinical adjustment of the biological status quo, with untidy or unnecessary humans disposed of like irksome insects. He wrote often about suicide, nearly always without melodrama. "Laughter is just a slowed down scream of terror," he told Joseph Francavilla in a 1983 interview.

... thoughtful minds are free of pain
To the degree that they can think
And alchemize their thoughts to ink.
Happy the man who can declare
His angst with any savoir faire.

-- Tom Disch, "Waking New Year's Day, Without a Hangover," 1986

Born in Iowa in 1940, Disch spent his childhood and early teens in the Midwest before moving to New York, where he attended Cooper Union and New York University. He held the usual spate of desultory writers' jobs, most memorably a brief stint in "Swan Lake's" corps de ballet, where he encouraged the other male dancers to sing "I am, I am, I am a swan" under their breath while Margot Fonteyn expired as Odette. In 1962 he wrote his first story in lieu of studying for an NYU exam and promptly sold it to the science fiction magazine Fantastic. He subsequently dropped out of school to devote himself to writing.

A number of beautifully crafted stories date from these early years. Among the best: "Descending," in which a man steps onto a department store elevator that only goes down, forever; the much-anthologized "The Roaches"; and the Kafkaesque "The Squirrel Cage," in which a writer works feverishly, endlessly, on a horror story he cannot even see, and which no one will ever read: "The story has gone on far too long. Nothing can be terrifying for years on end. I only say it's terrifying because, you know, I have to say something. Something or other. The only thing that could terrify me now is if someone were to come in. If they came in and said, 'All right, Disch, you can go now.' That, truly, would be terrifying."

In the mid-1960s he knocked around Europe and North Africa before touching down in London's Camden Town around 1967, where he became part of that movable feast of Anglo-American writers and artists associated with the New Wave: Michael Moorcock, John and Judith Clute, John Sladek (a future Disch collaborator), Pamela Zoline, M. John Harrison. "The Genocides" was published in 1965, a vision of Earth as an agribusiness run by extraterrestrials who sow the planet with a single vast plant crop, then methodically exterminate the human pests who infect their harvest. It ends badly. As Disch cheerfully pointed out in a 1990 interview published in the British journal Foundation, "Let's be honest, the real interest in this kind of story is to see some devastating cataclysm wipe mankind out ... My point was simply to write a book where you don't spoil that beauty and pleasure at the end."

His next major work, "Camp Concentration," appeared in 1967 in New Worlds, the New Wave's flagship magazine, and a year later was published in book form. Now regarded as one of the greatest SF novels, at the time "Camp Concentration" was overshadowed by Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon," which shared some themes and narrative structure. Inspired by the Faust legend, the novel unfolds as the journal of Louis Sacchetti, a schlubby poet interned at an American concentration camp for being a conscientious objector. There he and the other prisoners are injected with an experimental drug that boosts their intelligence even as it erodes their life span.

Samuel R. Delany wrote that "Camp Concentration" was "the first book within the s-f field I have read for which my reaction was simple, total and complete envy: 'I wish I had written that.'" It remains in print and is probably Disch's best-known book, though Disch was dismissive of it in the 1980 Foundation interview: "I think it was probably not strong enough to stand on its own outside the genre. Not as a work of literature."

"On Wings of Song," his 1979 masterpiece, is a work of literature. William Gibson called it "one of the great neglected masterpieces of late 20th-century science fiction"; Robert Drake named it part of "The Gay Canon." A savage, politically charged bildungsroman, the novel presents the American Midwest as a fundamentalist police state where air travelers are forced through security checkpoints, books and works of art are considered seditionary, and Daniel Weinreb, a 14-year-old from Amesville, Iowa, is imprisoned for possession of copies of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. After his release, he makes his way to Manhattan, a secular paradise, and struggles to become a bel canto singer.

The book's defining metaphor is a form of virtual reality that enables practitioners to experience ecstasy. Not everyone achieves this transcendence, and the attempt can be dangerous: disembodied souls, nicknamed "fairies," can be trapped and destroyed, their host bodies left in a vegetative state.

"Beauty is probably the antidote to evil -- in practical terms for an artist," Disch once remarked. "Because art is one of the routes of access to joy, and joy is always problematical the moment it stops happening. You're always asking, 'Where is it? Why can't it be brought back?'" It was the essential question for Disch.

Later books explored the nature of evil in more satirical terms. Raised Catholic, Disch took the heretic's glee in attacking church hypocrisy in works like "The Priest: A Gothic Romance," which featured pedophile clergy and murderous antiabortion protesters, and his play "The Cardinal Detoxes," which the Archdiocese of New York attempted to shut down. In Disch's version of hell, the suicidal poet John Berryman is forced to haunt Minneapolis. He talked about writing a career guide for young girls titled "So You Want to Be the Pope"; the Supreme Being he channels in his just-published "The Word of God" is sensible and gossipy, as demonstrated by the answers He gives to readers on His publisher's Web site:

Dearest God,

Since food is the most recent topic: Why have you made the pit in avocados so infernally Large? And along the same lines, what's up with your pomegranate invention?

-- Norman

You must have been kibbitzing with Proserpine. Her and her pomegranate diet. But as to avocado pits your guess is as good as mine. But did you know you can grow whole avocado trees from those pits? It takes a lot of patience, but they will grow all the way to the ceiling if you let them.

-- God

Disch was an often brutal satirist who wrote a beloved children's book about sweet-natured household appliances, an ironist who would cheer up a visitor by reading aloud poems ostensibly penned by Paddington the Bear, in Paddington's voice. He reveled in coincidence, in life and art. With Naylor, he wrote a marvelous historical novel, "Neighboring Lives," that explored the web of connections between Victorian thinkers and artists in Pre-Raphaelite London. Naylor gave him joy; "On Wings of Song" was dedicated to him.

Almost exactly a year after Naylor's death in September 2004, Disch began writing a sequence of poems, an extraordinary efflorescence of grief he shared on his blog. Eventually there were 31 of them. He titled the sequence "Winter Journey" after Schubert's lieder cycle "Winterreise" (a work Naylor loved). The poems are tragic, bitter, bleakly funny, romantic, heart-rending -- and also accessible. I can imagine, by some divine fluke, the book becoming a surprise, posthumous bestseller -- an irony Disch would have appreciated.

"The song does not end," Disch wrote in the closing pages of "On Wings of Song."

... and though he had written that song before he'd learned to fly himself, it was true. The moment one leaves one's body by the power of song, the lips fall silent, but the song goes on, and so long as one flies the song continues. He hoped, if he were to leave his body tonight, they would remember that. The song does not end.

This article appeared on Salon.com.

Here come the Muhajababes!

2008-07-10T02:34:00.000-07:00

Not especially well-written, but it's emblematic of the kind of interest the West has taken in my part of the world, post 9/11.

How sex, booze and heavy metal fit into the world of hip young Arabs today.
By L. Miller

"Rewish," or "al Rawshana," is a colloquial Arab term that means "hip" and also "distracted or confused," according to Allegra Stratton's "Muhajababes," a lively (and rewish) exploration of youth culture in several Middle Eastern nations. One of the many people Stratton interviewed for her book -- a bike-glove-wearing female member of a dance troupe that inexplicably describes itself as "an R&B band" -- told Stratton that the region's booming under-25 demographic is being made ever more rewish by their exposure to two seemingly opposed forces: racy pop music videos full of gyrating, pulchritudinous singers like Haifa Wehbe and what Stratton calls the "piety trend," which has more and more young Muslims heeding the call of TV mullahs to abandon smoking, drinking, displays of flesh and premarital sex.

The result is a new breed of mermaid-like creatures, spotted by Stratton all over the streets of Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Dubai and Damascus. These are "muhajababes," from "muhajabe," a term for the veil. Zina, a girl Stratton met in a Cairo cafe, is a classic example. Her hair was covered with "a flower-patterned headscarf" but she was also wearing heavy makeup and jeans so tight she couldn't fasten the top button. When Stratton asked Zina why she also smoked (widely considered "haram," or forbidden, to observant Muslims), Zina grew "frosty." Then she explained: "If I smoke and wear the headscarf you know that I'm not one of them [that is, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest Islamist group]. You know that I'm Islamic. That I am devout. But I'm also different ... If you know what you're looking for then you'll see being a Muslim these days is a different thing."

Stratton, a British journalist, didn't begin her research knowing quite what she was looking for, but she had a thesis, taken from Western scholars of the contemporary Middle East. These professors are predicting a major sociopolitical shakeup in the region, based on demographic patterns resembling those seen before in upheavals in Western history, such as the English Civil War and the French Revolution. "What creates unrest," Stratton writes of this theory, "was not just an increase in the numbers of young people but also in the numbers of educated young people with no increase in jobs." (Yes, that sentence is grammatically incorrect, as are many in "Muhajababes." Chalk it up to a combination of Stratton's attempt at an easy, casual style and the bad habits engendered by the low editing standards in British publishing. Be warned: Participles dangle as plentifully in these pages as vines in a jungle.)

Having spent her own post-collegiate years sharing a big, ramshackle East London house with a bunch of idealistic pals (they dreamed of setting up a printing press in the basement), Stratton decided to wander around a handful of Mideast cities, in search of the "Arab Haight-Ashbury," where the coming revolution might be brewing. Mark LeVine, author of another new book, "Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam," also went looking for glimmers of social change, but he took an approach at once more and less comprehensive than Stratton's. LeVine, who is both a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California, Irvine, and a profession rock musician, traveled to more countries (including Pakistan and Morocco) than Stratton, but he seems to have hobnobbed with a much narrower range of people.

There's something irresistible about the idea that LeVine, who according to his author bio has played with such luminaries as Mick Jagger and Dr. John, not only interviewed rock and rap artists from all over the Middle East and North Africa (or MENA, as he calls it), but also put down the notepad and got up onstage to jam with them. The folio of photographs at the center of "Heavy Metal Islam" features a few shots of him rocking out with his subjects at festivals and in nightclubs. Yet LeVine's account of Muslim rock culture is strangely colorless, mostly because he's only interested in two things: the music itself and the degree to which a band's lyrics explicitly criticize the political regimes in their home countries.

Most heavy metal lyrics are aggressive and doomy, and the lines LeVine quotes -- "This land is barren, it does not feel/ Our self-made slaughte / by our own hands/ Here lies the orphaned land" from the Israeli band Orphaned Land, for example -- can be interpreted as speaking of anything from, say, the conflict over Palestine to environmentalism to free-floating teenage social angst. The people LeVine interviews have ample cause for complaint; besides the general authoritarian, undemocratic nature of their governments, they often come in for extra harassment as a result of their appearance and musical taste. Metalheads in Morocco, Lebanon and Egypt have even been arrested for practicing "satanism." But their counterparts in the democratic West are often just as disgusted with the adult world for entirely different reasons.

Complaining about their governments isn't what makes Islam's metalheads unusual -- practically everyone in the Mideast does that (to the extent they can get away with it). What's interesting is the fact that they've chosen heavy metal in spite of its Western roots, and the ways they reconcile this with their own regional and nation identities. Several of the musicians LeVine interviews are religious, even devout, and the author has hopes that rock fans will unite with young Islamists against their authoritarian rulers. To his great disappointment, a meeting he facilitates in a Cairo hotel bar between members of a band called Wyvern and the editor of the Muslim Brotherhood's Web site turns out to be a dud, mostly because the metalheads don't seem to believe the Brotherhood's recent protestations that they are now interested only in political reform, not policing cultural virtue. "So many Egyptians -- and Arabs more broadly," LeVine laments, "prefer to continue dealing with the devil they know (corrupt and autocratic regimes) than to risk the even less appealing alternative of a religious state."

It seems churlish to reproach politically vulnerable people for a prudent refusal to accept the enemy of their enemy as their friend. It's true that many young Arabs increasingly see their religion as the ideological basis for political change while at the same time rejecting the extreme Wahhabist puritanism of Saudi Arabia. But even tolerant cultures tend to give metalheads a hard time, partly because metal -- like other forms of what LeVine refers to as "intense" popular music -- is fueled by a rebellious spirit. Sure, the Islamists might want to harness that energy now, while they're rebelling themselves, but they're unlikely to appreciate this particular manifestation of diversity should they ever come to power.

Another problem with "Heavy Metal Islam" is that virtually all of the subjects LeVine interviews in any depth are either musicians or professional scene-makers (promoters, producers, etc.). What's glaringly absent from the book is any substantive consideration of the fans, their numbers and the role of the subculture in their lives. After all, in the West, it means one thing to be a heavy metal musician and another thing to be a fan; the audience who go to Metallica concerts doesn't live like the band's members, even if they might want to. Besides, people rarely become musicians because they want to be activists. (Even the exceptional Plastic People of the Universe in Czechoslovakia, as LeVine finally gets around to admitting in his epilogue, were persecuted by their repressive government into becoming an inspiration for the Velvet Revolution of the late '80s.) Professional musicians, like most artists, are few in number and largely preoccupied with their work. Little wonder that so many of them told LeVine that they just want to be left alone.

"Heavy Metal Islam" works best as a tip sheet on the hard rock of the Muslim world. Most of the bands build their fan base via MySpace pages and Web sites. The book's bibliography and list of links lead to acts ranging from the Kordz of Lebanon, whose sound, according to LeVine, "blends together hard-rock and funk-guitar riffs, with a Gnawa (Moroccan blues-style Sufi music) bass line and vocals, Lebanese-inflected melodies, and a hip-hop beat" to the fabulously hypnotic (and subcontinentally iconic) Junoon, who combine rock with "the complex scales of classical Indian music, which offer twenty-two intervals to choose from in constructing the that or raga scale of a particular song."

Stratton, by contrast, can't really articulate why she thinks a Lebanese "ethno-techno" musician is "really good" or a Jordanian painter's work is "very bad," but she can give you a sense of how their work fits into the average Middle Eastern life. The answer is: barely. The painter, who mostly does nudes, has to keep them locked away in his home/gallery for fear of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the musician can't really compete with the sexy pop hits that monopolize audiences throughout the region thanks to heavy TV rotation given over to "video clips" (as music videos are called). A single company, Rotana, owned by a Saudi prince who mainlines money into the business, dominates over 80 percent of the music industry and its specialty is writhing bombshells in skimpy outfits. (It makes a nice favor to one's girlfriend of the moment to turn her into a star -- which explains why so many of the company's singers have such weak voices and such stunning figures.)

Rotana's video-clip floozies are wildly popular in the Arab world, even among the fashionably devout; Stratton witnessed a flock of veiled girls mobbing the singer Ruby at a Cairo shopping mall, unperturbed by the fact that she shakes it on-screen with a bared midriff and a python. A member of Ruby's entourage floated the idea that the girls regard the videos as a rare glimpse of the sexual life that they otherwise won't taste until their wedding nights.

Stratton had by then learned enough to doubt this picture of the muhajababes as "sexual ingenues." One of the girls she interviewed, a single mother at the center of a media circus surrounding the paternity suit she'd filed, told the author of her "urfi marriage," a kind of semiformal, provisional wedlock contracted by young Egyptian couples who want to have Islamically correct sex. The girl, Hind, got pregnant, and refused to comply with her TV-star boyfriend's request that she get an abortion and hymen-reconstruction surgery (!) to restore her virginity, combined with a 10-camel payoff and 60-day fast that a sheik assured him would cleanse their souls of the sin of the abortion. According to Hind, such practices are fairly routine among Egypt's middle-class youth.

Later, Stratton found out that Hind's ex, Ahmed, had been hanging out with an Egyptian televangelist named Amr Khaled, a man who becomes the Keyser Soze of "Muhajababes," an influence the author detects everywhere but whom she never gets the chance to meet. A potent combination of Billy Graham, Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil, Khaled is a regional superstar. "Absolutely bags of money," an unveiled Palestinian girl told Stratton. "Pop star friends, internet sites, television programs. People -- both girls and boys -- are so into him he's like a heart throb." So much so, in fact, that in the early 2000s, the Egyptian government, apparently seeing his popularity as a threat, told Khaled that if he wanted to stay in the country he'd have to stop preaching. Instead, he went to a university in Wales while the sales of his videotapes skyrocketed and his appearances via satellite and Internet went on as usual. (Khaled has since made several return trips to Egypt.) Satellite television and the Web, Stratton notes, mean that effective state control of the media, once a given in the Middle East, has become more and more difficult.

"He doesn't shout at us. He talks. Softly," the muhajababe Zina told Stratton of Khaled. Unlike the usual run of fire-breathing mullahs, this preacher, a former accountant, is clean-shaven, speaks an informal dialect rather than classical Arabic and wears Western-style suits. He encourages women to take the veil, but not by scolding them. Instead, he retails the stories of teenagers who felt depressed or incomplete until they renew their faith by putting on head scarves. This is a confessional mode familiar from countless American talk shows, and audiences eat it up. Zina, who dislikes the Muslim Brotherhood, took from Khaled the self-help nostrum that "the only way to change society is by changing yourself first," and went off to start a photocopying business. Later, Stratton meets a member of the Brotherhood who praises Khaled for denouncing domestic violence and calling for women's suffrage. The Brotherhood, which had once accused Khaled of selling a watered-down, moderate religion they call "air-conditioned Islam," eventually changed their tune (no doubt sensing a shift in public sentiment) and berated the government for banning him.

In other words, Khaled, like the head scarf, is newly fashionable, an affirmation of Muslim pride but also a cultural fad, like the Kabbalah or yoga in Beverly Hills. "I can list many female actors Amr and Ahmed hang around with," Hind told Stratton, explaining that her ex and his cohort turned to Khaled when gripped with a kind of existential despair about the absence of faith in their lives. The women are, like Ahmed, prone to what Hind calls "religious black moods"; sometimes Ahmed would "need to be alone in his penthouse and nothing could console him." The women celebrities who seek comfort in Khaled's circle are often referred to as "veiled-again," in reference to their resurgent interest in Islam.

The closer Stratton looks at the lives of these young Muslims, the more they resemble those of their Western counterparts, from pop stars thanking God for their Grammies to Bible Belt residents with their pro-life politics and whopping abortion rates. In Kuwait, a university student in a spotless dishdasha speaks scornfully of "Bedouins" in the social science departments, men wearing similar outfits, but with shorter hems indicating that they can't afford many changes of clothes and need to keep them well off the ground and away from the dirt. "Bedouins" -- for this boy, it's less a tribal term than an epithet much like "rednecks" -- gravitate toward disciplines that don't require them to learn English, "because they are not the most clever students and this degree never reveals that." They also tend to be more conservative religiously and opponents of liberalizing policies like women's suffrage. Still, there are limits to the militancy of these unsophisticated young men. Even the Hezbollah member Stratton met in Beirut expressed nothing but contempt for the "freaks" of al-Qaida. Her Cairo translator, a former jihadi, said of the bin Laden crew, "These guys want an international caliphate. Who else wants that? Egypt is difficult enough to sort out as it is."

The relatively small numbers of hardcore militants, however, is exactly what drives them to terrorism. Stratton got a firsthand taste of their rage on July 7, 2005, when she walked out of London's Tavistock Square moments before a suicide bomber blew up a bus there. Rumor had it that Amr Khaled had signed on as an advisor to the British government after the attacks, but Stratton could never get this confirmed; it would have made him unpopular among Muslims there. She found herself once again asking if the Mideast's secularists were right in claiming that Khaled's "trendy piety" is no more than "a rebranding of religious conservatism." Then, the next thing Stratton knew, she was hearing that Khaled was allowed to preach in the sanctum of the holy city of Medina (a "serious privilege" bestowed by the Saudi Arabian government). Later, he was Johnny-on-the-spot during the "cartoons crisis," urging Muslims enraged by Danish depictions of the prophet Mohammed to "move from protesting to starting a dialogue." Meanwhile, Khaled was recruiting ideological heirs and founding operations like the Life Makers project, designed to foster and fund entrepreneurship in the Arab nonprofit sector. All this, Stratton concludes, is "enabling the region's more moderate Islamists to ready themselves for power."

Should LeVine's metalheads and other nonconformists in the region go on worrying about an Islamist takeover? It's hard to say. Stratton thinks that the effect of the Amr Khaled and muhajababe phenomena is that "the Middle East appears more religious," while Arab youth covertly take an "eclectic mix-and- match" approach to their faith. They are not, she believes, very likely to abandon "smoking, make-up, plucking eyebrows, tight trousers, revealing swimwear, having sex." Besides, even a sincere trendy piety is still a trend, which means it comes with a built-in expiration date. Only one thing is certain when it comes to the fixations of youth culture: They don't last long.

This article appeared in Salon.com

Inside A Fake Iraq

2008-07-09T03:03:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the military's Iraq Simulation, where the townspeople are Arab actors, the insurgents come from Arkansas -- and things tend to go horribly wrong.

By A. O'Hehir

Khalid al-Khafaji, an Iraqi role player in the U.S. Army's Iraq Simulation, plays a Shiite imam in Medina Wasl, one of 13 mock villages in the simulation.

On the day United States troops arrive in Medina Wasl, an undistinguished village with a mixed Sunni-Shiite population at the center of a desert province, anti-American insurgents kidnap and murder the son of the town's deputy mayor. The American battalion's commanding officer, a thoughtful, bespectacled colonel who encourages his subordinates to be respectful and culturally sensitive, arrives with high hopes of winning hearts and minds in this remote area, but spends most of his time managing an explosive situation that is spiraling toward civil war. Even the battalion's public information officer refers to the colonel's outreach efforts as "all that 'salaam alaikum' shit."

On their first night in their new barracks, the arriving troops are attacked by insurgents who fire a mortar into the camp and briefly penetrate the perimeter wire, shooting several soldiers before escaping. A few days later, jittery U.S. troops fire on a vehicle at a checkpoint, killing several unarmed civilians. As the local population turns ever more anti-American, a local Shiite imam orders the expulsion of all Sunnis and the deputy mayor's henchmen conduct a freelance assassination campaign. The colonel orders payments to the bereaved families and promises the mayor aid in rebuilding the local water and sewer service, but the ceremony to award the contracts is ambushed by insurgents and turns into a chaotic firefight, with U.S. forces taking heavy casualties.

Then, after the debacle of Medina Wasl, the officers, men and women of the 5-82 Battalion of the 4th Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, get on a plane and go to Iraq. Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss' wrenching documentary "Full Battle Rattle" has all the tension and urgency of a vérité-style nonfiction film about the life-and-death choices faced by American troops in the current war, but all its shooting, bloodshed, propaganda and rhetoric are a dress rehearsal. Medina Wasl is a cluster of plywood huts near Fort Irwin, in the Mojave Desert of California, populated by a few dozen role-playing Iraqi-American immigrants. The anti-American forces are themselves U.S. soldiers learning to emulate insurgency tactics; the TV reporters following the troops around are actors.

Early in the film, when the "insurgents" make a video to display their coldblooded execution of the deputy mayor's son, one of them lifts the scarf from his face to ask, in what sounds like a rural Texas or Arkansas accent, for help in pronouncing "Allahu akbar!" After that's cleared up, the officer holding the camera smokes a cigarette, checks the view-screen, and says, "Yeah -- that's the spooky look we're lookin' for." Bassam Kalasho, a beefy, phlegmatic immigrant who plays the volatile deputy mayor of Medina Wasl, turns out to be a family man who runs a corner market in San Diego. The town's "police chief," Nagi Moshi, is an illegal immigrant who traveled from Iraq to Turkey to Greece to France to Colombia to Mexico to California, and is now waiting to learn whether he will be granted U.S. asylum or deported.

Such are the oddities of life in the Iraq Simulation, an enormous military facility also known as the National Training Center at Fort Irwin. Combat brigades scheduled for deployment to Iraq are sent there for immersive, unpredictable two-week exercises designed to prepare them for the military, cultural, linguistic and physical environment they will soon face. Each of the 13 towns and villages within the simulation poses different challenges, and the outcomes are not scripted in advance. You could compare the Iraq Simulation to improvisational theater or to a video game; each action by U.S. forces leads to a response (or "inject," in military argot) dictated by simulation planners, and Lt. Col. Robert McLaughlin and the soldiers of the 5-82 had a shot at either "winning" or "losing" Medina Wasl.

Gerber and Moss were embedded, you might say, within the simulation for two full weeks, and followed the 5-82 from its arrival to its withdrawal. To this ground-level "war footage," they added interviews with officers, enlisted men, Iraqi role players, simulation planners, and the commander of the entire Fort Irwin facility. (During the Cold War, it was used to simulate U.S.-Soviet tank battles in Eastern Europe; it is now apparently being rebuilt to include several "Afghan" villages infested with Taliban fighters.) On one level, "Full Battle Rattle" captures one of the most peculiar (if conceivably most sensible) elements of the massive U.S. war machine. On another, it simply illustrates that the distinction between reality and fiction -- and the question of which one emulates the other -- is never entirely clear.

In response to the most obvious question about this movie -- why did the Army allow two documentary filmmakers from New York inside this training facility, unfettered and uncensored, for two full weeks? -- Gerber and Moss have observed that the military is proud of the Iraq Simulation, perhaps more so than of the real thing. "It is one aspect of the war effort that has gone according to plan," they write. Indeed, as the likable but bewildered McLaughlin and his troops lurch from one blunder to another, and the violence accelerates in this plywood Iraqi town (where the casualties are latex dummies with gruesome, photo-realistic wounds), the simulation comes to seem like an eerily effective replica of the real war.

If "Full Battle Rattle" begins as surreal, almost goofball farce, with a bunch of beefy guys playing a fancy-dress version of laser tag in the desert -- aided by a bunch of rented Iraqis who'd rather be watching TV in suburbia -- it ends on an ambiguous and haunting note, much closer to tragedy. The soldiers of the 5-82 head back to Fort Bliss, Texas, for a few pensive days with their families while they wait to ship out for a year-long deployment (from which several will not return). The Iraqi role-players go back to their lives on the nervous margins of American society. Nobody talks much about what went wrong in Medina Wasl, and what that might mean in the real world. It was just a game.

This article appeared on Salon.com

Gonzo goes Beddie-bye

2008-07-04T02:18:00.000-07:00

Alex Gibney talks about his Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side" and his new look at Hunter S. Thompson, American hero.

By A. O'Hehir

Gonzo journalism pioneer Hunter S. Thompson and documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney don't seem like the most natural pairing, at least at first. Gibney's films, including the Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side" (which has produced an ugly dispute between Gibney and the film's distributor) and the Oscar-nominated "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," essentially present old-school investigative journalism, filtered through a pop sensibility. Gibney himself has compared his research-intensive work to archaeology, and I doubt anyone has ever described Thompson's work in those terms.

Without question one of the most influential journalists of the past 50 years, Thompson was both immensely talented and immensely undisciplined. His bookend masterpieces "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72," permanently changed the relationship between the reporter, the self and the subject in American journalism. Even in his best work, Thompson walked a thin line between honesty and fatal self-indulgence, and over the last 30 years of his life he gradually slid into booze-hound, gun-crazed, paranoid self-caricature, closer to the Uncle Duke of "Doonesbury" than to the lacerating wit who ripped through the mendacious superficiality of American political and civic life.

Gibney's immensely funny and sad new motion picture "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" -- the "Dr." was a mail-order divinity degree -- is principally intended to rehabilitate Thompson and introduce his work to a new audience. The primary focus of Gibney's mixture of interviews, archival footage and imaginative re-creation is the years from 1965 to 1975, when Thompson rose from obscurity to become a highly paid Rolling Stone correspondent and counterculture hero and wrote almost all his best stuff. Yet even at the end of his life, as Gibney reminds us, Uncle Duke had his moments of seeing through the charade and glimpsing the machinery grinding away beneath it.

In the fall of 2001, when the towers fell in Lower Manhattan, Thompson was writing an online sports column for ESPN. Of course he couldn't be expected to stay on topic, and while his column published on Sept. 12 is full of inaccuracies -- he estimated that more than 20,000 people were killed in the attacks -- it has weathered better than most of the mystified, pseudo-patriotic drivel written in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Gibney has Johnny Depp, who appears throughout the film as a narrator cum Thompson impersonator, read excerpts in an early scene:

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives ... It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerrilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

I think that stands among the most lucid and penetrating passages of Thompson's entire career. If he had been able to write and think that clearly most of the time -- possibly by staying off the Scotch and the coke for longer than a day at a time -- he might not have ended up shooting himself at his Colorado home in February 2005. (Some 9/11 conspiracy theorists have contended that Thompson was working on an exposé about the World Trade Center attack and was murdered to hush him up. Thankfully, Gibney does not go there.)

It probably took someone as professional and level-headed as Gibney to get this movie made at all. He got full cooperation from Thompson's widow, ex-wife and son and unearthed treasures from the author's collection of audiotapes and home movies. We see early and late Thompson TV appearances, and interviews with Hells Angels, former presidents and candidates, political friends and foes, reporting colleagues and rivals. It's an amazing all-star cast, from Jimmy Carter and George McGovern (perhaps the only two politicians to evade Thompson's wrath) to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, unlikely drinking buddy Pat Buchanan, and "New Journalism" competitor Tom Wolfe.

There are snippets about Thompson's unhappy early life in Kentucky and his semi-depraved later life in Rocky Mountain isolation (in a 2003 interview with Salon, he called himself "an elderly dope fiend living out in the wilderness"). But most of Gibney's material is meant to celebrate the meteoric and unlikely rise of a logorrheic autodidact who made his own flaws and excesses part of every story he wrote and who loved America so passionately that he felt the need at every opportunity to "piss down the throats of these Nazis" who ran the place.

Between 1965 and 1975, Thompson published his breakthrough book "Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs," a mordantly funny and insightful work that nearly got him killed; a derisive article about the Haight-Ashbury that made the San Francisco neighborhood internationally famous; the article "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," with which the gonzo tradition was born; the mind-bending memoir-novel "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," which probably did more to make drug abuse seem cool than anyone or anything else since Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and the Merry Pranksters (coincidentally or not, the subjects of an upcoming Alex Gibney film); and the epoch-making "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72," a book that reshaped political journalism in its own image. As Gibney captures hilariously in the film, in 1970 Thompson also ran and nearly won a patently ridiculous "Freak Power" campaign for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colo., where he lived.

Especially in the '70s and '80s, Thompson spawned legions of journalistic imitators, and it was almost always a bad idea. (The same could be said about Stanley Booth's book "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones," probably the best thing ever written about 1960s rock 'n' roll culture -- and a massively terrible example for younger rock journalists.) Most of that emulation was a matter of run-on sentences and substance abuse, when what today's journalism really needs is a fraction of Thompson's unjaded ferocity and righteous anger. As Gibney has said, Raoul Duke's spirit seems to live on largely among comedians like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher, not among the so-called professionals.

I recently joined Alex Gibney for breakfast at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan, one of those media-centric whoremonger power lounges that would have fascinated and appalled Hunter Thompson, and where he might have needed "two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers [and] laughers" just to start the day. We had none of those things, sad to tell, and I had to begin by quizzing Gibney a little about his teapot-tempest dispute with ThinkFilm, the distributor of "Taxi to the Dark Side," which recently prompted a front-page story in the New York Times. (Listen to the interview here.)

I don't want to eat up too much of our time talking about your last film instead of your new one, but "Taxi to the Dark Side" has been in the news lately. So let's review: You won the Oscar for best documentary, but then the film failed to return the dividends that everyone involved was hoping for. You ended up grossing less than $300,000, which I'm sure was a big disappointment. And now you're in arbitration with ThinkFilm, trying to get the distribution rights back and also some payment for damages. You're actually arguing that they mishandled the film to the point of fraud?

Well, I would divide it into two parts. I think they did a reasonable job up to the point we won the Oscar. And the whole strategy, which was a sensible strategy for a film about such a difficult and dark topic, was to win awards and capitalize on those awards, which give people permission to go see the film. But after we won the Oscar, nothing happened. In fact, the Web site was taken down and we didn't know why. We were mystified, and then over time we learned that they hadn't paid any of the vendors. They hadn't paid the labs, so they couldn't manufacture more prints. They hadn't paid the Web site people, so the site was taken down. All the publicists didn't get paid; one single mom was owed $100,000. Clearly, they weren't putting anything in advertising. One week when the movie was playing in New York at the Quad Cinema, I looked in the New Yorker, New York magazine and Time Out. Never mind the fact that there weren't any ads. There weren't even any listings.

So the only way that you knew about the movie is if you happened to walk by the marquee, and generally speaking, that's not a good strategy -- to rely on foot traffic for advertising. Our view is that ThinkFilm didn't disclose their financial condition to us, and they certainly didn't disclose it to us as we're coming in to Oscar time. I don't want to get too much into the weeds with this, but [ThinkFilm president] Mark Urman was quoted saying how he tried extra hard to move the film to HBO at great cost to Think. How was it at great cost to them? HBO paid them a large sum of money in order to delay the DVD release, and ThinkFilm demanded that they be paid instantly. Like, they had to be wired the money within hours of signing the contract, probably so they could use it for another film.

So it was very disappointing. You know, I respect Mark's taste in films, but he should have said to his financiers, "Look, you're gonna have to pay all the people we owe all this money to." It was embarrassing, because there were a lot of people who gave breaks to the film because they believed so strongly in the message. To see them get stiffed, that was a bitter pill to swallow. We are trying to compensate some of the vendors. It's ThinkFilm that owes them money, and we're trying to help them out. So the idea that we're somehow being greedy is ridiculous. We're looking for a businesslike relationship, and we don't feel like we got it.

This whole affair seems like unfortunate testimony to the problems the whole independent film business is having right now. We've got an Oscar-winning independent filmmaker and a respected indie distributor, most likely with similar political and artistic visions of the world, at each other's throats.

Well, Hunter Thompson put it in perspective. Let's see if I can get this right. He said the entertainment business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where pimps and thieves run free and good men die like dogs. There was also, said Hunter, a negative side.

Yeah, let's turn to Thompson and "Gonzo," which you premiered at Sundance to a very strong response, and which opens in a whole bunch of cities on the Fourth of July. Is it a patriotic film?

Absolutely. We're celebrating American independence.

For people who know your work, not just "Taxi to the Dark Side" but your hit film from a few years ago, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," this might seem like a departure. It's lighter subject matter, at least in some ways.

Well, look, someone in Australia described "Enron" as a comedy that turns to farce and ends in horror. Because it was a story about fraud and illusion, it had a certain amount of laughs in it, even though it ends rather darkly. I think of "Gonzo" as a dark comedy. There's certainly a lot of political content, but there are also a lot of laughs in there. I needed those, and Hunter -- I think his great talent was to take this anger he had and to turn it into comedy. That was his weapon.

Yeah, it's a dark comedy about somebody who was clearly a revolutionary writer and journalist and also somebody who wound up...

Blowing his brains out.

Yeah, a dysfunctional alcoholic, drug addict and suicide. What drew you to Thompson in the first place? Were you a fan?

I was a fan, but let's say I wasn't one of those people that read every semicolon. I read "Vegas." I read "Campaign Trail." And I read the reprint of "The Derby." But I hadn't dug into Thompson in a long time. I had read a lot of his later stuff and I was always amused by Garry Trudeau's version in "Doonesbury." I followed the exploits of the good doctor from time to time, but this movie gave me the opportunity to kind of dig in.

As Frank Rich pointed out in a piece not long after Hunter committed suicide -- you remember that guy Jeff Gannon, the sometime male prostitute who was somehow, mysteriously, given a White House press badge? Whenever Scott McClellan or anyone else would get into trouble, Gannon would wave his hand and say, "I think it's terrible. These people are running down this administration. They're trying to do such good." They were getting actors to pose as journalists, and at a time like that, you need somebody who's going to ruthlessly start goring some sacred cows.

I definitely felt, when I watched the film, that Thompson provides an instructive example to today's journalists. Maybe both a positive and a negative example.

A lot of positive and a lot of negative. You can't really imitate Hunter. He was unique, but there were times when he got it dead-on. What was it Frank Mankiewicz [who directed George McGovern's 1972 campaign] said in the film? Hunter's coverage of the '72 campaign was the least factual, but most accurate coverage.

Yeah. At his best, he was able to do that. Highly personal commentary that captured the spirit of things better than objective reporting.

Sometimes even flying into fantasy is useful. Ed Muskie was a peculiar guy, and he had this kind of stone face that would occasionally erupt into rage, or in one famous incident, crying. Hunter's way of dealing with that was not simply to say "Mr. Muskie, with his long, drawn-out face," but was to imagine that somehow Ed Muskie was hooked on this strange Congolese hallucinogen called Ibogaine. He had all the hallmarks of Ibogaine addiction! Rage, a stone face, you know. They said he was deep into it. And then some people in the media picked it up and actually treated it as a story, and I think if you read it in the original, it's pretty clear it's a tall tale in the Mark Twain tradition.

As Hunter says in the movie, when somebody's asking him about it, "Well, I didn't say he was taking anything. I said there was a rumor in Milwaukee that he was taking something, and that was true. Of course, I started the rumor in Milwaukee." So he was playing with all sorts of conventions and having a good time.

Yeah, it was almost like the Onion before its day. Newsweek or Time picked up the story and ran it as if it was for real. And suddenly Ed Muskie was a drug addict.

Right. "It's trouble on the Congo for the senator from Maine!"

Your approach to storytelling, to documentary film, is closely based on hard-hitting investigative journalism. It's really different from Thompson's approach, which is highly personal and deliberately outrageous.

It is different, but it's liberating to think about. And there are moments, I would argue, when my work exhibits, in a formal way, the playfulness of Hunter. In "Enron," there is a moment when we're talking about the enormous risks these guys were taking. And then we cut to this skydiver falling through space. Well, that's not Ken Lay! That guy doesn't work for Enron! We had fun with all these wacky Motocross and extreme-sports things that they were doing. We used bits from horror movies as a playful way of saying, of expressing, what is supposed to be expressed in monotone, third-person narration that dutifully explains the facts. Sometimes if you cut to a guy in the basement of some horror film, pulling these levers, that says more about what these loonies at Enron were saying or doing than describing the details of mark-to-market accounting.

In the Thompson film we also tried to have fun with the tall-tale thing, in a formal way. We found this audiotape of Hunter and [longtime sidekick] Oscar Acosta at a taco stand, where they ask this woman, "We're looking for the American dream. We don't know where it is." And she says, "Well, I think it's over by the psychiatrist's office on State Street." We have the original audiotape, which is fantastic. It was a great find. It's published in the "Vegas" book verbatim, which I didn't even realize. He was tripping, but that was true. But the way we filmed it was, we got some actors and we made it look like a home movie. At first, it plausibly could be. Then suddenly the scene opens up and you're seeing the taco stand from three or four different angles -- inside, outside -- and it's clearly a movie, it's fiction.

Early on in the film, you see this photo of Hunter pointing a gun at a typewriter. We zoom in to his hand holding the gun, and then suddenly the hand becomes real and the gun shoots. It was a way of saying we're going to have some fun, a little bit like Thompson did. I approach this stuff by playing with the form, but being straight about the facts.

Here's one question that I come away with after seeing this film: How much of Thompson's wild-man persona was an act, and how much was it real? You know, he writes about staying up all night in a San Francisco motel, doing crank and typing out the manuscript of "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72." How much is he kind of fronting and playing with that, and how much is he recording what really happened?

It's hard to answer that. I mean, I think he was doing speed in tremendous amounts and going on these binges, but earlier on it was more of an act and less of the real McCoy. He kind of descended into his own character later in life. He was doing all the drugs and all the alcohol all the time, and it started to slow him down. Rather than pretending that he was always on speed, maybe he was on speed a lot of the time. He used to have this big pill bottle. Tim Crouse [Thompson's Rolling Stone reporting partner] talks about how he would gently say, like a father figure, "Don't go for too many of those gray ones, Tim. Those are for people like me, not for you."

So there's no question that he was doing the drugs, but I think there was an act to it, too. He was creating a kind of action-hero figure for himself, and he was pretty serious about the writing. If you look at his output from '65 to '75, it's extraordinary. Somebody who was high all the time just can't crank it out like that.

You know, when I went back to Thompson's work after seeing your film, I read "Campaign Trail" for a piece I was writing about this year's campaign. And one thing that surprised me is that, on the one hand, he's totally spoofing the traditions of campaign journalism and ridiculing his fellow reporters, and on the other hand, he's capable of some remarkable feats of completely mainstream reporting.

Like at the Democratic convention.

Right, that's played completely straight. And sometimes he'll startle you with the things he pulls off. You remember the episode in 1968, when he somehow gets himself into the back seat of a limousine with Richard Nixon and they talk about football the whole way?

Sure, and that was a great credit to Hunter. Unlike a lot of the bloviators on TV today, Hunter was always interested in talking to people outside his tribe, to anybody really. So he pestered Pat Buchanan to get a ride with Nixon, he got in the limo, and for an hour he talks football with Nixon.

And as much as Thompson clearly hated Nixon, he gives him credit: Well, he did know a lot about football!

He describes these little details that Nixon clearly knew about the game, where certain pro players came from, and where they had gone to college. He was impressed.

Speaking of Pat Buchanan: He's in your film, and you might not automatically think of him as one of Thompson's friends. They were diametrically opposed, at least politically, but it's clear that Buchanan respected and liked him.

No question. He loved Hunter. They used to battle it out late at night over a bottle of Wild Turkey.

I bet Buchanan could put it away, too.

I think he could. They would get hammered together and scream at each other about the Cold War. Buchanan's a smart guy, and I think he really was amused by Hunter. He loved him. He also points out that while Hunter was of the left, if you want to put it that way, he leveled some of his hardest hits on liberals, people like Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie. He was a pomposity deflater. He went after everybody. Well, he was pretty gentle on George McGovern. Buchanan really liked the way Hunter captured how ridiculous the whole process is. People who are inside the process really do, at heart, understand what a ridiculous thing this political pageant is.

You're right in saying that Thompson arguably had a lot more distaste for mainstream liberals than, in some cases, for right-wingers. He hated Hubert Humphrey so much. Many Democrats felt very wounded by that. You know, Humphrey was a civil rights leader in the Senate, a loyal party soldier. And you have Thompson writing that he was addicted to some exotic kind of speed.

Wallet, he called it. He said they should stuff Hubert Humphrey in a bottle and let him float out in the Pacific Ocean on the Japan Current.

Thompson never stipulated whether there was any truth to that one, but it probably belongs in the same category...

As the stuff he wrote about Muskie. Again, though, it kind of captured something. If you see Humphrey, he's kind of artificially perky all the time.

I felt like we badly needed Hunter this year. I don't know what he would have made out of Clinton vs. Obama, or exactly what outrageous lies he'd be spreading about John McCain. But they'd be merciless.

I agree, but we needed the early Hunter, not the late Hunter. A guy operating at the peak of his powers.

That's right. Your movie is clearly an appreciation, but it's not a hagiography. You depict the decline in his later years, and it's not pretty. Was it the drinking and drugs finally catching up with him, or do you think those things were symptomatic of something else?

At the end of the day, the drinking really did him in. Whether it was the image that he had become obsessed with -- everyone was counting on him to be this gonzo character -- or whether he was afraid he was going to lose his muse if the drugs and drinking stopped, I'm not sure. Because I do think the drugs early on kind of loosened him up. You can see the writing change after the drugs start -- in an interesting way, in a good way. But at the end of the day, he couldn't kick the booze. It was destroying him. His health got worse and worse and worse, and he wasn't ready for that. It wasn't pretty at all.

I can come up with all these rationalizations for him. People are amused by you for keeping it up, for getting up at one o'clock in the afternoon or whatever with your tumbler of Chivas Regal and your little packet of cocaine. It is amusing, but living that life every day takes its toll.

One of the most upsetting things in your film is this moment when you see the wheels fall off for Thompson. It happens when he goes to Zaire to cover the Ali-Foreman fight in 1974. Such a delicious subject for Hunter Thompson, such a strange cultural event and enormous athletic event. The conflict between the wily veteran and the young giant, with an ending that shocked the world. A fight that itself became the subject of a great documentary.

"When We Were Kings." Which we quote in the film.

And he never wrote anything about it, not a word. What the hell happened?

Well, I think he'd already become something else, you know. It was like when we hear athletes talk about themselves in the third person. Hunter had become more important than the story. He was clearly high as a kite, snorting coke the whole time. They had these huge duffle bags full of marijuana. While the fight was going on, he playfully emptied one into the pool and just watched the dope go through the drains while he was sipping his Scotch. So he was high, way high, and there was a mixture of narcissism and a growing disability, where he was just having too much fun not doing his work.

But I also think something weird happened there, and this is just a guess. But by all accounts, he loved Muhammad Ali, and he was a guy who wore his heart on his sleeve. He was thinking, you know, about all these people he had backed, all the noble losers who had lost. And coming into the fight. everybody said Foreman was just going to take Ali apart. Here was a guy who was so big, and so brutal. He had demolished Joe Frazier. So maybe Hunter decided that this is not going to be any kind of fight and so screw it.

And after the fight happened, it must have had a peculiar effect on his psyche. It's like, once you stop believing, and then what you formerly believed in wins -- it's like being a Red Sox fan for 20 years and thinking, Oh, I'm so tired of this now. And then you start rooting for the Yankees, just so that they'll win. Right? And then the Red Sox beat the Yankees? Well, you can't take any pleasure in that anymore. It's kind of debilitating. It shows a loss of faith, and I think Hunter had that. There was a moment when he just lost faith, and that was hard for him to reckon with.

So he got fucked up there. And then he didn't recover from that, I think. Not only did he not file anything -- I mean, zippo -- but I think he had also undermined his own sense of commitment to the other side of the American psyche. To the sense of possibility, rather than the fear and loathing.

Pulp Orwell

2008-06-26T06:13:00.001-07:00

Jason Lundberg just blogged about a wonderfully lurid and pulpish book cover for Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1954 by Signet, that he happened to randomly find on Amazon. Significant is the artwork and over-the-top copy on the back, which is quite different from almost every other edition of this novel that I've seen.

Shipping children by postal mail: illegal since 1913

2008-06-24T14:36:00.000-07:00

From the Smithsonian's Flickr stream of historic, public domain photos, a shot commemorating the end of being able to ship your children by postal mail:

This city letter carrier posed for a humorous photograph with a young boy in his mailbag. After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.

I Can't Sleep Because

2008-06-16T16:58:00.001-07:00

Because my brain has trouble getting rid of bad memories. They could be old memories or new ones, if they pop into my head, I experience the same anxiety (or close to it) as if that thing had happened recently. When that happens, I feel a slight tightness in my chest and that cascading sense of worry begins to grip me, making sleep very difficult.

For days after that, going to bed comes with a similar sense of foreboding, even if the memory has gone away. In a sense, my psyche has "learnt" to associate falling asleep with the anxiety of the bad memories. Every night I don't fall asleep perpetuates and strengthens that learning.

The key is to break the chain and unlearn this anxiety. But how?

Another issue I'm dealing with right now, is a dislike of situations where life is celebrated on any spontaneous level. It's not a suicidal tendency per se, it's more an eschewing of any situation where people are excited by something, and seem to be enjoying themselves. I don't begrudge them their excitement, nor do I envy it (though, interestingly, I'm aware I should be envious), but I am anxious to get away from it, in order to go somewhere quiet and non-invasive.

I'm also finding people harder and harder to deal with. I can do a phenomenal job engaging with people, genuinely and naturally, but in terms of forming a bond or initiating a connection, I favor isolation every time. I crave companionship, but I can't stand people with their demands and their noise and their cluttered lives. It feels like such a burden.

For the most part, I function well with people, and even enjoy myself without really trying. I mean, despite the sourpuss connotations of this post, I am a lively, engaging and entertaining person. I'm just concerned that as time goes by, my taste veers more towards isolation than integration.

I know I've said this many, many times before...but the next few months should be telling.

Being a Man

2008-06-13T02:34:00.000-07:00

Human males have yet to evolve flesh-eating sperm like some animals, but their biological imperative for sex has made them into the creatures they are today.

By T. C. Flory

The animal kingdom is crawling with kink: threesomes, sadomasochism, spontaneous sex changes, and coital decapitation, for starters. There are also male ducks with corkscrew-shaped penises and sea creatures that shoot acidic semen leaving their partner pregnant and covered in burns. Nature even has its own date rape drug: the Great Barrier Reef's yellow slug delivers a sedative to its desired mate with a quick penile stab.

It's all in the name of successfully passing along genes -- much like these creatures' human counterparts. The male of our species has yet to evolve flesh-eating sperm, but their biological imperative to sow their seeds has led to similarly mind-boggling behavior, like paying $2,150 for seduction seminars. Faye Flam, a science reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, charts this carnal quest in "The Score: How the Quest for Sex Has Shaped the Modern Man," and details the trade-off experienced by most males: They invest less than females in reproduction, but pay for it (among humans, sometimes literally) by working harder to have sex in the first place. After all, some male mammals need only ejaculate, while the female is responsible for gestation and nursing.

In addition to engaging in pop-culture discussions (like Christopher Hitchens' assertion that women aren't funny) and scientific meditations, Flam also infiltrates a pickup artist's boot camp, tours the world's only penis museum (Iceland's Institute of Phallology), and grills experts on the sex lives of our Stone Age ancestors. There's very little that escapes her survey of men's sexual selves, including pornography, monogamy, parenting and homosexuality.

We spoke with Flam by phone from her desk in the Philadelphia Inquirer's newsroom.

In your book, you mention the idea that everybody -- including animals -- wants to be the male when it comes to sex. Why is that?

It has to do with a couple of common male traits that run through the whole biological world. One of them is that the sperm are smaller than the egg and for most male animals that translates into not having to invest as much energy or work into the babies. Everybody wants to do less work. It's a universal laziness.

You really only have a chance to see that sexual choice play out in these crazy sea worms that can be either male or female. Before they have sex, they fight it out, and the winner always plays the male role. Most other animals don't get the chance to fight for the right to be the male during reproduction.

There are a few animals that turn the tables and the female sticks the male with all the work. More often than not, though, the females not only have to either incubate the babies or create the eggs, but they also end up stuck with more of the work. The males can pass on their genes without investing quite as much.

What about the question of pleasure. Does that play into the male sexual advantage?

It's hard to say what is going on in animals' heads when they're having sex. Who knows whether it's any more pleasurable for these sea worms -- if they feel any pleasure -- to be the male during sex, and that's why they fight over the position or whether it's just an instinct.

One of the funny things about sex is that we have an urge to do it, we want it, but it doesn't always turn out that well. You can chase and chase after someone, but it doesn't necessarily mean the sex will be particularly pleasurable. That may be something that's going on with a lot of men. But they chase it anyway.

Your book mentions the idea that sexual anticipation, rather than realization, might give us greater pleasure.

They're doing a lot of research in an area called neuro-economics where they're looking at what really gives people pleasure and why we spend our money the way we do. Apparently, an animal's brain really reacts and the pleasure centers turn on during the period when he's anticipating a reward, not when he actually gets it. That's a growing area of research right now and it applies well to sex.

Pickup artist Mystery's "Venusian Arts" -- which you point out should technically be called "Venereal Arts" -- loom large in your book. Does it have a biological basis?

The pickup artists illustrate a couple of things really well. First, they illustrate the idea that because males invest less in offspring, their success in evolutionary terms is more tenuous. Males are more likely to get completely frozen out of reproduction. So they are likely to end up evolving to chase after sex in a way that females might not. The pickup artists illustrate the way that men are likely to invest a lot of their money and time in going after plain old sex.

Second, there were some things they did that psychologists believe might really work -- and they would probably work for females, too, in some cases. Their concept of playing hard to get was tested in a lab. There was a speed-dating setup in which people pretty successfully guessed how picky their opposite-sex counterparts were. The participants they liked the most were the ones they thought were the pickiest. So, projecting that you're picky could actually be helpful.

The pickup artists also attempt to play on people's tendencies to copy each other. They would show up somewhere with a lot of female friends, so that women would look at them and think, "Wow, he must be popular. Those women must see something in him." That's also something that works on some animals. A researcher actually surrounded male birds with fake female birds, and the real females went for the males surrounded by decoys. The females were attuned to thinking they had to have what everybody else wanted.

You mention some people's desire to return to the "simple" days of hunting and gathering, when men and women had strict sex roles. How accurate is this popular perception of those times?

I had a long interview with an archaeologist, James Adovasio, who co-wrote a book on the topic called "The Invisible Sex." He exploded all of these myths. From what we know from archaeological records, and modern people that hunt and gather, women were pretty independent. They could get fish, small animals and plants on their own. They really weren't dependent on men -- at least to eat, anyway. The idea that somehow in the old days the men's hunting was so terribly important is a myth. Our picture of prehistoric man was built up during the late 1800s, so it was a reflection of what men thought life should be more than what it really was.

That opens the way for a lot of interesting evolutionary forces. If women aren't dependent on men then they can afford to be picky, they can decide to only mate with the men who are skilled singers, attractive or good fathers. It puts men under an evolutionary pressure of a different kind.

It's a commonly made assertion that testosterone is "poison." How has that idea been challenged?

I traced the term "testosterone poisoning" to Alan Alda, of all people. He used it in an article for Ms. magazine and it really caught on. Subsequent research suggests testosterone simply needs to be balanced. If you shoot yourself up with lots of testosterone, that's probably going to really hurt your health, but if your testosterone gets too low, it can also be associated with health problems and depression. It looks like there is a healthy amount for men.

The level of testosterone a man has ebbs and flows over the course of the day and his lifetime.

Speaking of testosterone, why did risk-taking evolve in men?

That's the subject of a lot of speculation in evolutionary psychology. A lot of it comes down to showing-off behavior. It's a peacock type behavior -- among peacocks, the male with the best tail gets all the females. It's possible that over the long history of humanity men who did incredibly risky things and survived would be like the peacock with the best tail. They would be the heroes, whether it was for beating up someone from an enemy group or hunting a dangerous animal.

Males are under more evolutionary pressure than women to stand out from the crowd. Every study shows that men are more likely to do risky things of all kinds. Women simply have a little more common sense when it comes to drinking, driving, guns -- that sort of thing.

What are we to make of the fact that the Y chromosome is actually shrinking?

I've talked at great length to the first scientist to propose that the Y chromosome was shrinking, and she was shocked that people got so up in arms about it. It would take millions of years or maybe hundreds of thousands of years for it to completely disappear -- in any case, it won't cause males to go extinct. We know of two other mammals that have actually lost their Y chromosome and, somehow, they keep making males and females. Scientists aren't sure what they're doing, but there must be some new genetic switch that creates males.

Do alpha males exist in human society as they do in the animal world?

In animals like gorillas and chimpanzees and dogs, it's much more clear-cut -- the alpha male has to beat everybody else up. Then he gets access to all the females. You can see similar stuff happening with humans, but instead of the tough guys, it's the artists, rock stars and actors who get all the attention.

Some animals have alpha females, but it's not too common. The bonobos, one of our closest relatives, have alpha females. They're actually more powerful than the males. The females dominate the whole group.

What inspires monogamy and fatherly behavior in animals?

It can have something to do with how much care the offspring actually need. If you're a male bird and all of your offspring are going to die if you don't take care of them, then your genes will not pass on to the next generation. You will be a Darwinian failure. In that case, only males who stick around to help will manage to pass on their genes.

In some cases, like in some fish, the females just abandon the eggs, and if the male doesn't take care of them, they won't survive. Sometimes the female turns the tables.

And humans are somewhere in the middle when it comes to sex and commitment?

Currently, yes. There's a lot of monogamy and paternal care, but we're not quite as monogamous as birds and some other animals. Women can have sex, have babies and get by without a man. Monogamy depends a lot on social groups and whether you have help in raising offspring. Humans are so flexible. There are ways women can work around the need for fatherly care.

In a lot of groups, there is serial monogamy. In a lot of cultures around the world it's pretty common that people go through a couple relationships in their lifetime. People can be monogamous but not mate for life.

You raise the possibility that DNA paternity testing and contraceptives could, respectively, change men and women's sexual drives. Can you explain that?

It goes back to the common themes that run through males and females. One of those is the uncertainty of paternity: Females know which baby is theirs, males don't necessarily. Paternity testing might make men more afraid of certain types of sex, like sex with women they would like to never see again. It might not make them less interested in sex, but rather more circumspect about whom they have sex with.

On the other hand, it could be that women have traditionally been more circumspect about sex because, until more recently, ending up pregnant was an ever-present possibility. Birth control takes away some of the risk.

What might cloning and artificial insemination mean for men's and women's sex drives?

Both would probably have a similar effect in that they would amplify men's perceived risk of not having any kids. It might make their evolutionary existence even more tenuous. Women could have reproductive independence. A man can't use cloning to have a baby but women could, in theory.

It seems it could make men even more competitive. I think it makes men insecure, the idea that in the future they could be left out of the equation completely.

This article originally appeared on Salon.

How much sleep is ideal?

2008-06-11T04:00:00.000-07:00

Studies show that people who sleep between 6.5 hr. and 7.5 hr. a night, as they report, live the longest. And people who sleep 8 hr. or more, or less than 6.5 hr., they don't live quite as long. There is just as much risk associated with sleeping too long as with sleeping too short. The big surprise is that long sleep seems to start at 8 hr. Sleeping 8.5 hr. might really be a little worse than sleeping 5 hr..

Morbidity [or sickness] is also "U-shaped" in the sense that both very short sleep and very long sleep are associated with many illnesses—with depression, with obesity—and therefore with heart disease—and so forth. But the [ideal amount of sleep] for different health measures isn't all in the same place. Most of the low points are at 7 or 8 hr., but there are some at 6 hr. and even at 9 hr. I think diabetes is lowest in 7-hr. sleepers [for example]. But these measures aren't as clear as the mortality data.

I think we can speculate [about why people who sleep from 6.5 to 7.5 hr. live longer], but we have to admit that we don't really understand the reasons. We don't really know yet what is cause and what is effect. So we don't know if a short sleeper can live longer by extending their sleep, and we don't know if a long sleeper can live longer by setting the alarm clock a bit earlier. We're hoping to organize tests of those questions.

One of the reasons I like to publicize these facts is that I think we can prevent a lot of insomnia and distress just by telling people that short sleep is O.K. We've all been told you ought to sleep 8 hr., but there was never any evidence. A very common problem we see at sleep clinics is people who spend too long in bed. They think they should sleep 8 or 9 hr., so they spend [that amount of time] in bed, with the result that they have trouble falling asleep and wake up a lot during the night. Oddly enough, a lot of the problem [of insomnia] is lying in bed awake, worrying about it. There have been many controlled studies in the U.S., Great Britain and other parts of Europe that show that an insomnia treatment that involves getting out of bed when you're not sleepy and restricting your time in bed actually helps people to sleep more. They get over their fear of the bed. They get over the worry, and become confident that when they go to bed, they will sleep. So spending less time in bed actually makes sleep better. It is in fact a more powerful and effective long-term treatment for insomnia than sleeping pills.

Wrong Directions, Right Intentions

2008-06-11T02:23:00.000-07:00

This is a wonderful article: insightful and sensitive.

By M. SLACKMAN

CAIRO — Emad Refaat strode out of his workshop with purpose, his grease-covered hands pointing down the road even before he could see the road. “Come here,” he said, his voice strong with reassurance. “Go to the light, make the first right. That’s Salah el-Din Street.”

“I am sure, totally sure.”

But he was wrong, totally wrong. “I wanted to help. I was actually going to tell you to ask the flower vendor on the corner. He knows all the streets,” said Mr. Refaat, 28, who was slightly embarrassed when he was asked why he gave the wrong directions with such conviction.

Navigating Egypt can be a challenge of understanding, and not just language but also culture, values, norms. A pile of trash may look like litter to a foreigner, but it is a commodity to poor people who recycle and reuse almost everything. In Egypt, it is routine, absolutely routine, to get the wrong directions.

That is not because people are mischievous, but because if you ask for help, they feel obligated to try to help — even if they send you off in the wrong direction.

There is a lesson in this confusion that has more value than merely cautioning tourists to bring a map, sociologists, political scientists and intellectuals agreed.

The United States’ relations with Egypt are strained. From the man on the street to the president, rightly or wrongly, Egyptians are feeling disrespected by Washington.

It is not just about the invasion of Iraq, or the perennial feeling of favoritism for Israel, or the mild critiques coming from Washington about Egypt’s lack of democracy. It is what people here see as the demonstrated failure to understand how they think, what they value — even when those values mean sending someone off in the wrong direction.

Egyptian society values hospitality and personal honor over precision and directness; there is a kind of emotional camouflage that Egyptians wear to get through their days. Drivers act as if no one else is on the road, but almost always smile and wave after a near collision.

“Here, even if someone sends you in the wrong direction, he still feels that he did what he was supposed to do,” said Hamdi Taha, head of a charity, Karam al-Islam, and a professor of communications at Al Azhar University. “He doesn’t think he misguided you. He helped. Right and wrong is a relative thing.”

It is the little things that can be hardest to understand. But it is the little things, especially at a time when people are angry with the big things, that can stoke people’s ire, Mr. Taha said.

Even with people you might expect to be on America’s side.

Like Ghada Shahbendar. She is an outspoken, English-speaking rights advocate who has tried to prod the Egyptian government to be more democratic, more open and less repressive. But even Ms. Shahbendar was offended by President Bush’s remarks last month at the World Economic Forum in Sharm el Sheik.

Mr. Bush came to the podium with little credibility among Arabs, that is a given. But his indirect criticism of Egyptian politics set off a national chorus of protest. People were offended because Mr. Bush, with all his own baggage, stood in Egypt and criticized Egypt, Mr. Taha and Ms. Shahbendar said.

“We are emotional people,” Ms. Shahbendar said. “A criticism of a regime that represents us, whether we are in agreement with that regime or not, sparks negative emotions.”

It is a complicated line that officials must walk when they try to balance the values of foreign countries against the values at home. When Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wrote a letter to Mr. Bush, the language was the kind of flowery prose common in Iranian communication — but quite different from the very direct communication of American English. It was widely mocked as sophomoric.

In Egypt, the recently departed United States ambassador, Francis Ricciardone, was well regarded by Egyptians on the street and in high office because he spoke the way they did — with effusive praise for his hosts. But this got him in trouble at home.

In February 2007, the ambassador was interviewed on Egyptian television and displayed his characteristic guest-in-the-house behavior. “Egypt today is very different from Egypt during the 1980s, both economically and politically,” he said at a time when it was clear that the government was backpedaling on political reforms. “There is more freedom and there are more intense, aggressive discussions.”

He was then blasted back in the United States for sounding like an apologist for the government. His term ended abruptly at the three-year mark. He left Egypt last month.

“Most Egyptians like him because we believed he liked us,” Ms. Shahbendar said.

Egyptians want democracy. Mr. Bush talked about democracy. But it is not at all clear that both sides were talking about the same thing. Magdy Mohammed, 22, an engineering student, was hanging around a coffee shop in Tahrir Square recently when he reflected on democracy. “If democracy brings us food we can afford, and a government that really cares about its people, then this is what we want.”

What he and others say they most want is fairness, rule of law, to no longer be victims of a system that links opportunity with connections and the ability to pay bribes. He was not talking about free elections. “This is what you do in America, but your leaders are no better than ours,” he said.

There have been numerous times when American officials have been blindsided by the little things in the Middle East. When the United States first organized a police force in Iraq, officials purchased uniforms with baseball caps. But the Iraqis were infuriated and embarrassed because they wear berets, not caps.

When Karen P. Hughes, then the under secretary of state for public affairs, told women in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, that they should be able to drive and to “participate fully” in society in 2005, she was met with hostility from her handpicked audience.

It is those kinds of assumptions — that the citizens of foreign countries want to be liberated by America and live like Americans — that can really get under people’s skin. Egyptians may give out wrong directions — but only when they are asked for directions.

Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting to this New York Times article.

Geoducks are Strange

2008-06-10T15:22:00.000-07:00

Check them out. Geoducks are the weirdest creatures I've ever seen.

Keith is an Alien

2008-06-10T15:19:00.000-07:00

Keith says:

Here's something that's kinda strange, maybe you can help. Here's a link to a picture of my tongue. Perhaps other readers can help me out.

I've had these things hanging under my tongue all my life. Only recently have they been bothering me. I've been accidentally biting them and/or getting them caught on my lower teeth. It hurts a lot when this happens. Nobody else I know has these, except for my 5-year-old son; I figure it's genetic. As an adoptee though, I have limited access to my genetic history. My birth mother says that she doesn't have these. Anyone out there have these? Anyone have them removed? I searched Gray's Anatomy online, and of course have googled, but haven't found anything on this. Any tips or information would be appreciated.

Anyway, if you could post this, cool, I'd like to hear what others have to say about it.

Too Dumb to Decide

2008-06-05T03:11:00.000-07:00

Sure, ignorance is rampant among the American electorate, as Rick Shenkman argues. But without The People, there would be no Democracy as we know it.

By L. Bayard

"Just How Stupid Are We?" There's no getting around the provocation of that title, and if your mouth is already forming the words, "Not stupid enough to read this book," then pause and give author Rick Shenkman his proper due. By questioning whether American voters have the capacity to think straight, he has ensured that he will never win an election and probably won't scare up a lot of readers, either. But at a time when Obama and Clinton and McCain have been hustling around the country trying to feel the common man's pain, it's oddly bracing to hear someone argue that the common man is a pain.

If nothing else, it flies in the face of a great many clichés. "The people have spoken." "The people are always right." "Government of the people ... by the people..." Well, you know the rest. Or maybe you don't. Because, according to Shenkman, Americans don't know a hell of a lot, and some of us are, by any available metric, D-U-M dumb.

"No one thing can explain the foolishness that marks so much of American politics," writes Shenkman, former journalist and founder of History News Network (hnn.us). "But what is striking is how often the most obvious cause -- public ignorance -- is blithely disregarded ... We feel uncomfortable coming right out and saying publicly, The People sometimes seem awfully stupid."

For starters, they know nothing about government or current events. They can't follow arguments of any complexity. They stuff themselves with slogans and advertisements. They eschew fact for myth. They operate from biases and stereotypes, and they privilege feeling over thinking. The result is a political system of daunting irrationality, and rational people like Rick Shenkman are paying the cost.

Don't look for things to get better, either. With the decline of political bosses, party machines and labor unions, the hoi polloi no longer have anyone telling them how to think -- even as polls, referendums and ballot initiatives place an ever greater premium on their opinions. "Nothing in our past experience," writes Shenkman, "justifies the belief that people in these circumstances are up to the task that history has now given them ... Our confidence in democracy rests on a myth."

Stated this baldly, Shenkman's thesis has the sting of novelty, but in its rough outlines, it's no different from what Alexander Hamilton was arguing more than 200 years ago. Indeed, as Shenkman usefully reminds us, our constitutional history betrays from the very start "a constant tension between faith in The People and contempt for them." Madison and Jefferson may have talked a good game, but many of the Founding Fathers lived in terror of mob rule, which is why, under the original Constitution, only the House of Representatives could be directly elected.

If it had been up to conservatives, that would still be the case today. Indeed, until Nixon and Reagan seized populism for anti-populist ends, America's right wing (the late William Buckley included) had very little use for representative democracy. By contrast, Shenkman argues, liberals actually swallowed the myth of mass wisdom and so were all the more stunned when The People turned on them for such crimes as embracing the rights of women and minorities. The upshot is that we are now "in the pitiful position that neither liberals nor conservatives are prepared to say to The People: stop and pay attention. Liberals cannot because their ideology leaves them unprepared to find fault with The People. Conservatives have not because The People repeatedly put them in power."

But are The People really such a bad bargain? We can all, of course, muster at least anecdotal evidence of American stupidity. We've seen "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" We've watched Jay Leno flummox bystanders with the most basic questions. ("How many doors in a four-door sedan?") I know of more than one journalism professor who's been forced to quiz students on current events because tomorrow's news reporters don't actually follow today's news.

But the more Shenkman tries to define our stupidity, the more slippery it becomes. Short-sightedness is part of it, he says. Boneheadedness, wooden-headedness, good old-fashioned numbskullery. But where are the statistics to show we are living in "an Age of Ignorance"? We're told that students forced to listen to NPR for a whole hour liken the experience to "torture." Depending on the hour, I might agree with them. A study finds that 22 percent of Americans can name all five members of TV's "Simpsons" clan, but only one in 1,000 can name all five First Amendment freedoms. I'll admit I'm among the 999 -- on the spot, I couldn't come up with "petition for redress of grievances" -- but what exactly makes these fact sets worth comparing, other than that each numbers five? Is a widespread familiarity with the most intelligent and subversive comedy in American TV history really a cause for despair?

Shenkman has an equally tough time gauging our irrationality (though, again, each day brings fresh evidence). He criticizes voters for measuring economic success by employment and not productivity, as economists do. But isn't employment how the economy manifests itself to the average citizen? Similarly, Shenkman considers voters irrational for buying into George H.W. Bush's "no new taxes" pledge. Surely, though, that makes them not irrational but credulous.

And in truth, the condition that Shenkman seems to be anatomizing is not so much stupidity as malleability. Americans are very good, he says, at being manipulated and lied to (to buttress his point, he offers a brief history of political ads) and we're equally good at lying to ourselves. Is it any wonder, then, that our current president was able to ram such an ill-advised war down our throats?

But again, this won't quite pass. A sizable number of Americans opposed the Iraq war from its infancy, and a majority of Americans opposed it once it became clear the Bush administration had trumped up the casus belli. The 2006 congressional elections and the dismal state of Bush's poll rankings are persuasive testimony that the masses, one way or another, are tuned to the world around them.

At any rate, representative democracy is a hard genie to put back in the bottle. As Shenkman admits, with more than a touch of rue, "We cannot fire the American people." He holds out hope, however, that we can downsize them. Among the bizarre trial balloons he lofts for enhancing political discourse are requiring voters to pass civics tests (shades of the Jim Crow literacy tests), letting state legislatures once again choose senators, and restoring the Electoral College's historic autonomy in electing presidents.

A counter-revolution, in other words, that would roll American governance back to the good old days of Hamilton (without, presumably, rolling over women and blacks in the process). It would all be pretty alarming if it weren't so hopelessly, even endearingly, unrealistic and if it didn't arise from a fundamental misreading of the electoral process. Elections are not, despite the fond wishes of academics like Shenkman, examinations. A basic understanding of the issues is certainly an asset to a voter, but the decisions we make about candidates can't help being informed by all the things that Shenkman distrusts: emotions, hopes, values.

I tend to vote Democratic, for example, not because I've scrutinized the party platform down to the last plank but because I approve, in general, of how Democrats want to use their power. The same, I assume, holds true for many Republicans. And so the seemingly blinkered outcomes that drive Shenkman crazy -- Clinton supporters overlooking his crassness, Bush supporters overlooking his obtuseness -- can actually be seen as exercises in priority setting. We may not like what our leaders are doing, but we continue to like who they are and how they look at the world. Simply because these sentiments can't be assayed through true-false questions is no reason to deny their validity. Even in the voting booth, the heart has its reasons.

Scenes from a Group Marriage

2008-06-04T02:53:00.000-07:00

I was a normal 9-year-old boy with two parents. And then, after a fateful camping trip, I had four.

By L. Harrison

One day in the summer of 1971, my parents held hands, closed their eyes and jumped out of their conventional marriage into something strange and new. I was 9 years old at the time, and we were camping at Betsy Lake in the High Unitas Wilderness with another family of five. We were halfway into the camping trip when the six of us kids realized our parents had mixed and matched: My father was in the tent with their mother, and their father was in the tent with my mother.

No sound came from either tent. I remember the smell of mosquito-repellent. I remember gray ripples in the lake, squirrels scrambling up pine bark and us kids nervously discussing. I remember trying to believe my life hadn't shot off its safe, predictable tracks.

Of course, it had. We began seeing the other family at least once a week; one of my parents spent each Sunday at their house and one of theirs at mine. And then we all moved in together. The arrangement felt uncomfortable, if only because no one else's parents were doing anything like it. One day, as I lay reading on my bed, the girls from the other family came downstairs with moving boxes in their arms. That night, the adults erected a screen to separate the dining room from the living room. In place of our dark varnished table and the buffet with its china and silver appeared a king-size bed. Downstairs, the salt-and-pepper sofa and the desk where my father tracked investments gave way to bunk beds for two of the girls. Over the next few days, my brother and I learned to grab for our bathrobes when our new sisters slipped through our room on the way to the toilet in the morning. They learned to duck behind closet doors when we trespassed through their bedroom on our way upstairs.

Fiction about the 1970s -- including "The Ice Storm" or the new "Swingtown" TV series -- typically depicts such experiments as frivolous and irresponsible. "How could they have done this to you?" my wife still asks me. It's true that boredom was an element in my parents' motivation. It's also true that the arrangement embarrassed me in front of my friends, and that it threw me off balance at a nervous time of life. But behind that -- at least sometimes -- lay an idealism that has disappeared from the public recollection.

My parents saw themselves as part of a movement, promulgated in visionary writings like Toffler's "Future Shock." The notion was that an adult could simultaneously maintain more than one intimate relationship as long as all the partners agreed. The movement, which now calls itself "polyamory," is still going, though mostly underground. Webster's accepted the word two years ago.

But my parents didn't take a public stance. They kept their sex lives to themselves; they never suggested I should want to follow their example. And the communal household enjoyed a kind of camaraderie I have never felt since. I liked the party we made when all of us kids sat down to watch "Hogan's Heroes" or danced to the soundtrack from "Cabaret." Over the next two years, I swapped books with my stepsisters, listened in awe to their stories of crushes, exchanged tips on teachers. Their father imparted his love of great music and their mother her passion for cooking. A sort of bond formed among the 10 of us.

I found out it was ending one day, after a tennis lesson, when my mother picked up my brother and me in her blue Dodge Dart with its painted butterflies. I knew from her silence something was wrong. She pulled into the parking lot of a drug store and sat for a moment. Without turning to face us, she said that the two families were splitting into separate households -- but not in the original configurations. My father would live with the other woman, my mother with the other man.

I didn't ask for the story of the foursome's disintegration. Despite the intimacy of our crowded household, or perhaps because of it, we kids refrained from probing the details of the adults' love lives. Instead I stared at the smudged upholstery of the seat in front of me, feeling in my stomach as though we had just driven off a cliff.

Over the next few years, that falling sensation accelerated. My father married the other woman. The other man found a new lover and left my mother. I switched back and forth every six months between my parents' households. For the first time in my life, my mother let me see her tears. I learned to hide mine in my pillow.

Divorce is commonplace now, but group marriage is still weird, almost incomprehensible to most people. Only recently have I overcome the shame that used to make me gloss over that period when I told new friends the story of my life. But now, when I think back, I can see it wasn't the group marriage that cast a lasting shadow on my childhood; it was the divorce. For a few years I'd had something more than a family, then suddenly I had something less. And the loss was wrenching.

This year, my youngest son is 10, as I was at the beginning of my parents' odyssey. His brother is 14 -- close to my age at the end. I've felt for myself the stress that our hyper-individualist culture puts on families. Few of us live with extended family; fewer and fewer of us know our neighbors, go to church or belong to a social club. We measure success by the size of our houses and our paychecks. We see child rearing as a lifestyle choice, not a community endeavor. But two grown-ups sometimes aren't enough to pay the bills, to wipe the noses, to coach the soccer team and listen to the stories of schoolyard bullying. After 17 years, my wife and I are still passionate about each other. I have no desire to engage in the bold sort of experiment my parents took on. But sometimes, even when all four of us are home together, our world feels too small, and I understand the hope with which my parents blindly plunged into uncharted love.

This article originally appeared on Salon.

2008-06-03T04:16:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Laura for sending this.

A Mad (Cow) Question

2008-06-02T13:28:00.001-07:00

This question has been kind of driving me crazy, not because it's of any vital importance, but because I'm unsure where or to whom one would pose such a question, in order to gain a satisfactory (and accurate) answer. The question is this:

I was reading on the Interwebs about Neil Entwistle, 29, who murdered his wife Rachel, 27, a couple of years ago, in Massachussets. Now if he killed her 2 years ago, this means he was 27 when he did it. Does that mean she was 27 too? Or do they list their age at the time of the crime and keep it there?

I know I'm stoned, but it's a valid question.

Be gay, be anything -- just not single!

2008-05-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

Aside from being very well-written, I bonded with the line about parents seeing unmarried children as a failure on their part. My folks have oscillated from resentment to guilt to self-recrimination. Now there seems to be tender resignation to my barren future:)

With same-sex marriage now legal in California, mothers across India and elsewhere are eager to see their gay sons and daughters finally get hitched.

By S. Roy

May 30, 2008 | When I left India for America, my aunts worried about who I might end up marrying. "I hope you'll marry another Bengali," an aunt told me. Over the years that relaxed to, "I hope she's a Hindu, even if she's not Bengali." Then it became, "At least another Indian," until finally we reached, "I hope you'll get married to someone before we all die."

She probably didn't mean another man.

But now it might just happen. Same-sex marriage is on a roll in California. First a Republican-dominated Supreme Court said there was no reason gays and lesbians couldn't get married. Now there comes a new Field Poll that says that, for the first time ever, a majority of Californians think same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

As the pink confetti settles around us, I'm left wondering how immigrants are going to come out anymore. Many of us come from countries that really don't have a word for "gay." India certainly doesn't. There are epithets and some rather technical terms. Coming out in India is usually about marriage, as in, "Mom, Dad, I don't think I am going to get married."

Now the California Supreme Court has yanked that coming-out line away.

Perhaps it's time. After all, the Oxford English Dictionary has apparently had to recalibrate its definition of marriage to allow same-sex nuptials. The Field Poll shows that Californians support the right of same-sex couples to marry by a margin of 51 to 42 percent.

In a state where one in four Californians is foreign-born, that seems to be an astonishing change. When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom started issuing same-sex wedding licenses in 2004, some of the first protests came from Chinese churchgoers. After all, immigrant families are supposed to be socially conservative.

But that might be part of the reason why the tide is finally shifting on gay marriage. (Of course a younger, more socially liberal state helps.)

For my immigrant friends, being gay in California is not much of an issue. Being unmarried in their 30s and 40s is the real issue, the conversation-stopper at Indian potlucks, the thing that makes them stick out at Chinese banquets.

My friend said that when a heterosexual but unmarried Chinese friend of his told his parents that at least he wasn't gay, the parents retorted, "We'd rather you were gay with kids."

Immigrant families just understand marriage, even same-sex marriage, more easily that singlehood. Singleness means you never grew up. It's the biggest failing of parenthood -- the incompleteness of the unmarried child.

It leads to acts of desperation. I've seen the ads for marriages of convenience -- 29-year-old professional Indian gay, 5-foot-9, good job, looking for Indian lesbian facing similar family pressures. There was even a Web site devoted to Assisting Matrimonial Arrangements for Lesbians and Gays from India, complete with a "gaylerry" of posted ads.

In 1993 my friend Aditya Advani went to India with his boyfriend Michael Tarr and complained to his mother that no one would ever come to his wedding. She promptly organized a ceremony. The family priest presided over it. "Openly gay and married in my parents' drawing room at the age of 30," marveled Aditya. "Right on schedule as a good Indian boy should be!"

I recently watched their wedding video at their home in Berkeley while their cats purred on the couch. It still felt like a fairy tale, a lump-in-the-throat act of domestic revolution.

In 2004 when San Francisco started issuing same-sex wedding licenses, Arvind Kumar and Ashok Jethanandani rose at 5:30 a.m. to drive from their home in San Jose to San Francisco to stand in line to get married.

The couple were already married in a sense. Arvind's mother, who had once adamantly rejected her son's sexuality, presided over a Hindu ceremony for the two after they had been together for more than a decade. They are registered as domestic partners in Palo Alto and the state of California. The registration licenses hang on the wall where other couples might have pictures of their children.

Arvind and Ashok couldn't get married in 2004. Despite getting up so early, they were behind 300 other couples in line. They finally got an appointment but by then the Supreme Court had halted the marriages.

At that time Arvind was philosophical. He knew it was going to be a long fight. "We are just fighting to simplify our lives," says Arvind. "I don't want a Palo Alto date, a state of California date, a Hindu ceremony date. I just want one date, one wedding anniversary like everyone else."

Now Arvind and Ashok can get their one date after all. On June 17 California counties will start issuing marriage licenses to couples like them.

The next generation of immigrant gays and lesbians will have to come up with some other coming-out line.

And the revolution will have to find some new frontier.

Imagine this ad in the local Indian weekly: Hindu very well-established Los Angeles family invites professional match for daughter, 25, 5-foot-3, slim, wheatish complexion, U.S. born, senior executive in Fortune 500 company. Loves music and dance. Prospective brides encouraged to reply in confidence with complete bio data and returnable photo. Must be professional, under 30, caste no bar.

It might just be time for the gay arranged-marriage.

This article appeared on Salon.com.

Imploring Despots

2008-05-30T06:51:00.000-07:00

This makes me kind of sick.

Miraculin Fruit changes flavors

2008-05-28T03:01:00.000-07:00

CARRIE DASHOW dropped a large dollop of lemon sorbet into a glass of Guinness, stirred, drank and proclaimed that it tasted like a “chocolate shake.”

HOW’S IT DO THAT? Franz Aliquo, who calls himself Supreme Commander, right, supplied miracle berries grown by Curtis Mozie, left, to party-goers in Long Island City, Queens, last weekend.

Those who attended sampled the red berries then tasted foods, including cheese, beer and brussels sprouts, finding the flavors transformed. Beer can taste like chocolate, lemons like candy. Mr. Aliquo says he holds the parties to “turn on a bunch of people’s taste buds.”

Nearby, Yuka Yoneda tilted her head back as her boyfriend, Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She swallowed and considered the flavor: “Doughnut glaze, hot doughnut glaze!”

They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.

The host was Franz Aliquo, 32, a lawyer who styles himself Supreme Commander (Supreme for short) when he’s presiding over what he calls “flavor tripping parties.” Mr. Aliquo greeted new arrivals and took their $15 entrance fees. In return, he handed each one a single berry from his jacket pocket.

“You pop it in your mouth and scrape the pulp off the seed, swirl it around and hold it in your mouth for about a minute,” he said. “Then you’re ready to go.” He ushered his guests to a table piled with citrus wedges, cheeses, Brussels sprouts, mustard, vinegars, pickles, dark beers, strawberries and cheap tequila, which Mr. Aliquo promised would now taste like top-shelf Patrón.

The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. Dr. Bartoshuk said she did not know of any dangers associated with eating miracle fruit.

During the 1970s, a ruling by the Food and Drug Administration dashed hopes that an extract of miraculin could be sold as a sugar substitute. In the absence of any plausible commercial application, the miracle fruit has acquired a bit of a cult following.

Sina Najafi, editor in chief of the art magazine Cabinet, has featured miracle fruits at some of the publication’s events. At a party in London last October, the fruit, he said, “had people testifying like some baptismal thing.”

The berries were passed out last week at a reading of “The Fruit Hunters,” a new book by Adam Leith Gollner with a chapter about miracle fruit.

Bartenders have been experimenting with the fruit as well. Don Lee, a beverage director at the East Village bar Please Don’t Tell, has been making miracle fruit cocktails on his own time, but the bar probably won’t offer them anytime soon. The fruit is highly perishable and expensive — a single berry goes for $2 or more.

Lance J. Mayhew developed a series of drink recipes with miracle fruit foams and extracts for a recent issue of the cocktail magazine Imbibe and may create others for Beaker & Flask, a restaurant opening later this year in Portland, Ore.

He cautioned that not everyone enjoys the berry’s long-lasting effects. Despite warnings, he said, one woman became irate after drinking one of his cocktails. He said, “She was, like, ‘What did you do to my mouth?’ ”

Mr. Aliquo issues his own warnings. “It will make all wine taste like Manischewitz,” he said. And already sweet foods like candy can become cloying.

He said that he had learned about miracle fruit while searching ethnobotany Web sites for foods he could make for a diabetic friend.

The party last week was his sixth “flavor tripping” event. He hopes to put on a much larger, more expensive affair in June. Although he does sell the berries on his blog, www.flavortripping.wordpress.com, Mr. Aliquo maintains that he isn’t in it for the money. (He said he made about $100 on Friday.) Rather, he said, he does it to “turn on a bunch of people’s taste buds.”

He believes that the best way to encounter the fruit is in a group. “You need other people to benchmark the experience,” he said. At his first party, a small gathering at his apartment in January, guests murmured with delight as they tasted citrus wedges and goat cheese. Then things got trippy.

“You kept hearing ‘oh, oh, oh,’ ” he said, and then the guests became “literally like wild animals, tearing apart everything on the table.”

“It was like no holds barred in terms of what people would try to eat, so they opened my fridge and started downing Tabasco and maple syrup,” he said.

Many of the guests last week found the party through a posting at www.tThrillist.com. Mr. Aliquo sent invitations to a list of contacts he has been gathering since he and a friend began organizing StreetWars, a popular urban assassination game using water guns.

One woman wanted to see Mr. Aliquo eat a berry before she tried one. “What, you don’t trust me?” he said.

She replied, “Well, I just met you.”

Another guest said, “But you met him on the Internet, so it’s safe.”

The fruits are available by special order from specialty suppliers in New York, including Baldor Specialty Foods and S. Katzman Produce. Katzman sells the berries for about $2.50 a piece, and has been offering them to chefs.

Mr. Aliquo gets his miracle fruit from Curtis Mozie, 64, a Florida grower who sells thousands of the berries each year through his Web site, www.miraclefruitman.com. (A freezer pack of 30 berries costs about $90 with overnight shipping.) Mr. Mozie, who was in New York for Mr. Gollner’s reading, stopped by the flavor-tripping party.

Mr. Mozie listed his favorite miracle fruit pairings, which included green mangoes and raw aloe. “I like oysters with some lemon juice,” he said. “Usually you just swallow them, but I just chew like it was chewing gum.”

A large group of guests reached its own consensus: limes were candied, vinegar resembled apple juice, goat cheese tasted like cheesecake on the tongue and goat cheese on the throat. Bananas were just bananas.

For all the excitement it inspires, the miracle fruit does not make much of an impression on its own. It has a mildly sweet tang, with firm pulp surrounding an edible, but bitter, seed. Mr. Aliquo said it reminded him of a less flavorful cranberry. “It’s not something I’d just want to eat,” he said.

2008-05-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

Typecasting

2008-05-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

I'm of the school of thought that if you treat me badly, I'll try to prove you right. Call it vindictiveness or sheer bloody-mindedness ("Want to be right? I'll make damn sure you are") or even some kind of subconscious admission that I really am as bad as you say I am. The point is, I'm capable of behaving badly, saying and doing things I regret (almost immediately, as well, which speaks to the rapidity and depth of the rage into which I descend) and even if it's for the briefest moments, tapping into a kind of unadulterated self-destructiveness.

Anyways, I've been losing the plot a little bit lately (isn't that a wonderful expression? You have to give the English mad props at their skill with language, if not for much else) and, for a change, I thought I'd brainstorm into ways of not trying to undo all the good work I've done for myself. Examples of undoing good work include sinking into depression, locking myself up at home, smoking copious amounts of reefer and indulging in dark thoughts and (where available) emotionally-unsatisfying, sexual relationships.

I've noticed a disturbing trend in my dating life; in a nutshell, I seem to have two types of women I end up being with: Type A is a strong, independent, attractive (if not always good-looking) woman with equal measures of purpose and vulnerability. While type B is submissive, detached, overweight (almost always not good-looking) with very low self-esteem and a manic desire to be overwhelmed in some way.

If I'm fine, I go for type A, when I'm not I go for type B. Whatever 'fine' means.

Type A challenges me emotionally, and I relish that. But almost always, once I've had a chance to identify their weaknesses, I lose all interest in them and struggle to relate to them on any level. Sex, never a strong connector with this type, trickles into oblivion. I often don't miss sex with them, but they often do.

Type B offers me the kind of sex I guess I really enjoy: uninhibited, dominating, slightly degrading and no-holds barred. Type B women never say no to anything and they never seem to be enjoying themselves that much. They're not bored, but they are...detached. Despite that, they initiate a lot of sex and always claim they enjoy it. When the relationship ends, they are much more likely to attempt to engineer a continuing sexual relationship with me, even if it's just on that level. I'm more likely to say yes, because the sex is good.

I like type As but I lust after type Bs; I respect type As and would likely be friends with them, while I don't have much respect for type Bs and am less likely to want anything to do with them after the relationship has died.

Now, I'm not a fool. I know that my inability to connect with type As speaks to some emotional inadequacy that I have, almost certainly a few self-esteem issues and possibly some kind of power struggle that I resent. Freud would have said I see my mother in them, and Freud might have had a point.

Likewise, I'm aware that type Bs represent some kind of perverse attempt to exorcise whatever resentments I have towards women (and there are a few though you'd be hard pressed to find a man who doesn't harbour even one) by acting out a certain level of dominant sexual relations. I enjoy it very much and it relaxes me, but it's not a positive, constructive experience and I bond with the girl, not a bit.

Obviously, I'm torn; but seeing as I get torn by far more trivial fare, this won't surprise regular readers. It's kind of chastening (possibly the worst word choice of all time) to acknowledge to yourself you have out-there sexual fantasies involving domination and light bondage, but it's got two things in common with all sexuality:

1. You can't control what you like, anymore than you can switch from being left-handed to right-handed.
2. What you really like, I mean really, is always going to be some fucked up shit. If you're honest with yourself.

Anyways, I called an old type B this week, and we're meeting up next week. It's so depressing how weak I am.

This is how I feel today

2008-05-16T03:16:00.000-07:00

Why Egyptians don't do Protests (well)

2008-05-16T03:13:00.001-07:00

I think this quote explains the lethargy of the Egyptian citizen's reluctance to stand up to the corruption in their government:

"The genius of the Russian system was its appeal to people's laziness. They said, "Look, get drunk, don't do any work at all, we'll give you just enough money to live, and we'll take care of everything else." That's what Soviet Russia was all about: Live in your shitty village, we'll give you cheap vodka, and we'll take care of your medical bills, and you don't have to worry about all that other stuff. They counted on the fact that Russians would rather wallow in their own shit than organize and protest anything that's actually happening in their country. It is really kind of similar to what's going on here. People bitch and moan, but basically all they really want to do is sit in front of their televisions and watch the football game. Even people on the left who complain about Bush, when it comes right down to it, they don't really want to do anything. If they do go to protests, they go, and then they come home, and it's all over."

-Matt Taibbi, speaking to Salon.com in 2005.

Call Your Mother

2008-05-11T08:05:00.000-07:00

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The ad popped up in my e-mail the way it always has: “1-800-Flowers: Mother’s Day Madness — 30 Tulips + FREE vase for just $39.99!”

I almost clicked on it, forgetting for a moment that those services would not be needed this year. My mother, Margaret Friedman, died last month at the age of 89, and so this is my first Mother’s Day without a mom.

As columnists, we appear before you twice a week on these pages as simple bylines, but, yes, even columnists have mothers. And in my case, much of the outlook that infuses my own writings was bred into me from my mom. So, for once in 13 years, I’d like to share a little bit about her.

My mom was gripped by dementia for much of the last decade, but she never lost the generous “Minnesota nice” demeanor that characterized her in her better days. As my childhood friend Brad Lehrman said to me at her funeral: “She put the mensch in dementia.”

My mom’s life spanned an incredible period. She was born in 1918, just at the close of World War I. She grew up in the Depression, enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, served her country in World War II, bought our first house with a G.I. loan and lived long enough to play bridge on the Internet with someone in Siberia.

For most of my childhood, my mom appeared to be a typical suburban housewife of her generation, although I knew she was anything but typical. She sewed many of my sisters’ clothes, including both of their wedding dresses, and boy’s suits for me. And on the side, she won several national bridge tournaments.

My mom left two indelible marks on me. The first was to never settle for the cards you’re dealt. My dad died suddenly when I was 19. My mom worked for a couple of years. But in 1975, I got a scholarship to go to graduate school in Britain and my mom surprised us all one day by announcing that she was going, too. I called it the “Jewish Mother Junior Year Abroad Program.”

Most of her friends were shocked that she wasn’t just going to play widow. Instead, she sold our house in little St. Louis Park, Minn., and moved to London. But what was most amazing to watch was how she used her world-class bridge skills to build new friendships, including with one couple who flew her to Paris for a bridge game. Yes, our little Margie off to Paris to play bridge. She even came to see me in Beirut once, during the civil war — at age 62.

The picture of her in Beirut makes me think back in amazement at what my mom might have done had she had the money to finish college and pursue her dreams — the way she encouraged me to pursue mine, even when they meant I’d be far away in some crazy place and our only communications would be through my byline. It’s so easy to overlook — your mom had dreams, too.

My mom’s other big influence on me you can read between the lines of virtually every column — and that is a sense of optimism. She was the most uncynical person in the world. I don’t recall her ever uttering a word of cynicism. She was not naïve. She had taken her knocks. But every time life knocked her down, she got up, dusted herself off and kept on marching forward, motivated by the saying that pessimists are usually right, optimists are usually wrong, but most great changes were made by optimists.

Six years ago, I was in Israel at a dinner with the editor of the Haaretz newspaper, which publishes my column in Hebrew. I asked the editor why the newspaper ran my column, and he joked: “Tom, you’re the only optimist we have.” An Israeli general, Uzi Dayan, was seated next to me and as we walked to the table, he said: “Tom, I know why you’re an optimist. It’s because you’re short and you can only see that part of the glass that’s half full.”

Well, the truth is, I am not that short. But my mom was. And she, indeed, could only see that part of the glass that was half full. Read me, read my mom.

Whenever I’ve had the honor of giving a college graduation speech, I always try to end it with this story about the legendary University of Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant. Late in his career, after his mother had died, South Central Bell Telephone Company asked Bear Bryant to do a TV commercial. As best I can piece together, the commercial was supposed to be very simple — just a little music and Coach Bryant saying in his tough voice: “Have you called your mama today?”

On the day of the filming, though, he decided to ad-lib something. He reportedly looked into the camera and said: “Have you called your mama today? I sure wish I could call mine.” That was how the commercial ran, and it got a huge response from audiences.

So on this Mother’s Day, if you take one thing away from this column, take this: Call your mother.

I sure wish I could call mine.

You Are Not Your Bookcase

2008-05-02T02:20:00.001-07:00

Online profiles and painfully constructed "faves lists" have turned us into a bunch of unwitting snobs. Enough already.

By Megan Hustad

May 2, 2008 | A few weeks ago, a friend who grew up in Communist Eastern Europe told me he thought the "product endorsements" on social networking sites like Facebook -- those lists of each member's favorite books, bands and movies -- were paid for. You provide a plug for someone's book alongside your vital statistics? Surely you get paid, he reasoned -- this is America! He found this practice to be wonderfully efficient: In his eyes, companies had figured out a way to cut out the high-priced firms and just let people advertise to one another. It was, he thought, absolutely brilliant.

I gently explained that these plugs were entirely voluntary. But why do we spend so much time crafting such elaborate summaries of our buying habits? It gets us dates, for one. If a girl posts a halfway-decent photo and expresses a taste for George Saunders, "Lolita" and the Clash, she is guaranteed an e-mail asking her to elaborate over drinks next week. (I speak from experience.) But the prospect of trolling for dates doesn't explain the zeal with which people throw themselves into perfecting these lists, as anyone who's received an e-mail notification informing them that a faraway friend has just removed "The Flight of the Conchords" from her list of favorite TV shows can attest. We don't shill for profit; we post these lists to give people a sense of who we are. We plot points on a graph and hope it -- we -- will be interpreted correctly.

Using consumption habits as a sort of self-expression shorthand has become so ubiquitous that we don't even blink. Hi, I'm Megan, I'm from New York, and I like the Jam, Prince, Nina Simone, mid-1990s D.C. punk, "The Colbert Report," "Little House on the Prairie," Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth," "Middlemarch," "The Moviegoer," Kazuo Ishiguro, Joan Didion's essay "On Self-Respect" and Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

Too much, too soon, you say? Lately I've been thinking it's a bit too much -- period. The "I like this = I'm like this" cultural moment, as Virginia Postrel succinctly put it in "The Substance of Style," has turned us into self-handicapping snobs: Since we've taken so much care to craft our own perfect list, we feel more entitled to shrug off anyone whose list doesn't similarly impress. Would you be interested in someone who identifies with "The Secret"? We're also keeping our distance from a whole array of cultural output because we think it sends the wrong message about who we are and what we want to be.

I'll stick with books, because I care most about them. In my pretentious literary circles, the reluctance to pick up anything beyond the aesthetic boundaries of our faves lists -- which run roughly from Dostoevski to Geoff Dyer -- is especially pernicious when it comes to the self-improvement genre. No one wants to be seen in this section of the bookstore. If you even mention the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" to these people -- as I have numerous times in the last year -- it's possible to make someone visibly flinch; it's as if the person you're talking to never expected to be at the same party with someone who read such books. I have friends who've endured numerous romantic humiliations who wouldn't, on pain of death, read relationship advice. When I worked in book publishing, I never thought of reading a tome of business advice, even during moments when the rising fumes of fetid office politics brought tears to my eyes. I was above that. I was hoping the right workplace strategy would reveal itself through a particularly nuanced reading of Gogol's "Dead Souls."

Of course one could say that the pretentious and literary like their dysfunction, and so their reluctance to pick up anything that's not them, even if it might help, shouldn't worry anyone. (And you could also say that most self-help or career advice books are too facile to be of help. More on that later.) But there's also the possibility that over-identification with our preferred products weakens our political instincts.

A few years ago I attended a panel discussion at a local college organized in part to let people blow off steam in the wake of the 2002 elections. I don't remember the exact topic, but I do remember that Janeane Garofalo was there, as well as famous flat-tax crusader Grover Norquist. Whenever Norquist started speaking, hisses would emanate from the crowd, and eventually, decorum gave way and scattered hisses devolved into outright booing. But the booers were abruptly shushed by a noted leftie on the panel -- not Garofalo -- who interjected that maybe folks ought to be quiet. Maybe just listen for a second. Norquist's political acumen, the noted leftie said, was about as keen as Lenin's, and if we really wanted to put our high-minded ideals into effect, perhaps we ought to be less precious about what ideas we allowed ourselves to hear.

And perhaps reading Norquist's "Leave Us Alone" could help someone organize a push for federally subsidized childcare. But the notion that what we're reading says something about us continually trips us up. Recently my conservative father suggested I pick up "You Are the Message" by Roger Ailes. Ailes is the president of the Fox News Channel and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. I made a face and started to protest that the prospect was noxious to me. My father replied that sound advice was sound advice and perhaps I shouldn't worry so much about the source.

Was he really suggesting that the pointers in "How to Win Friends and Influence People" would be worth following if, say, Robert Mugabe had authored it? Not quite. He was saying that if I'd decided a book had nothing to offer me before I'd read a single word, then perhaps I wasn't as cosmopolitan as I liked to imagine I was. Then he started boasting about how back in the mid-'70s, he forced his white suburban Minnesota high school students to read the Black Panthers' Ten-Point Program, too.

This conversation helped to dislodge some of my reluctance to pick up a book that was not "me." I didn't buy Ailes' book, but I did read it -- cover to cover, alone in my bedroom. Because while I was emotionally and intellectually ready to receive whatever wisdom Ailes' book offered, I was not prepared to be seen anywhere in public with it.

When I started asking around, I found that quite a few people were consuming "off-message" books, but only in the privacy of their own homes. As a painfully shy and awkward teen, my friend Ben procured a copy of Larry King's "How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere," hoping it would help him get through high school's more trying moments. But he was so embarrassed to have this book -- he even worried what his parents might think -- that he kept it hidden under his bed as if it were "Barely Legal."

Once when an ex-boyfriend was in the shower, I found a copy of Harville Hendrix's classic "Keeping the Love You Find: A Guide for Singles" in his apartment. It too was under the bed. I didn't say anything about my discovery at the time because, one, I had no business looking in that drawer, and two, to out him as something other than the self-contained, emotionally robust, Harvard-educated Master of the Universe that he presented himself as struck me as more than our fragile relationship could handle. (After he dumped me, incidentally, I bought a paperback of Lama Zopa Rinpoche's "Transforming Problems Into Happiness" and stashed it on the shelf behind the collected works of Philip Roth.)

Closeted self-improvement sessions have a whiff of sadness to them. But those who undergo them are far better off than those who can't bring themselves to. Too clever for "dumb" books, they never learn that even banal prose can illuminate experience. Or, as music critic Carl Wilson writes, that "stepping deliberately outside one's own aesthetics" can be an exercise in shaking off ugly social prejudices.

You have to ask yourself, who benefits most from the "I like this = I'm like this" cultural moment? Apple? McSweeney's? Not the consumer, I imagine. That educated people are choosing not to access vast swaths of available help and information is hardly cause for glee. It would be awfully nice, instead, to read whatever you please without fear of being branded one thing or another.

I asked a journalist friend who, as he puts it, "has to read a lot of embarrassing books for work" -- most recently a coffee-table book celebrating Miller Lite ads, and yes, he took it on the subway -- how he copes. "Well, I'm so used to it now that the stares don't faze me." But he does abstain from the practice of posting his lists of favorites -- on Facebook or anyplace else. "I don't feel I'm capable of truthfulness there. There are the books I like, and the books I want people to think I like. A truthful list would probably range from Kingsley Amis to Michael Crichton. Would I post that? Would that seem too contrived (ooh, how very high-low!)? I would need a therapist to sort it out."

Or, we could just skip this fixation on product signifiers altogether. I propose a movement in another direction -- one in which we spend less time trying to fashion portraits of ourselves as curious, reflective, wide-ranging intellects, and more time … reflecting and ranging wide. Toward that end, here are a few short exercises that might help:

Go to the nearest bookstore and meander over to the self-improvement section. Stand in the aisle for 15 seconds. Leave. Proceed upstairs to the fiction and literature section. Browse. Come back downstairs to the self-improvement section and remain in that aisle for a full minute, during which time you must pick up one book and hold it long enough to read the back cover copy.

Start tossing around the word "research." If someone finds you holding an embarrassing book, you say, "Oh, I'm reading this for research." Most people will not inquire further. (I learned this when brandishing "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." For research.)

Take that book out from under the bed and put it on the bookshelf.

Type up a shadow list of products, one that really captures you. (My list, for instance, would be: ChapStick, Kleenex, $9 bottles of red wine, pumpkin walnut muffins, Mrs. Meyer's Dish Soap, and boy-short underwear from American Apparel.) Print it out. Stare at the list. Take a deep breath. Let yourself be humbled. Then toss it in the recycling bin. Step outside and take a walk.

Branding Gone Bad

2008-04-24T02:51:00.000-07:00

The UK Office of Government Commerce is:

Responsible for improving value for money by driving up standards and capability in procurement

Now, let's see, how would you improve value for money? I know! An expensive branding exercise. That'll do it.

So FHD, the prestigious London branding agency, has been brought in to devise, among other things, a new logo. And here, courtesy of The Register, it is:

When it was presented to OGC staff it didn't take long for them to look at the new brand logo (emblazoned on mouse mats and so forth) from all angles:

Apparently they are pressing ahead with it anyway. A spokesman for the OGC said (I kid you not) this:

We concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters 'OGC' - and is not inappropriate to an organisation that's looking to have a firm grip on government spend.

They Killed My Blog

2008-04-22T17:00:00.000-07:00

Because I've been cutting-and-pasting copyrighted material. Fuck 'em. I'm not going to stop.