Ephron Ain't Shakespeare

This quite excellent Leon Wieseltier critical essay can be reduced to a simple maxim: If you are disposable middlebrow pop culture pap don't compare your work to that of the greats.

It's one thing to aspire to greatness and to stand on the shoulders of giants. It's another thing to imply that your work is akin to those giants.

Released Exile

The Rolling Stones recently re-released an updated deluxe edition of "Exile on Main Street," which many people think is not only their greatest album, but the greatest album in rock history. The argument is a pretty strong one on both counts. Naturally the re-issue has inspired a significant amount of critical response. Two of my favorites have come from Jack Hamilton at The Atlantic Online and Ben Ratliff at The New York Times.

Nitpicking an Advertisement's History

There is a new ad celebrating magazines (you can see the text and accompanying picture of Michael Phelps here, though I cannot find a version that replicates the version I have seen in several magazines) and I generally like it. I love magazines, subscribe to a ridiculous amount that I cannot possibly keep up with, and believe that it is the print medium other than books that I hope weathers the storm. And one of the main points of the ad is that magazines are flourishing even as newspapers, say, are going belly up.

But one of the assertions has been grinding my gears. It is as follows:

What it proves, once again, is that a new medium doesn’t necessarily displace an existing one. Just as movies didn’t kill radio. Just as TV didn’t kill movies. An established medium can continue to flourish so long as it continues to offer a unique experience. And, as reader loyalty and growth demonstrate, magazines do.

The larger point stands. But I have a historical quibble: Why would movies have killed radio? They antedated radio. Radio did not become a mass consumer diversion until the 1920s. Movies were already a well established form of mass entertainment. Birth of a Nation, after all, was released to wide acclaim in 1915 and is known to have transformed the medium, meaning that there was already a movie industry. Yes, there was crude technology for radio as far back as the 19th century, but the first public broadcasts did not occur until right around 1920.

Am I nitpicking? Sure. But someone got paid an awful lot of money to place this ad in some of the most prestigious magazines in America. Is it really asking all that much to ask them to get facts right that are at the foundation of their argument?

On W

In case you were wondering (and I know you were not) I have zero interest in seeing this. I do not even have the energy to bury or praise Oliver Stone, though as Tootle always rightly says, historians have every right to resent Stone simply for the time we have to take to correct him. Let's just say that Stone's claims to be a "historian" are laughable.

Stone and I are on the same side of the aisle in that we will both be voting Democrat in this election, and in all of them. But you do not necessarily have to waste time on everyone on your side of the aisle. I'll simply nod in recognition and move on to more important things. (Though it does seem that no one will go to this movie who is not already convinced of its premises. And it might breed some resentment among not only the doubters, who are unlikely to vote for Obama anyway, but also from those cherished independent voters. This leads me to see a whole lot of solipsism in this movie's pre-election release date. Ultimately W seems to be as much about Oliver Stone as about its putative subject. In other words: It's a typical Oliver Stone movie!)

On Ryan Adams and Wilco

Two of my favorite music artists, Wilco and Ryan Adams (with his band the Cardinals) have released new albums in the past few weeks and are now touring. Both played in Boston in the last few days and both received nice reviews in the Boston Globe. Go buy both albums.

Here is the review of Wilco, touring behind Sky Blue Sky, and here is the Ryan Adams performance review. Adams released Easy Tiger on Tuesday and after three listens I think I am very fond indeed of the newly sober Adams, onetime bete noir of the y'alterantive scene. Adams was the front man for one of my very favorite bands of all time, Whiskeytown, and today I was thinking that his career might well trace the path of the leader, Paul Westerberg, of my favorite band of all time, The Replacements: Brilliant, volatile (Adams far more so than Westerberg) and chemically fueled singer and lead songwriter of seminal (and criminally underappreciated) band goes solo after band's breakup, eventually tempers a dissolute lifestyle, and goes on to long and successful (if criminally underappreciated) career as rock balladeer-sage. There are worse fates. Adams has entered Westerberg territory for me in another way -- if he releases it, I'm buying it right away.

Incidentally, Jeff Tweedy's career trajectory shares some similarities with that of Adams and Westerberg as well, but rather than go solo after the breakup of his epochal band, Uncle Tupelo, he helped form Wilco; his longtime partner in crime with Uncle Tupelo, Jay Farrar, formed Son Volt, also adamned good band, though not as acclaimed as Wilco. I cannot currently envision a scenario in which I would not buy a new Wilco or Son Volt album almost instantly as well.

When Comedians Attack

I have to admit it: I've never found Carlos Mencia to be all that funny. And my friend Jaime concurred after he went to see Mencia and walked out after discovering that he is not only not that funny, but he also may be a racist. Well, on top of that, apparently he is a joke thief. And now there are crazy goings on between Mencia (who apparently was born neither Mexican nor "Carlos Mencia") and Joe Rogan, who throws down hard over at his blog.

The joke theft aspect is to me the worst part, and Rogan does a pretty good job of explaining why. As a writer I fully understand his sentiments -- it is hard to imagine what it would feel like to be the victim of plagiarism, and as he points out, Mencia has a reputation for stealing from people who have not yet achieved enough fame or pull to protect themselves, which would be like being a junior faculty member and having a Bancroft Prize winner co-opt some of your work.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Defending the Big Box

In December's Atlantic Monthly Virginia Postrel has an absolutely brilliant argument "In Praise of Chain Stores." I have tried to find one perfect representative paragraph that sums up her argument and makes it more enticing for you to read, but it seems as if every paragraph is better than the last. If forced to choose one to give you a flavor of her argument, I would choose the following:

Stores don’t give places their character. Terrain and weather and culture do. Familiar retailers may take some of the discovery out of travel—to the consternation of journalists looking for obvious local color—but by holding some of the commercial background constant, chains make it easier to discern the real differences that define a place: the way, for instance, that people in Chandler come out to enjoy the summer twilight, when the sky glows purple and the dry air cools.

Now I do not find chain stores to provide an unmitigated benefit, but I somewhat tire of arguments hearkening to a romantic era of bustling downtowns in which Mom and Pop served the greater good with their wholly unique, homegrown stores. In a rather astringent critique of an article on Starbucks and music a little while back, I argued as much in reference to Starbucks' alleged nefariousness:

This is a clever conceit, albeit not the most original one -- we are seeing the Wal Marticization of coffee shops, a sort of Starbucksification of the country (and some might say the world, though apparently having not left New York, Hajdu might not know that one can find Starbucks in Hong Kong and England and many points in between). And no one can doubt that Starbucks has done a hell of a job of becoming ubiquitous in American cities. Though one also has to wonder about the peculiar jolt in coffee consumption that has arisen concomitant with the rise of Starbucks. Has Starbucks in fact fueled demand? And many of us live nowhere near New York. In fact, for all of New York's size, most of us don't live there, and so the question becomes, has Starbucks replaced little Mom and Pop coffee shops all over the country, or has it merely brought coffee shops to places where, in the Starbucks cafe format, they simply never existed? I cannot help but wonder if Starbucks has not in many places created demand rather than destroy a subculture. Not that Hajdu asks such questions -- such curiousity would not much help his burgeoning thesis.

The reality is that for the vast number of Americans in flyover country, and outside of a select number of metropolitan areas that might produce a (romanticized and overstated?) sui generis homegrown culture, such as New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, many of these box stores have increased access to goods and products by a thousandfold. More Americans can access more books, cd's, and electronic goods than ever before. And not just mainstream fare. If you want a book, and it is in print, or if you have heard of an obscure band and want their cd, the odds are better than good that Barnes & Noble or Best Buy will have them or, if you don't want to do the internet shoping on your own, they can make sure you get what you want. I love Postrel's argument that "stores don't give places their character." It is an important argument from a wonderful and thought provoking piece.

Now if you'll excuse me, the fiancee and I are going to deal with wedding registration at Target (bourgies though we are, we find it nice that we can register at a place that is both affordable and accessible for the proles) and I think I might be in the mood for a caramel macchiato. Gauche, I know, but we rubes gotta get by too.

Boston Terrorized By Cartoons?

We live in a weird world. Yesterday Boston was thrown into tumult by a cartoon ad campaign gone awry. Basically, the cartoon network tried to advertise some of its Adult Swim fare all over the city yesterday, and the effects that were used were bizarre to the point of scaring some people into believing it was some sort of terrorist plot. Globalization being what it is, I first read about the story through a story from a South African news service. But today's Boston Globe not only had an extensive story, it also provided an analysis of how this incident exposed a generation gap in the US and also an editorial about how the city was "paralyzed by a gimmick."

My initial response is simply to pass this off as one of those stories -- a confluence of poor execution, clashing cultures, and all that. But another reality is how we are all so much more attuned, if only selectively so, to terrorism. If a plane goes down our first thougth will be of 9/11. Odd bleeps and bloops emanating from a pecuilar cartoon character in an unexpected place? Terrorism. This makes a certain amount of sense. But when the story turns out to be far more benign, it makes me wonder if we have not created for ourselves a noise-to-signal ratio that only complicates things. And of course the politicization of terror has both cheapened and oversensitized us to the point of an almost universal societal confusion over what terrorism is and as importantly, what it is not.