In Defense of Food

This is one of those books that potentially changes your life, by eloquently pointing out what's wrong with the status quo. Michael Pollan writes clearly and persuasively about the pitfalls--not just of how America eats, but of how we think about eating. He debunks nutritionism as a science by pointing out how the whole nutritionist paradigm (focusing on the consumption of individual nutrients rather than whole foods) benefits food processors.

While traditional nutritionists and other scientists have traced our high incidence of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other diseases to high-fat diets, or high-carb diets, Pollan looks at the big picture and points out that the most striking difference between the modern American diet and traditional diets is the modern prevalence of processed foods--foods that have been engineered to ship and store well, be palatable, and contain the nutrients we need. Pollan suggests that we just don't know enough about how whole foods work in our bodies to reproduce their full benefits in processed foods. He characterizes whole foods as systems--nutrients in whole foods may work together to provide important benefits that are otherwise unavailable.

Pollan's arguments are convincing, and are leading me to reevaluate my consumption of white bread and white rice. I still love these foods, but I'm thinking I should consider them treats--like cake--rather than as staples. I should keep brown rice in the pantry, and make sandwiches with whole-grain bread.

But then I think about the beautiful bread we had in Paris, which was white, and Pollan often points to the French as healthier than we are, so I think maybe a little (or more than a little) white bread really isn't so bad. I'm much pickier about whole-grain bread than white--I guess it's a matter of what I'm used to.

The book made me feel a little proud and self-satisfied that Victor and I have already been eating at home and cooking for ourselves so much more in the past few months. And I have already been trying to vary the vegetables and fruits in our diet; going to ethnic grocery stores in different neighborhoods exposes us to an impressive range of foods. But eating well is an ongoing process. Sometimes we get stuck in ruts and it is tempting fall back on what's easy. We're very good at making excuses for not doing what we should (see my rationale for continuing to eat white bread, above).

I like Pollan's notion that food preparation and consumption should take more time and even cost more--it's that important.

Clever Maids

I have had a hard time finishing books lately. I finally set aside Miss Leavitt's Stars, about how we learned to determine the distances between the stars and between the earth and the stars. It was interesting, but I have a kind of blind spot or handicap when it comes to the details of physics. (I love the big concepts, though.) A sort of mental fog keeps me from comprehending basic mechanics. Ah well.

I have also been rereading Ward Just's 21 Stories, which is a mass-market paperback, and so fits nicely in my purse. And the stories are really excellent. But they seem to get rather more depressing as the book proceeds, so I have been correspondingly less inclined to take it out of my purse.

With Clever Maids, I've finally finished something. It's a decent read, about the female sources of the fairy tales we're accustomed to attributing to the Brothers Grimm, and has some biographical interest. But the author seems to have an axe to grind, which can get annoying. She keeps noting that the Grimms never thanked their female sources by name in their publications. Surely it would've been nice if they had, but I wonder if such public acknowledgment was really the custom in the early 1800s. The Grimms were folklorists--they never claimed to be the tales' original authors.

Still, nice to know a bit more about the Grimms and their process for collecting and setting down stories. The book is less interesting for its analysis of the tales, which is (to say say the least) not subtle. For fairy tale analysis, I prefer Maria Tatar's Off With Their Heads.

Painting Class

Taking an art class as an adult feels funny. It's like kindergarten all over again: you wear a smock, make messes, cover your hands and forearms with multicolored streaks. It brings back memories: how it always seemed impossible to get the paintbrush clean just by swirling it in a cup of water.

Now I do manage to get the brush clean, but I remain pretty inept at things like circles and straight lines.

Today's class was about colors--we mixed primary colors with each other in different percentages to make a color triangle and mixed primary colors with complementary colors in different percentages to make earthier tones. Cool! But I definitely felt kindergartenish--using my finger would have worked better and been a lot more satisfying than mixing globs of paint on my palette with a knife.

Chinese Broccoli

Last week I visited two different Asian markets for the first time: Tai Nam, which is in a shopping center on N Broadway just south of Argyle, and Golden Pacific, which is about three blocks north of Argyle on N Broadway. Part of the reason I wanted to check out these markets is I had read that they offer Japanese products, and for some time I have been looking for this dressing, which we used to get from our local Japanese market when we lived in Columbus. I have had a hard time finding it here, except at Mitsuwa, but since we don't have a car, we don't get out to Arlington Heights very often.

Anyhow, while I didn't find this dressing, I did find all sorts of other fun stuff, including pan-fried noodles, fried onions and fried garlic (makes a tasty garnish for stir-fries and salads), miso soup mix, pomelos, and chinese broccoli.

I didn't know for sure it was chinese broccoli until I looked it up; in Tai Nam there was such a tremendous array of unknown (to me) green vegetables that I just picked a bunch and hoped it would be good. It was. Strong-flavored when raw, but cooked with a sweet chili sauce and served over those pan-fried noodles, chinese broccoli tastes just delicious.

Hunting around the ethnic neighborhoods and markets around the city for groceries makes eating at home a terrific adventure. And cheap!

April Showers, Chicago Style

It's been a pretty cold, wet spring, and everybody's complaining about it. I don't know how many times I've heard people say that Chicago doesn't have a spring; just (beautiful) fall, (brutal) winter, and (beatific) summer.

It isn't true. Chicago absolutely does have a spring, but those of us who've lived in warmer climes just expect it to start sooner and be milder. Since March began, we've rarely had snow (and snow sometimes in spring is only to be expected--think of Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow) and temperatures have rarely--if ever--descended into the 20s. Crocuses and daffodils started to appear in March; migratory birds have been passing through since late February.

The tremendously rainy, chilly April has demoralized everyone, but rain in April is hardly out of place.

(Don't make me repeat that old rhyme.)

I'm no particular fan of freezing or searing temperatures, but I really enjoy having four seasons. There are so many ways we lose touch with the outdoors; changes in weather remind us that we are subject to something beyond our own little plans. In winter, I make a point of watching for wintering ducks, and tracking how the harbor freezes and thaws. We stay home a lot more, but our lives are usually so outward-focused that it feels kind of like vacation. We rent a lot more DVDs and cook heartier meals.

In spite of the damp chill of the current spring, I've been delighted with the new flowers, the trees just beginning to bud and leaf out, the determined (and euphoric) singing of birds, and spotting species I haven't seen since before winter began. In the harbor, on the lake, and in nearby ponds I've noticed ducks and geese pairing up. In the parks, red-winged blackbirds have been extremely vocal about their territories.

So what if it's been cloudy and gray?

The sun will return in good time.

Rereading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler

This was one of my favorite books when I was a kid growing up in New York City. E.L. Konigsburg tells the story of two suburban children who run away from home; their chosen refuge is the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As a child I took arts and crafts classes on Saturdays at the Met, and I judged it the most beautiful place in the world. The idea of living there just completely enchanted me. A home to get lost in! (As opposed to the snug 2-BR, 1-BA apartment I shared with my parents and older brother.) I still have a fondness for sprawling residences, with counterintuitive floorplans, expanses that seem to go on forever, and/or limited sightlines, so you can't quite tell where the next turn will take you.

So the book was a treasure to me when I first found it, and when I recently saw it still in print, I decided to get two copies: one for my niece in Washington Heights, and one for me.

Rereading it was more about remembering pleasure than experiencing it fresh. Of course I noticed the many discrepancies: the Met is no longer free (even when I first read the book, there was a suggested donation, as there is today), the restaurant has moved, and I believe security has been much enhanced. There is no Automat nearby (I'm not sure there was even when I was going there, in the mid-70s) and prices have increased significantly, for everything from bus rides to meals.

But the yearnings, enthusiasms, and achievements described still feel true, and I imagine my niece will have as good a time with it as I did.

Ravenswood

Since moving to Chicago, we have heard about this neighborhood, without a clear understanding of where it is, or what's so great about it. After a recent trip there, we feel very much enlightened. In the area of its commuter rail station, Ravenswood is characterized by repurposed warehouses containing artist studios, galleries, furniture retailers and wholesalers, design firms, and other businesses. Walking through the neighborhood, you feel like you're in a creative mecca. There's even a community art center, and a pizza place that's considered one of the best in the city.

One of those places that makes you feel lucky to live in Chicago.

Architectural Artifacts

Victor and I had the opportunity to check this store out a couple of weeks ago and found a multi-story warehouse full of salvaged furniture, fixtures, and architectural remnants.

At Architectural Artifacts, you can purchase stained glass windows, dental cabinets, ice cream parlor benches, and opera house chandeliers. There is an abundance of hundred-year-old foosball tables, a smattering of stone statues (religious as well as secular), towers of old tiles. It's like a wonderfully eclectic museum, but you're permitted to touch.

We visited on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and found browsing there a perfect rainy-day activity. We look forward to bringing out-of-town guests there; somehow, though it's tucked away in Ravenswood, the store exudes a wonderfully urban atmosphere and energy--sophisticated, quirky, and downright strange.

American Violet

We got a free pass to see this movie a couple of weeks ago, based on a true story of a young Texas mother falsely arrested on drug charges. She is offered a plea bargain and is under a lot of pressure to take it (if she accepts the plea bargain, she gets to go home; otherwise, she has to stay in prison, and she's terrified that the estranged father of two of her girls will get custody of them). Her mother thinks she ought to take it, and her court-appointed attorney practically insists she take it. But she refuses, since she knows she's done nothing wrong.

The ACLU gets involved, and she agrees to be the lead plaintiff in a case brought against her county DA.

This movie is nothing fancy. It is a straightforward tale of a struggle against injustice, with excellent performances (including a terrific star turn by Nicole Beharie) and truly inspiring moments.

It is one of those movies that makes you feel things might turn out OK after all.

The Queen

I think Stephen Frears may have made a movie or two that I didn't like, but not more than a couple. For me, he's one of the most reliable directors for movies that are emotionally involving as well as intellectually interesting. This movie addresses the crisis caused by the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the role that Tony Blair, the new British Prime Minister played in restoring relations between the British people and their queen.

Plus, it has corgis in it.

Excellent performances, particularly by Helen Mirren, who manages to dull her natural beauty while pumping up her natural queenliness--the result is a tremendously convincing impersonation of Elizabeth.

Plus, it has corgis.

Beautiful Young Things

This 2003 movie, written and directed by Stephen Fry is hard to get a handle on. You find yourself watching a lot of superficial young, rich, people cavort about(even those that aren't rich act like they're rich, so the effect is the same), and wondering why you should care.

I'm still not sure, but to my surprise, images and emotions from the movie lingered for a day or two.

More powerful than it seems.

The Professional

Does anyone not like Jean Reno? We first saw this movie years ago and I was delighted to see the DVD for sale recently for less than ten dollars (our threshold for movie purchases). We watched it last night for the first time in years, and were glad to find that it lived up to our memories--a really excellent, exciting, emotionally involving movie, with terrific performances from Reno, 12-year-old Natalie Portman, and Gary Oldman (who is particularly scary and weird).

My Kid Could Paint That

Very interesting documentary about Marla Olmstead, who stunned the art world when she was four with an exhibition of startlingly accomplished abstract paintings. The documentary starts by focusing on Marla's family environment,the impact of fame, money, questions of what is art and what makes art valuable, and so on, and then, with the advent of a 60 Minutes segment that calls into question whether the paintings are indeed Marla's, the film maker begins to explore his own doubts.

Marla's paintings, shown in the film and also here, are really quite beautiful. They are also remarkably diverse. Marla's father is suggested to be the "real" painter of these works, via coaching, but a couple of his paintings appear in the film, and, frankly, they stink. And I just don't see how these paintings could be produced by coaching.

In our home, we have two paintings done by elephants, which we picked up in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at an elephant camp where we watched elephants paint. They really do paint--trained from an early age, they work hand-in-trunk with a mahout, who provides brushes dipped in color. We explain to our amazed friends that each elephant is trained to paint a certain kind of picture: some paint flowers or trees, others abstractions of various types. No one suggests that an elephant sees a tree, gets inspired, and paints it. It's a learned activity, the result of which can be quite beautiful.

Those elephant paintings are coached, and it's easy to see how that's done. They are relatively simple, examples of particular motifs and techniques.

Marla's paintings are something else. They are complex and composed. Someone painted them.

The owner of the Binghamton, New York, gallery that first introduced Marla's work to the art world is perhaps a more likely suspect than Marla's father--a skilled hyper-realist painter, old friend of Marla's father, with quite a store of resentment against abstract art, where most of the big art money goes. But to believe that someone else might have painted these works requires not only that you believe that an elaborate hoax has been perpetrated for more than six years (and counting, as Marla is still painting); in addition, it ignores the fact that these paintings are really quite good.

If someone could paint that well, why wouldn't he do so using his own name?

One thing I would like to see is Marla's more recent work. Her website seems to focus on early work (I recognize pieces I saw in the movie). I am wondering how her paintings have changed. Have they become more ordinary? (I wonder this because I don't see recent ones on the site.)

Good, provocative documentary. Puzzling mystery. Lovely artwork, whoever made it.

Trader Joe's Love

Products I love:
Triple Ginger Snaps
Beef tamales
Dried California apricots

Products I miss:
Black pepper roasted cashews
Kiss My Face pear soap

Jezebel

Just when you get to thinking all old movies are great, a movie like this comes along and disabuses you of the notion. Flimsy premise, unsympathetic heroine, altogether unconvincing.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Not funny. Stupid, rather.

Couldn't get through it, in spite of music by Sondheim (I understand a lot of the original songs were cut).

Harry N Abrams Art Books

I was in the Jacksonville Public Library yesterday browsing through the art section, and came across one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen: Collage, by Herta Wescher. This oversized 1971 volume is a translation from the German of an exhaustive history of art through the prism of collage. It contains beautiful plates, but before we even consider the pictures, one is struck by the quality of the paper, the binding, and the printing. Just beautiful. The layout features wide margins in which the author places notes, references, and even small illustrations--right next to the relevant text.

I think Abrams is famous for tipped-in pictures, or perhaps was--I have an Abrams book of Van Gogh pictures that I bought more than 20 years ago; the first time I had ever seen tipped-in pictures. The reproductions are of a really gorgeous quality, and even the black and white plates (which are bound in) look stunning.

After browsing through the Collage book for a while, I found an Abrams book on expressionism and a similar book called Master Watercolors of the Twentieth Century. Beautiful color plates, absolutely, but rather than being tipped-in, they are slipped-in, into mats, with two extra mats provided in a pocket just inside the back cover so that you can study the pictures "at your leisure."

If anybody is still making books like this, I want to know about it.

I look forward to spending more time at the library.

Can We Talk (about Credibility)?

The HuffPost headline says "McCain's Revenge" and the media is lapping up the losing 2008 presidential candidate's excoriation of the stimulus bill, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and President Obama's ethics.

Let's take these one at a time. McCain says the stimulus "really is a bad bill." Does he present any alternative?

Sure: the Republicans have consistently pushed for more tax cuts for wealthy Americans and corporations, as well as less government regulation, which is exactly the set of policies that that landed us in the mess we're in. Apart from McCain's much-publicized admission that he's relatively ignorant of economic issues and would be relying on advisors who have since been largely discredited, what has he done to establish any credibility in this area?

He smears Timothy Geithner by blaming him for the mismanagement of the first TARP installment because he was a "key advisor"--maybe he's forgotten that the people in charge of the TARP were Bush appointees?

And then he questions the President's commitment to his own ethics standards by pointing to nominees who have been withdrawn. This from a guy whose closest advisors were lobbyists for industries that have been instrumental in causing our economic problems.

I am sick of seeing Republicans in the media. They have brought us war-by-choice, torture-as-SOP, and civil rights-as-luxury, flushed our economy down the toilet, and continually stonewalled efforts to protect the planet and limit climate change. Their ideas have held sway for a solid 8 years (and I think a case could be made that they held sway for 28) and have left us in a place substantially worse than we were before they took over.

This is not a partisan observation. We are less healthy, less educated, less wealthy, less respected in the world--you name the area; we are almost certainly worse off.

And now we have a president who has been elected to lead us to a better future, and all the Republicans can do is call names.

I guess that's all they could ever do, since their ideas are bankrupt. Well, I hope they have fun getting advice from Joe the Plumber. He'll surely keep their ideas in the mainstream.

Oh. Most Americans don't hate Social Security? Well, doubtless if Joe knows best, along with Mr. "The fundamentals of our economy are sound."

The Intuitionist

I have been trying to decide whether I have read an odder good novel. That is, I have read plenty of novels that were odd, but not worth a damn. This novel is both odd and really quite splendid. Author Colson Whitehead conjures an alternate universe in which elevator inspectors and engineers matter enormously. It is also an alternate universe in which the civil rights movement never happened; blacks are largely excluded from society's mainstream.

Whitehead writes with so much grace that you absolutely believe in his universe, and so much authority that you don't question why or how the universe got that way.

His heroine, the city's first black female elevator inspector, is an Intuitionist (there are two schools of inspection: empiricism and intuitionism); although Intuitionist methods are poorly understood and mistrusted by many, she has the highest accuracy rate in the department. The novel turns, however, on an incident that seems to point to her first failure; she sets herself to solving the mystery of how she could have been mistaken. In the process, she bumps up against political intrigues between Empiricists and Intuitionists who are battling for control of the elevator inspection guild, competing elevator manufacturing companies, and the mysterious background of the founder of Intuitionism.

The book succeeds in making you feel there is something profound about elevators, which is quite an accomplishment; from a philosophical point of view, Whitehead is less convincing: he challenges the practice of drawing conclusions from visible (or surface) evidence in favor of a mystical intuition. Since such talents don't reliably exist outside the fictive world, we can't really buy the notion that empiricism is not just wrong but racist; that is, we can buy it in a limited way (within the world of the novel)--we just can't take it with us.

Quite an extraordinary book, and beautifully done.

Technology and Me

Recently, someone said to me, "When I was in grad school, there was no Internet, that's how old I am." Well, when I was in grad school, the Internet existed, but it didn't do very much. "I had to type my dissertation on special paper." I printed my thesis out using a dot-matrix printer.

In 1981, I was 16 years old, and still writing term papers out by hand. Even at Queens College, most of my instructors allowed assignments to be handwritten. When I started working for temp agencies that year, I was limited to straight receptionist and filing jobs because I was utterly hopeless with a typewriter. After a few years at SUNY-Binghamton, though, I became pretty proficient with my Smith-Corona--so much so that I periodically had to take it into a repair shop to get key covers replaced--(I was more of a POUND typist than a TOUCH typist--still am).

I remember browsing Macy's while I was in college. Apple computers were on display, selling for around $2,000, maybe even more. They looked so cute! Those little screens. That scary ESCAPE key (there were signs, as I recall, that said "PLEASE DON'T PRESS ESCAPE!") Totally out of my range, but I liked daydreaming about them. Instead of a computer, for graduating college I got an electronic typewriter with a 3K memory. If I remember right, it was about $500. I thought it was fabulous. I'd type into the memory (watching my words scroll across the 2-inch LCD screen) and then load a piece of paper, press a key, and watch the typewriter bang out the page.

Magic!

In 1986, I bought my first PC for $800. It was an XT-compatible custom-built by a professor and contained two 5.25" floppy drives and no hard drive. When you wanted to use your computer, you put a DOS boot disk in the top floppy drive (A:) and waited for about 10 minutes for the system to be ready. Then you took out the boot disk and put in a disk containing a software program--say, IBM Writing Assistant, which let you create documents. You would type a command to start the software (say, write). Then you would type your document. When you wanted to save it, you would put a formatted data disk in the bottom floppy drive (B:). Saving your file would take about a minute, and the computer would make grinding noises.

A few years later, I realized I needed a hard drive. I sent away for one from an electronics store in Brooklyn and installed it myself. I thought I remembered that hard drive was 20 MB, but as I research what that would have cost in 1989, I realize that I could never have afforded so much storage. Maybe 10? Whatever the case, it was fabulous not needing to put a disk in the drive to boot up, and I remember thinking there was no way I'd ever need more.

Ha.

At work, I went from a typewriter to a Wang word processor, which was connected to a letter-quality printer that actually typed out the documents. There was no email. I typed out memos on the word processor, printed them out, and delivered them by hand or put them in envelopes and sent them by mail. By 1991, my business unit had a single IBM 286, loaded with Microsoft Windows, which we all shared.

Then we moved to Seattle to go back to school, and used our student loans to replace my old PC-XT with a 386. It seemed so slick! The top floppy drive (A:) was for a 3.5" disk; the bottom was for a 5.25" disk. It came with a modem that promised fast connections and we used it to access the Internet, such as it was in the early 1990s. Text and UNIX-based, more interesting for the fact that it existed at all than for what you could actually do with it.

It was in Seattle that I bought my first laptop. It was reconditioned, so I was able to get it for less than $1000, which I considered a coup. I loved the novelty of it. I could write at the local cafe.

It was also in Seattle that my conversion from (text-based) WordPerfect to (GUI-based) Word happened. In a Microsoft town, there was really no other possible outcome. I still missed the "old" WordPerfect for a long time, though--the WordPerfect for Windows never caught on with me.

The World Wide Web was starting to make the Internet more interesting. But at the company where I worked (1993-1995), technology managers doubted the utility of providing employees with access to the Internet. They also doubted the benefit of the company investing in its own website.

They have a pretty slick site now, though.

Since leaving school, we have changed computers every few years. Each time we get a new one, it seems improbable that we should ever need more (speed, storage, functionality), but software continues to increase in complexity as the dual costs of storage and memory continue to diminish. Our entire music collection (more than 500 CDs) is on a hard drive now, and I look forward to the day that we'll be able to store our DVD library on disk, too.

From a world in which a two-hour download of the text of a single newspaper was considered a marvel, to a world in which such access is nearly instantaneous, and in which I can ask my computer virtually any question and get a pertinent answer, in fewer than 30 years.

I can't even remember how I did some things before I did them electronically. I guess before there were online options, I used to look up airlines in the phonebook and how much it would cost for a ticket or go visit a travel agent. And we would mail away to government tourist bureaus to get information on what to do in faraway places (like Nova Scotia, where we took a vacation in 1999). Of course, before Mapquest, we had maps.

Made out of paper. Really.

For big trips, we would call up the Automobile Association of America and ask for a Triptik to be drawn up.

And when we wanted to buy things, we had to go to stores. In person. Every time.

Crazy, huh?

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology

This odd little book by Lawrence Wechsler celebrates the odd little Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) in Los Angeles. Really, the book celebrates wonder itself.

I have not been to the MJT, but this book has certainly put it on the itinerary of my next trip to LA. Presenting itself as a natural history museum, the MJT features meticulously detailed exhibits that may or may not pertain to "real" phenomena. The pronged ant of the title, for example, may be unknown to science under the name Megolaponera Foetens but, as Wechsler discovers, its odd life history is perfectly plausible: a large ant, and the only one that produces a cry audible to humans, normally forages on the forest floor; however, after ingesting the spore of a fungus, it climbs upward and then waits to die as the fungus consumes its body from the inside, finally generating a spike about an inch long from the place where the ant's head was, which distributes spores downward, to be breathed by other Megolaponera Foetens.

The book (and, presumably, the MJT) makes you think about the purpose of museums, and whether the relative "truth" of things that astonish you matters.

(Since reality routinely outdoes what we can imagine, why quibble?)

As Robert Louis Stevenson has pointed out:

The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings

A Dangerous Friend

There are not many writers as good as Ward Just. I can think of just a few--the others are Robert Stone and Graham Greene--who manage to write persuasively and compellingly about politics and war without feeling like a newspaper or like pulp. But where Stone and Greene mainly focus on outsiders of one kind or another, Just writes from the perspective of ostensible insiders; in this case, a true believer who comes to realize the flimsiness of the vision in which he put his faith.

A Dangerous Friend takes place early in our Vietnam adventure. It shares with The Quiet American a view of American preoccupations and methods as dangerously naive and tragically ignorant. In a way it is a small story, dealing with a single awful event in a war sadly full of even worse atrocities, but the reader can't help but feel its reverberations--it becomes a prism for looking back at the entire conflict and particularly our role in it.

Beautifully done, although once I started I was anxious to be finished--I kept telling people, "It's good, but it's not timely." At the beginning of a new administration in which I place a great deal of hope, it's hard to read about so much failure.

Memory Mambo

This novel by Achy Objeas tells the story of a young Cuban-American lesbian on Chicago's west side. It's a decent read, but it's the kind of book that promises revelations that don't arrive--ultimately not entirely convincing.

Today's GOP: Stagnation You Can Believe In

Republican legislators are delaying the confirmation of Eric Holder as Attorney General because they are worried that he will prosecute U.S. agents for torture.

(They have expressed no particular concern about U.S. agents engaging in torture.)

Other legislators are delaying the confirmation of environmental nominees Lisa Jackson and Nancy Sutley reportedly as part of a strategy to derail the appointment of Carol Browner to the newly created Climate/Energy czar cabinet position and delay/weaken action against global warming.

Now, I hear they're objecting to Obama's new ethics rules.

Does the GOP think this is the way to win elections? As the pro-torture, anti-environment, anti-ethics party?

Good luck with that, GOP.

Obama's Inauguration Speech

Graphically.

What I Loved

Visiting friends recently recommended this novel by Siri Hustvedt. I started reading it before I was done with the Houdini book and stayed up till three in the morning the other night to finish it.

So that tells you something about how much I liked it.

I never read anything by Siri Hustvedt before, but this novel makes me want to read more. Contemporary fiction is not often so learned. Richard Powers is the only other author I can think of right now who manages to convey such fierce intelligence and rapacious curiosity and knowledge about the world in invented characters.

The invented characters in this novel include an artist, a professor of art history, a Henry James scholar, and a sort of cultural critic. The novel contains friendships, love stories, joys, griefs, sane people, crazy people, and even a murder.

What makes a novel great?

I am not sure, but I know that this is a great novel.

Revolutionary Road

We went to see this movie last weekend. I had read mixed reviews, and knew it was likely to be very sad, so it was not on the top of my list for a long time, but last week I re-saw Road to Perdition on DVD, which reminded me that I love Sam Mendes' movies, regardless of how sad they are, and finally at the ticket counter I asked the girl "we're trying to decide between Revolutionary Road and Slumdog Millionaire. What's your vote?" And she said "I'm a big fan of Revolutionary Road." Which surprised but delighted me, and that was that.

In the event, it was fully as good as I hoped and expected. Every scene was beautiful. About halfway through I had to pee, but I waited because I didn't want to miss a moment. Kate Winslet was astonishing. Her face is a wonder--you can read it like a book. Leonardo DiCaprio was fine, but he looked about 12. I didn't understand why they didn't do a better job of aging him. He doesn't always look like such a kid in movies.

Terribly sad, of course, but good-sad, not pointless-sad.

The Way We Were

I'm a sucker for sentimental tearjerkers, so I recently seized the opportunity to buy this on DVD for cheap. Watching it last night, for the first time in years, I was surprised to find that it wasn't as sad as I remembered.

Or else I don't cry as easily.

The movie, which stars Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, and is directed by Sydney Pollack, is a love story between Katie, a Jewish girl (Katie) with a social conscience, and Hubbell, a goy prince with (apparently) none. They meet in college, where he is a celebrated jock with surprising depths, demonstrated in the short-story class they take together. Katie wants desperately to be a writer, but apparently lacks the talent. Instead, she pals around with communists and tries to organize the student body against Franco.

They don't get together in college--Hubbell is paired with the prettiest girl you can imagine (Lois Chiles)--but there are a few moments that spark a mutual attraction. They meet years later and begin an exciting affair, which is periodically troubled by Katie's concern about Hubbell's lack of seriousness (particularly as evidenced by the shallowness of his friends) and Hubbell's concern about Katie's inability to let well enough alone. Hubbell tries leaving Katie, but she won't let him go. They get married, go to Hollywood (Hubbell's now a screenwriter), and are on the cusp of having a child together when crusades against reds in Hollywood begin, and Katie of course entangles herself in political battles. Meanwhile, Hubbell is under tremendous pressure at the studio to be more of a team player, while Katie has been encouraging him to move to Paris with her and finish his second novel. Finally, they split up.

Years later, they meet by chance in New York. They're involved with other people now. Clearly, they haven't been in touch, and Hubbell hasn't seen his child. Just as clearly, they're as attracted to each other as ever. They wish each other well and go on with their separate lives.

Anyhow, very enjoyable movie--Sydney Pollack's work is pretty consistently entertaining and you can hardly go wrong with the young Streisand and Redford. The emotional sincerity of the movie somehow overcomes the cloyingness of the theme music, which has of course been done to death in the past 30-plus years.

Among the extras on the DVD is a fairly substantial "making of" documentary, featuring interviews with writer Arthur Laurents, director Sydney Pollack, and star Barbra Streisand. The documentary features deleted scenes that apparently Streisand and Laurents still blame Pollack for cutting. The scenes have a lot of political content. Pollack notes that one preview (with the political scenes) was a dud, the other (without the scenes) was a hit.

Both Streisand and Laurents talked about how you can't possibly understand why the two characters split up without those scenes. Streisand says the viewer ends up thinking it's because of Hubbell's one-night stand with an old girlfriend; Laurents says the climax is missing from the movie and the viewers are just too dumb to notice.

What the star and writer don't seem to notice is that the movie traces a classic story of lovers who are strongly attracted but ultimately incompatible. Streisand seems to think they parted because if they had stayed together, Katie's political past would have destroyed Hubbell's Hollywood career. Laurents thinks two scenes that made this explicit were the missing crux of the movie.

On the contrary, these scenes would've made the movie trivial, because, finally, politics is trivial, at least in the world of movie romance. If it was just politics, why not get back together when the politics had changed? But at the end, when the politics had changed, Hubbell says to Katie, "I can't. I can't come for a drink," and Katie nods and understands, and they hug, and that's that.

We talk about opposites attracting, and the glib assumption is that opposites, once attracted, can also live together. But it is not easy to make the adjustments necessary to accommodate a person who is very different from you. This reality underlies The Way We Were and makes it poignant. That's why the plot details don't matter, and the "missing" scenes don't feel missing at all.

The Secret Life of Houdini

I have been carrying this heavy book around for weeks, through a holiday trip to Germany and on bus rides downtown. It's rather slow going, but the other night I finally finished it. An interesting account of the life of a household name who seems too iconic to be real. The biography succeeds on evoking a real person, with real passions and real flaws, but it doesn't really succeed in making Houdini seem like a whole person. We feel we are getting the results of thorough research; the synthesis of that research is less satisfying.

For example, a scene is recreated between Houdini and a woman not his wife. The scene carries clear implications of an affair. Following this construction, with its implications, the authors note, "we will never know..." if the affair occurred. There are a lot of similar instances, where research points to possibilities the authors highlight but won't completely commit to. The result is a biography where you feel you're repeatedly led down the garden path and then left to make your way back to the standard narrative on your own.

Ultimately, it leaves you wondering about the point of the biography. Ostensibly, it contains revelations about Houdini's romantic entanglements, his relations with the U.S. Secret Service and spy and police organizations throughout the world, and about the orchestration of his unexpected death by key members of the Spiritualist movement (folks who use seances to consult with spirits) who he had spent many years trying to expose. But the revelations are all--or mostly--heavily qualified, which tends to detract from their value.

In the end, the book is of great interest for people already curious about Houdini--it certainly contains a wealth of detail. But I doubt it will hold other readers.

Milwaukee Treat

For Victor's birthday, we took a train up to Milwaukee, and visited the Milwaukee Museum of Art. We were so delighted with the place, and so sure we'd return, that we bought a membership.

Aside from the gorgeous building, MAM has a very impressive and eclectic collection, spanning decorative arts, ancient artifacts, and classical, modern, and contemporary works. Recommending we visit, our friends particularly praised the soon-to-close Act/React installation and the ongoing Sensory Overload exhibit, which also features relatively recent work. Both of these exhibits were interesting and impressive, but we found ourselves struck by the strength of the MAM's permanent collection as well as less flashy exhibits such as the naturalist art of Mark Catesby and his influence on subsequent artists including Audubon, and a small selection of the work of JoAnna Poehlmann, which I found tremendously charming. Eager to see more work by this artist.

Hooded Merganser in Belmont Harbor

Out walking yesterday afternoon (beautiful, sunny, cold day), I saw some black and white ducks in the distance. Wasn't sure what I was looking at. Scaups? Buffleheads? Goldeneyes?

My vision isn't what it was.

Sat on a handy bench, and after several minutes my patience was rewarded. That telltale white crest behind the eye. At least one of the ducks was a hooded merganser.

Wintering ducks are a terrific compensation for the brutality of this season in Chicago.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

This movie is both funny and dirty, as you would expect; it is also sweet, as you might not. Enjoyable, but by the end doesn't hang together all that well. Kevin Smith copying Judd Apatow copying Kevin Smith--something gets lost in translation.

Still, it's entertaining enough.

Mata Ortiz Ceramics @ the Field Museum

A couple of years ago, the Art Institute of Chicago presented a fantastic exhibit of Casas Grandes pottery--beautiful stuff from more than 500 years ago, unearthed in Northern Mexico.

Until the end of next week, the Field Museum is hosting a small show of Mata Ortiz ceramics--a newer pottery tradition very much inspired by the Casas Grandes example.

Highly recommended, if you can find a moment to get out there.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

I had been avoiding this Romanian movie for a long time. Of course I had heard all the acclaim, but it is hard to want to see a movie about a young woman seeking an illegal abortion.

So we missed it in the movie theaters, but it was added to our Netflix list. It arrived a few weeks ago, and we delayed and delayed. When, finally, we put it in the machine, we found it was unwatchable. Literally. No picture, no nothing.

Last week the replacement arrived. Last night we watched it, and for the first half hour or more, I felt I'd been right: who wants to see such a thing? But, by the end, I felt it was one of the best portraits of a certain kind of friendship that I'd ever seen. It's an interesting movie because the abortion turns out to be its thematic centerpiece but not its emotional centerpiece. Other urgencies intervene.

It remains quite a grim movie, but not in the way you expect.

Richard III

I studied Richard III in high school (where it made an indelible impression), but never saw a performance of it. This rendition, starring Ian McKellen (Gandalf!) certainly does justice to my memory of the play. The thematic implications of recasting the story in an alternative, fascist 30s England--with Richard a Hitler-ish, charismatic dictator who brooks not an iota of dissent--are pretty interesting. Richard's seduction of individuals can be seen as a demagogue's seduction of the masses, and the patterns of his rhetoric and propaganda (turning his victims into oppressors and using his own violence as a pretext for reprisals against others).

Even more striking, though, are the ways the director leverages the timeshift to enlarge his cinematic storytelling--this is a Shakespeare story that is only minimally play-like. Richard's first soliloquy ("Now is the winter of our discontent...", for example, starts as a speech to the assembled company, presumably broadcast to the populace. Tanks, gasmasks, trains, early aircraft, drug addiction, and fur collars all do their part in the storytelling.

My only quibble with the movie is McKellen's rather unsubtle portrayal of Richard. Sure, this is a bad guy, but he even falls to his death with an evil cackle. (I think this is a matter for the director, Richard Loncraine, as well.) You see why people would be afraid of Richard, but it is hard to see how they would be much fooled by him.

Still, very much worth watching, and, further, makes me want to reread the play.

White Hunter, Black Heart

Somewhere I got the idea that this was a great movie we had overlooked.

We wished we had left it overlooked.

A movie about a disaster should not be a disaster.

Restoration

We could not get through this one, in spite of our admiration for Robert Downey, Jr.; Ian McKellen; and other fine actors in this terrible, terrible movie.

"D'oh" Moment of the Day

Watching North by Northwest at home last night (for the umpteenth time--it's a great favorite of ours) and suddenly noticed all the diagonals in the shots--from the opening credits, which feature the exposed steel grid of a modern office building on the bias, to scenes of Cary Grant clambering among the unusually angled support stilts of an ultramodern house near the Mt. Rushmore national monument in South Dakota.

I wondered why that was, throughout the movie, and was still wondering this morning, so I decided to try a Google search.

The "D'oh" came as I was typing in the words "north by northwest diagonals" into the Google search box.

At least I didn't have to see the search results before I had my "aha." And this is not to say that there aren't all sorts of other good reasons to shoot on the diagonal--adding to the sense of action, of things being off-kilter, and so forth.

But, clearly, N-NW is a diagonal.

Collateral

Saw this again on video last night and was struck by all the recognizable actors, with strong presences, in (relatively) small parts. Jason Statham has one line. Debi Mazar has a bit in a cab. You never want to take your eyes off Mark Ruffalo when he's on screen; he's just not on screen that much.

On screen most of the time are Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise, of course, and they do a pretty good job of holding your attention. Collateral is another entry in the ordinary-guy-gets-thrust-into-extraordinary-situation-and-becomes-hero genre--Michael Mann's version of North by Northwest, but taking itself way more seriously.

Still, very enjoyable.

The Wind and the Lion

Terrible.

Recent Deaths

Reading my high school alumni newsletter, I learned that a man I graduated with died of cancer last spring. I think he was the valedictorian. I have only the vaguest memory of his face and his big glasses.

And I learned that my eighth-grade English teacher died in June. "Before he became a teacher, he performed professionally as a jazz drummer." Who knew? If we had known, most of us would probably have shrugged and said, What is jazz?

Eighth graders are idiots.

I remember a person who was passionate about literature, ironic, and impatient with stupidity--yet, sometimes, resigned to it. I think we read Macbeth in his class, and Julius Caesar. Maybe Romeo and Juliet, too. I didn't learn to love Shakespeare then, but I learned the plays. Even though I have not reread Julius Caesar since, I remember it.

He had us read the plays out loud, even though we stank at it, even though you could tell he relished reading them himself.

A good teacher. RIP.

Team of Rivals

I ordered this book a few months ago,after reading or hearing about a group of books that Obama has mentioned influenced him, which also included Alinsky's Rules for Radicals and Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society.

I started reading it after the election and was enthralled. Goodwin writes beautifully, and she brings Lincoln and his contemporaries to vivid life. I think I haven't read much history from this period, and my mental picture of Lincoln dates from high school social studies: a secular saint.

Goodwin both presents Lincoln as an authentic human being and highlights the elements of his character that made him such a great president at such a critical time. The book also greatly improved my understanding of the Civil War--in school I learned it was about slavery, and later I bought the notion that this was a naive view (like thinking we fought WW2 to save the Jews); at least as Goodwin describes it, slavery was an increasingly critical issue as the war progressed.

Of course I was thinking a lot about Obama as I read, and there are many parallels in their political careers and in their (apparent) temperaments. Reading about how Lincoln assembled his cabinet as Obama assembled his was a very interesting experience. A key trait of Lincoln's was his refusal to hold grudges, or to act on them. Others thought him simple, or naive for that refusal, but his insistence on seeing and expecting the best of others served him extremely well.

Finally, Lincoln assembled a cabinet of strong personalities. The strongest, Seward, thought he would be the "power behind the throne," and throughout Lincoln's presidency, there were some observers who believed that. Seward, however, was quickly disabused of his notion of Lincoln as a simpleton who needed to be led by the hand, and became his great friend and support.

Lincoln was able to manage a team of strong personalities because he was himself a confident and insightful leader. He understood his own strengths as well as the strengths of the individuals on his team, and he trusted no one's judgement so well as he trusted his own. He was idealistic, but also pragmatic.

Sound familiar?

A measure of the effectiveness of Goodwin's work: when Lincoln was assassinated, I cried and cried. I even cried for Seward and his son, who were attacked the same night. You felt the loss of something tremendous and abstract, and you also felt the loss of people you loved.

I don't know when I've read a better history book.

Taking on the System

In this tumultuous election year, I've become interested in the mechanics of how social change happens. This book by Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, purports to map out exactly that process, in the context of our digital, media-saturated environment.

It's an easy, straightforward read, with some insightful analysis and an ultimately optimistic--and frankly democratic--vision, which helps you see how you can take (meaningful) part in making change happen. It didn't knock my socks off, but I liked its clarity, and the many compelling examples.

Atonement

This might be the best movie I almost didn't finish watching. The opening section is certainly excruciating: it's hard to watch a spoiled 13-year-old ruin lives--you see it all coming. I was ready to eject the DVD, but Victor counseled patience, and he was right.

Happily, the movie skips through time. You don't sit in jail with the wrongly convicted character; you don't pine away with the unjustly bereft character. What the movie does show, is sad enough--I think after the midpoint I was pretty constantly in tears--but at least you're not sure how things are going to unfold.

Recommended if you're in the mood for a weeper; if not, not.

The Exquisite City

Chicago is just full of people with fabulous, creative ideas. The Exquisite City is one of these. In a riff on the Surrealists' exquisite corpse technique, diverse artists were asked to create a city block out of cardboard and sundry other materials, in their own style; the result, arranged in grids in the dark interior of the Viaduct Theater on Western off Belmont, is a dreamy concoction--part fantasy, part nightmare.

One of those exhibits you just have to experience--complete with Chicago sound effects and huddling hipsters. It's open through 12 December.

If you miss it, perhaps it will return. Certainly, the show's worth repeating.

Site Unseen 2008

After hearing about the Chicago Cultural Center's annual festival of site-specific installations and performance for at least three years, I finally made it for its fifth iteration, last 12 November.

There is something especially exciting about the specific and ephemeral. The festival lasts only one evening, and its components are designed for execution only in the Cultural Center's particular space during that particular evening. By its nature, video is less ephemeral, and so I found myself not so interested in the video installations scattered about the building, but rather drawn to the performances.

All of which demonstrated some degree of oddness, humor, eclecticism, and spectacle. The freedom to come and go from the various performance events makes typically challenging work less intimidating and more approachable. (You're not committed to witnessing some incomprehensible weirdness for hours.)

A very worthwhile commitment by the Cultural Center, and an event I look forward to revisiting in the future.

Gatz

Under what circumstances could a full-length reading of an 83-year-old novel be entertaining? How, indeed, could you get an audience to sit through the requisite six or eight hours straight?

Perhaps it goes without saying that you'd have to start with a damned good novel. The Elevator Repair Service theater troupe has met this requirement, choosing what many would say is the very best: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

It's a genius idea, really: in a rattletrap office, a frustrated clerk (his computer hangs every time it boots up) finds a dogeared copy of the novel in an unexpected location (a disk storage box on his desk) and begins to read. Aloud. His colleagues ignore him at first, intent on their own business--carrying on phone conversations, typing, filing. The noise of the contemporary world--car horns, the urban roar--loudens every time the door opens to admit another coworker or usher one out. Colleagues approach to get help finding a file, or ask for a favor. Still, he reads on. He pauses a moment to try his computer again. No dice, and the fellow reads on.

Before long, parallels between the office world and the novel's world emerge. The phone rings in the office, and a ringing phone is described in the novel. The colleagues begin to take on the personalities--and ultimately the roles--of various characters in the novel. Gradually, the real business of the office (whatever that is) is subsumed by the imaginary business of Fitzgerald's story. The ambient noise transforms from a contemporary urban roar to an idyllic suburban symphony of crickets and birdsong.

Gatz is a tremendous accomplishment. The externalization of the clerk's psychological absorption in his book is often humorous, and finally very moving. It goes without saying that the effort is something to admire, but the fact is that the play is also great entertainment.

Highly recommended, if you ever get a chance to see it. But we suggest you bring a cushion. Theater seats are a little hard on the bottom after so many hours.

Quantum of Solace

A lot of our friends would be surprised that Victor and I often see James Bond movies opening weekend, placing us more as the kind of people who would go and see Synecdoche, New York or Happy-Go-Lucky the first chance we got.

Victor reminds me that I brought James Bond into our lives. When we met, Victor inclined more towards the art house and revival house stuff. I did, too, but I grew up with James Bond movies and wouldn't miss a new one. There's something nostalgic and satisfying about an entertaining Hollywood action movie.

There's nothing particularly nostalgic about the new James Bond movie, though. For one thing, there's nothing nostalgic about Daniel Craig. I enjoy his Bond, but the character he's created is a very different quantity than the sly charmers portrayed by Sean Connery and Roger Moore. Craig's Bond is all subtext--he delivers on the action, but you might wish he weren't so sad about it.

The newest iteration of the Batman series shares this broodiness. I happen to enjoy it (being fond of heroes with consciences); I can understand, though, the disappointment of those who prefer their fun unadulterated by qualms.

The shift in the emotional tenor of blockbuster action movies may be due in part to our living in a more thoughtful time, I suppose (wouldn't it be pretty to think so). It is likely more directly due to the enlistment of serious creative talent--Marc Forster (Monster's Ball) directing a James Bond movie?

Really?

And the writers include Paul Haggis (Crash)?

Seriously?

Yes and yes.

As long as Hollywood keeps recruiting indie talent into blockbuster projects, blockbuster projects are going to keep delivering angst-ridden heroes along with spectacular explosions.

After all, audiences seem to like it.

Chicago Publishers Gallery

Was back at the Chicago Cultural Center Wednesday night for the first time in a while and found the Chicago Publishers Gallery in a cozy corner on the first floor. What a great idea! Chicago-grown books and periodicals fill overflowing shelves, there are chairs and rugs that look comfy if you have time to sit and peruse, and if you feel inclined to purchase, you can go around the corner to the gift shop to complete the experience.

The website is nice as well. A real boon for Chicago book and magazine lovers, and a great resource for writers considering publishers.

And another reason to love Chicago.

Back to the Future

I want to live in the universe this newspaper is reporting from.

Garrison Keillor (almost) Gets It Right

Very amusing article today. I would beg to differ on one point, though: Chicago has been cool for a long time.

Admittedly, Obama is making it cooler.

Another Letter to the Editor

I just got an email from Al Gore's Repower America asking me to send a letter to the editor about renewable energy. Here's what I wrote:

The unprecedented environmental, national security, and economic challenges we face share a common thread: energy.

Our dependence on dirty fuels wreaks environmental devastation; our dependence on foreign energy sources poses tremendous security risks; our dependence on increasingly scarce (and expensive) natural resources renders our economy unsustainable.

We can address all three of these formidable challenges by Repowering America with 100 percent clean electricity within 10 years, as Al Gore has proposed. Details on the plan are available at repoweramerica.org. Key steps include energy efficiency, generation of power from renewable sources, and an upgraded national power grid.

The result will be high-paying green jobs, lower energy costs, reduced foreign debt, increased security, and (not least) decreased impact on global climate change.

I want our leaders to know that we in Chicago understand it's time for big solutions.

I've done these before, but never got published (I mean, using these automated tools. I did get a letter published in the Boston Herald that I had sent by snail mail, but that was more than 20 years ago. OUCH!). But maybe if enough people send letters on this subject, some of them will be published.

Which is what counts.

The Great Buck Howard

During the Chicago Film Festival, we saw this sweet movie starring Tom Hanks' son Colin as well as John Malkovich and Emily Blunt (in a nice turn after not being so nice in The Devil Wears Prada). I almost forgot about it, but yesterday our shiny film festival catalog arrived in the mail(a month after the festival?!) and as I was browsing through, the page happened to open to a picture from the movie.

So, not terribly memorable, but a good-hearted, pleasant tribute to a certain kind of entertainer (John Malkovich impersonates the Amazing Kreskin, on whom Buck Howard is based) and a certain kind of show business, still clinging to the edges of popular culture.

Told as a coming-of-age story, the movie is great DVD fodder, but not particularly exciting in a movie theater. For what it is, it is highly recommended.

Obama Love

I find that in spite of the election being over, I am still obsessed with Obama and company. Here are some videos and links that make me smile and/or feed my obsession.

Obama supporter of the parrot persuasion:



True facts about Rahm Emanuel.

Hip hop Obama:



Obama pictures that make me weepy.

That's all I can think of right now. More later.

My Name Is Red

I picked up this novel by Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk a while ago. Someone had given a copy to Victor and it had been sitting on our dresser for weeks.

It took me a while to get through, but it was a very interesting, textured book: a love story combined with a murder mystery and a complex meditation on the power of images. The writing is good, overall, but I sometimes got impatient with the philosophizing.

So I skimmed.

On the whole, though, a worthwhile read.

The Pale Blue Eye

My friend Stef recommended this novel by Louis Bayard recently, so I checked it out. Turned out to be excellent. The narrator is a retired 19th century constable who lives near West Point. He's invited to help solve a gruesome murder, and eventually takes as an assistant a young cadet named Edgar Allan Poe.

Very well written and terribly clever. I stayed up late to finish it.

Recommended.

Obama's Luck, and Other Inantities

I went to a panel Friday here in Chicago (in which kos happened to be participating) about the recent election, what it means, etc.. Along with kos, the panel included Laura Washington and Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, and was moderated by Charles Madigan of the Chicago Tribune. Per Laura Washington, who happens to be African-American (the sole African-American member of the panel), as she discussed the enormous about of luck Barack Obama has had in his life and career, Obama is also lucky in that he is “not African American.”

WTF?

Did I hear that right?

Yes: she said it again. Because he doesn’t share (in his blood, presumably) this country’s history of slavery, he’s not African-American.

And this makes him lucky.

Ironically, before I heard Washington make this comment, before the panel started, I fell into conversation with a couple of (white, 60-ish) women sitting near me. They appreciated the historic nature of Obama’s candidacy, but wanted to be clear that Obama didn’t get their vote because he was black.

OK, that wasn’t why he got my vote, either.

Then one of the women pointed out that he was “both” (white and black). I mentioned this Garry Trudeau cartoon, which had me laughing till I cried the day after the election.

Then the other woman said, “But I think he should remember that he’s half white.”

WTF?

The first woman pointed out that he could hardly forget that, having been raised in a white family.

“Well, of course he knows it, but he should…” I can’t remember the exact words. “…act like it?”

Thankfully, the panel started before I could formulate a response. And then, in her introductory remarks, Laura Washington said Obama is not African-American.

Well, guess what. That’s exactly what he is. Having a father from Kenya makes him African-American, just as my husband’s having parents from Germany and Egypt makes him German-Egyptian American. My two grandparents from Hungary, one from Poland, and Russian great-grandparents make me another kind of mutt (mutt, by the way, appears to be the new black).

The fact is, there is nothing particularly lucky about being born nonwhite in America. It’s not like bigots ask you to fill out a genealogical questionnaire before they discriminate against you.

I’m paraphrasing kos here: you want to talk about lucky? Being born George W Bush—that’s lucky.

Being born half-white, half-Kenyan and being raised by your single white mom and/or your grandparents—for most people that would fall under the category of lemons out of which you try to make lemonade.

By definition, we are all lucky: whatever happens to us is largely a matter of chance. But luck does not define how we respond to and leverage what happens to us. That is defined by character, skill, knowledge, experience, and other highly personal qualities (partly genetic, no doubt, but also willfully, effortfully developed).

I am frankly sick of commentary about Obama’s “luck”—whether it’s inanity about his not being African-American, or the “luck” of the financial crisis occurring when it did, or the “luck” that the Jeremiah Wright business came up so early.

The fact is that Barack Obama has proven able, over and over again, to master the circumstances he’s been presented with. That’s not luck. That’s a demonstration of the kind of skills we need in a president, after having suffered one who managed to squander just about every bit of luck that ever came his way.

Lawrence Lessig at the Chicago Humanities Festival

Last night's talk by Lawrence Lessig was pretty phenomenal. He gave a very effective presentation on the influence of money in politics, basically contending that its most pernicious effect is the obliteration of trust--the people's trust in their government.

You can view the presentation here.

And if you want to join the movement to change congress, you can learn more here.

FYI, Lessig is also the founder of Creative Commons.

Jeffrey Sachs at the Chicago Humanities Festival

First of all, my hat is off to anyone who can talk coherently for 45 extemporaneous minutes. No podium, no notes, no overheads. An amazing feat.

I really didn't know what to expect from Jeffrey Sachs; I was vaguely aware of him as someone who had "converted" from being a more free-market capitalism guy to a sustainable development guy.

There was no evidence of the free-market capitalism guy at last night's lecture. He spent the first 20 minutes or so of his talk trying to put the current financial crisis in context. He reminded us of the collapse of the Asian bubble in the late 1990s, the subsequent dot.com bubble, and the most recent real estate bubble. All interconnected--nothing about them should have been unpredictable.

From there, he segued into bubbles that he deemed more critical--the climate bubble, the population bubble, and the water scarcity bubble. When these burst, he pointed out, we won't just be looking at a recession.

He made a good case for pumping up our aid to impoverished parts of the world and taking a larger role in helping solve apparently intractable problems. He made connections between climate change, water scarcity, population explosion, and the situation in Darfur. He connected human encroachment on wildlife with the rise in diseases that cross from animals to people (including AIDS and SARS).

And all along the way he pointed to Tuesday's election as the first step to get real traction on these issues. He called Barack Obama "incredibly smart," which is something, coming from a guy who's clearly pretty darned smart himself.

Well, we are all hopeful. But of course the real work starts after Tuesday.

Lisa Randall at the Chicago Humanities Festival

Lisa Randall is a rare specimen: a renowned cosmologist who happens to be female. We listened to her give a talk the other night based on her 2005 book Warped Passages, about the possibility of "hidden" dimensions in space-time.

Randall explained that the investigations into additional dimensions are triggered by the desire to make quantum theory consistent with relativity theory. The existence of higher dimensions may explain apparent inconsistencies. One thing that was striking is how the mathematics drives the investigation. For example, "there is nothing in the mathematics that rules out the existence of other dimensions." It reminds me of another talk we went to--last year, I think--where the scientist talked about how there is nothing in the math of physics to explain why we can go forward in time but not backward.

So the work is to a considerable extent mathematical rather than physical (though this is physics). But there's nothing particularly new about that--Einstein used mathematics, too, and it was a long time before his theories could be proved empirically.

Randall claimed that the theories about higher dimensions may well be proved (or disproved) by experiments at the new CERN hadron collider in Switzerland, starting next year.

It is exceedingly hard to imagine higher spatial dimensions, though Randall tried her darnedest to help us do so. She explained that it is much easier to imagine them mathematically than visually. After her talk, I wondered if the whole question of what higher dimensions would look like is meaningless--as the cosmologist Rocky Kolb once said my question--what existed before the universe?--was meaningless after one of his lectures. We can't picture higher dimensions anymore than a point can picture a line. I wondered if the best way to think about dimensions is as projections. For example, you can look at a point as the one-dimensional projection of a line; a square is the two-dimensional projection of a cube; so a cube would be a three-dimensional projection of a four-dimensional object.

Which means there are hidden worlds we can't perceive directly. But that's not new, is it? The microscopic world--was largely hidden from us for most of human history, and even now some of what we know about this world is due to inference rather than direct observation. You could say something similar about the astronomical world.

Anyway, it was all very interesting and thought provoking. One of these days I'll try reading Randall's book, which I bought in 2005 but haven't gotten to yet.

The Garden

Victor and I went to see this movie last night--the first screening on our 2008 Chicago International Film Festival schedule.

A group of Latinos in South Central LA spent more than a decade tending a 14-acre community garden, until a backroom deal involving a member of the City Council threatened their eviction. While this pretty much is a classic good guys/bad guys story, the movie also manages to convey a lot of the complexities of personality and politics that have been involved. We're not that familiar with LA politics, but we had thought highly of its mayor. The movie made us wonder about him. It also made us wonder how many stories like this take place in the background of Chicago politics. The movie reminds us that we urgently need a different kind of politics.

One of the fun things about seeing movies at the Chicago Film Festival is sometimes the directors, or other key players show up. In this case, director Scott Hamilton Kennedy took questions after the screening. He was wearing a tee shirt with Barack Obama's face on it. It's wonderful to see people who are doing such great things in the flesh.

On the ballot provided by the film festival, we both gave The Garden our highest rating.

Threepenny Opera

We caught this Hypocrites production on the day it closed. We were impressed with the tremendous energy, creativity, and talent on display. The Hypocrites made Threepenny Opera their own while remaining fundamentally true to the original.

This was our first Hypocrites show, but it won’t be the last.

The Chicago Humanities Festival in Hyde Park

Saturday we went down to Hyde Park for a special program of Chicago Humanities Festival. Usually the festival starts at the end of October and runs through the first couple weeks of November, but this year they scheduled this early taste in Hyde Park. So Victor and I rode our bikes to the Belmont Red Line stop and took the train (with bikes) down to Garfield.

We got up early to try and catch a bird watching group that meets Saturday mornings at 8 in Jackson Park, but the trip ended up taking too long, and we missed the group. But—wow—Jackson Park was beautiful, especially the Japanese Garden. We’re determined to go back.

The first event we attended was in Mandel Hall, a beautiful venue that looks like it used to be a chapel. The speaker, Gary Becker, is a Nobel-Prize winning economist, but his talk wasn’t so great. His thesis was basically that actions to resolve fears have unintended consequences, including the generation of new fears.

Duh.

His theme was involved the importance of education in ameliorating the impact of unexpected consequences (fears). The most interesting data he presented was on the contribution of higher education to higher quality of life in various respects. But the main thesis was simple-minded at best.

Presumably his academic work is more interesting. I can only imagine he believed he had to dumb the stuff down for a general audience.
Next, we entered the Smart Museum of Art for the first time. Looks like a great space. In a classroom there, we listened to Deidre Chetham and Orville Schell, who discussed the new dam on the Yangtze River. Chetham talked about the impact of displacement on families who had lived in the areas that are now submerged. Schell focused more on the bigness of the projects that China is engaging in.

Our third and final event was a performance by the Silk Road Theatre Project of a new verse play by Yusef Komunyakaa, an adaptation of the ancient epic Gilgamesh. I’m afraid Victor fell asleep, but I really enjoyed it. I thought the performers were pretty wonderful.

After this we took a quick tour through at the Hyde Park Art Center, and then had a beautiful ride home. But long. We usually don’t ride more than 5 miles or so. The ride home was about 10 miles.

I was awfully tired the next day.

Goodbye, Chicago Tribune

Today, I called to cancel our subscription to the Sunday Chicago Tribune. I wrote this letter (submitted online) to explain why:

My husband and I moved to Chicago about four years ago, and shortly afterward began our subscription to the Chicago Tribune. Only Sundays, because we frankly haven’t time to read the newspaper daily. Like many people, we spend so many hours working during the week, most of our news comes from the radio and internet.

Sundays are different, however, and we’ve enjoyed dedicating our Sunday morning hours to reading the Sunday Tribune and the New York Times. It is with regret that we choose to stop including the Chicago Tribune in this ritual. We cannot continue to support a newspaper that publishes intellectually dishonest editorials.

A number of recent editorials have disturbed us, but the latest, “Scapegoating Markets,” was the last straw.

The headline is ironic. While the editorial argues against scapegoating capitalism as the cause of the current financial crisis, instead, attempts to “increase homeownership, particularly by minorities and the less affluent” are scapegoated.

The editorial claims that if deregulation were the problem, “it would be the commercial banks, not the investment banks, that were in trouble,” ignoring the failures of Indy Mac and Washington Mutual, and the shaky status of Wachovia. “The demise of Glass-Steagall turns out to be a boon,” the editorial adds, noting that its absence enabled Bank of America to purchase Merrill Lynch.

The editorial ignores the fact that if the regulations eliminated in the past 20 or so years had still been in place, Merrill Lynch might not have required rescue.

Instead, the editorial blames the current crisis on “an attack on underwriting standards [that] was undertaken by virtually every branch of government.”

Which “underwriting standards” are we talking about? Standards that facilitated discrimination against whole classes of borrowers, including single women and minorities? Redlining of neighborhoods? Certainly U.S. courts and the legislative branch have been instrumental in attempts to eliminate such “standards,” and I hope we are all proud of this.

But where the government has urged relaxation of fiscal lending standards, such relaxation was backed and promoted first by lending industry lobbyists, like—for example—Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager and former president of Homeownership Alliance, a lobbying firm funded by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (Which were (until recently) private corporations, by the way, not “mixed” public-private enterprises as your editorial suggests.)

We thought a lot about whether it’s appropriate to cancel our subscription to a newspaper because of its editorials. They’re just a reflection of opinion, after all, and we wouldn’t cancel a subscription because of a disagreement with a columnist. We think that unsigned editorials are different, though, because they represent the opinion of the newspaper as an institution, and we find we can’t continue to support an institution that demonstrates such low standards. If we want to read editorial fueled by ideology instead of facts, we can find lots of that online. From a newspaper, we expect measured and reality-based news and commentary.

We understand that your newspaper is launching a redesign tomorrow: more pictures, less words.

Good luck with that.

Sincerely,

Dave DaVinci Saves the Universe

In the past couple years, Victor and I have become big fans of the House Theatre, which is noted for its creative presentations of fairly simple stories and its terrifically high energy. At the Chopin Theatre, the House is now performing an earlier work, Dave DaVinci Saves the Universe. While this science fiction tale is perhaps less substantial than runaway success The Sparrow or even The Magnificents (which got less enthusiastic notices, but which we enjoyed very much) both in script and in execution, it remains an appealing story, performed by a talented cast.

Recommended, especially if you can pick up discounted tickets via Goldstar or HotTix.

Promoting Science

The other night, I attended a presentation sponsored by the Chicago Council on Science and Technology, which seeks to promote more (and accurate) understanding of science and technology. The speaker was Alan Leshner, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and he talked about science challenges for the new millennium.

These mainly involve the disconnect between a large swath of American opinion and the goals and conclusions of science. Where science conflicts with what Leshner called "core values," Americans tend to just look the other way. So we have a remarkable proportion of citizens who don't accept that humans developed from a simian ancestor, or that the earth is billions of years old. A remarkable proportion of Americans simply don't trust scientists, and look at scientific conclusions as opinions they can take or leave.

Leshner proposed that to deal with this problem, scientists need to do a better job of communicating with the public rather than to the public.

This response seems rather facile. A preposition change is not sufficient. I think the problem needs to be dealt with by dramatizing why these scientific conclusions matter. I am not entirely sure how to do this, but I think it's crucial. For example, millions of Americans are able to reject Darwin's theory of evolution (particularly as it pertains to human beings) because ultimately they feel it doesn't make any difference what they think about it.

We do not live in a society where truth/reality is valued for its own sake. Our public discourse is riddled with lies and spin, and we pretty much have to decide what we think before we decide who we're going to listen to. People are treating scientific conclusions the same way. After all, there are so many scientific conclusions, and they frequently contradict each other: coffee is good for you; coffee is bad for you. In a society where we're overloaded with information, we largely ignore stuff we don't see a way to use or doesn't fit with our world view.

Scientists (and their communicators and policymakers) need to figure out how to make critical scientific conclusions relevant to Americans. Maybe it's by reminding us of why the practice of science is important. What happens when you don't do science properly? How do problems get solved if you pick and choose the conclusions you like best? As some scientists like to joke (with regard to creationists who call evolution "just a theory"), gravity is just a theory--how would you like to jump out that window?

Maybe what we need is an ad campaign that warns us of the consequences of bad science and of ignoring scientific conclusions. People hear about the rewards all the time; they're all around us. The rewards of science are so ubiquitous that we almost feel they're natural occurences. So let's focus on what happens when we don't teach kids to be good scientists, and when our decision makers and policy makers are science ignoramuses (ignorami?).

Our society in recent years has come perilously close to valorizing ignorance (see Idiocracy).

Let's change that.

Robin Robertson and Simon Armitage

Went to see these two British poets the other night at Loyola University's downtown Rubloff Auditorium (as distinct from Northwestern University's downtown Rubloff Building--Thorne Auditorium--and the Art Institute of Chicago's Rubloff Auditorium--all, no doubt, the result of donations by Arthur Rubloff of the real estate firm) in an event presented by the Poetry Foundation.

Victor has read Simon Armitage's recent translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, so Robin Robertson was the real surprise to me. Firstly, he has a wonderfully sonorous reading voice--I could listen to him forever. Secondly, his poems are chock full of gorgeous sounds. Only a few were not entirely convincing or took an easy way to closure. I was delighted to discover this fine poet.

Simon Armitage who is--at least by appearance--a good deal younger than Robertson, also delivered a good performance, but I liked him more for his manner--the patter between poems--than the work itself. A couple of poems--especially the first one he read, about a sperm whale--were knockouts, but on the whole I wasn't so impressed. I still look forward to reading Gawain, which Victor liked very much, but I wasn't wowed enough to buy another Armitage book.

On the other hand, I bought Robertson's translation of Euripedes' Medea without hesitation, and plan to get to it just as soon as I finish (or abandon) Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine.