second americano

Aproaching 2 Months with No Posts

2009-11-18T16:42:00.004-05:00

I could list excuses for pages and pages. Indeed, if I just posted a new excuse every day, I could keep the blog updated for a month.

Instead, I'll just say that it is not wise to try to buy a house in the middle of a rather intense academic semester (particularly one that has the added background pressure of a tenure decision).

We spent 8 months on this search because, how shall I put it, the last real estate transaction did not go very well. After looking at at least 50 places, someone finally took an offer that I thought was reasonable (and let's just say that most sellers found what I thought to be reasonable to be offensive in extremis).

We are now the owners of real estate for the fourth time, and owners of a condo for the first time. Just hours after closing we began the first home improvement project, installing new hardwood floors in the master bedroom. Here's photographic proof:

Grammar Police

2009-09-26T09:38:00.003-04:00

I like to think that I am very good at ignoring the myriad ways in which the English language is abused in the many things I read these days. But there are still lines, and sometimes they are crossed.

Some of you may know that Google, Apple, And AT&T are all sending letters back and forth to the FCC to comply with the FCC's investigation of Apple's decision to reject the Google Voice app for the iPhone. AT&T sent their response yesterday, and basically they blamed it all on Google. This was mostly dumb, but I'm not interested in the arguments, just the language used.

Please let me emphasize: this was a formal letter of response to the Federal Communications Commission concerning an on-going FCC investigation. It has footnotes. At the same time, it's only 4 pages long, and it was months in the making. So it seems fair of me to expect it to be edited and proofread and perhaps even, I'll not say well-written, but at least grammatically sound.

Here's the line:

By openly flaunting the call blocking prohibition that applies to its competitors, Google is acting in a manner inconsistent with the spirit, if not the letter, of the FCC's fourth principle contained in its Internet Policy Statement.

I'm guessing that with my learned audience of 5 readers it's not even necessary to say that the word flout (not flaunt) means to disregard openly a rule or law or authority. The word flaunt means to display something ostentatiously, to show off one's excess wealth or pretty jewelry. One simply cannot flaunt a prohibition, and just because words sort of sound alike doesn't mean they are substitutable.

Obviously I won't even mention the fact that in all the many places where this line is being quoted on websites, no one is including the needed sic.

Customers Who Bought this book....

2009-08-15T11:10:00.003-04:00

Hmmm...I wonder what the connection is between queer theory/television studies and 20th century visual culture in India???

Click the image for a bigger version:

The Open Source Textbook

2009-08-09T16:23:00.002-04:00

Reading this morning in the on-line NYT:

“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.

“They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote,” Dr. Abshire continued. “Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.”

Let's unpack this. Because my stodgy, textbook-based education enables me to do so:

multitask: do many things at once. unable to concentrate on one thing at a time.
transpose: mix things up, confuse one thing for another
extrapolate: make things up. unable to understand the difference between productive synthesis and fiction
knowledge as infinite: too much information. therefore, I don't need to know any of it at all. also: I can make it up because it's infinite and therefore also undefined/undefinable, limitlessly expandable.

I actually think that wiki-style knowledge production is fascinating and potentially productive. I'm in favor of using wikis in the classroom to help students build their knowledge and understand how synthesis (not transposition or extrapolation) works. But anyone who has done a google for a subject slightly outside of the mainstream will find multiple sources cut-and-pasted from the same place (with no record of which source the initial text comes from). This repetition also takes place in textbooks, to be sure. But the responsibility of the authors who write the textbooks, the peer reviewers who approve them, and the publishers that oversee these processes means that experts contribute, whether directly as authors or editors, or through reference to their latest research. Textbooks are a limited number of steps away from the archaeologist at a new dig in central America or the physicist working at the new supercollider. In the face of infinite knowledge production (read: making crap up as much as you want because you read it online somewhere), I worry that education will go the way of journalism: a bunch of folks, repeating the same memes in blogs and calling it knowledge.

Textbooks are boring to read--I get that. And they're expensive. But shouldn't we try instead to provide incentives for experts in their fields to work in schools as teachers? For those same folks to develop new materials to teach with? Shouldn't part of schooling be to learn how to think differently than one "wants to" or is comfortable with? Breaking old patterns--patterns encouraged by quick cut, advertising-driven media--and developing skills that might enable, say, reading a book (and not just Harry Potter) from beginning to end? Maybe a book that at first you don't immediately "get"? That doesn't immediately "hook" you with snappy dialogue written for a movie? (It could be a short book! Or a play!)

And finally (for the rant is now getting out of control): textbooks are a site of great political strife and contestation. This is important, because knowledge is never neutral. But we do, like journalists of yore, need to struggle to maintain our integrity as knowledge-producers, even in the face of economic and political pressure to do otherwise. Once we move this to an "open" platform, how do we understand, say, the problematic, religified terrain of geologic time? Or the history of Christianity itself? Or pick any war history, any history of partitioning of peoples, any colonial past. Will we be subject to the mob's decision on these things?

Am I misunderestimating the power of the collective wiki??

Shop Movies

2009-08-05T16:51:00.002-04:00

Our current home, in the workshop of F's uncle, has a number of advantages. Big-screen TV is not one of them, and yet we are watching films, in the spirit of mtg and tg, on our laptop, seated at the only table in the place. This is largely due to the lovely public library in town--they have a good, surprisingly wide ranging and eclectic contemporary film collection on DVD (including a whole batch of Brazilian indie films I haven't even brought up with F as a possibility, but there you are). We have watched several films, and if you know us, you know that we are trepidatious about watching film because we tend to, well, dislike in the extreme and/or have such scathing critical analyses afterwards that in fact we reduce said film into a puddle of ooze, and said discussion is summarized to others with a grunt and a "meh". So, herewith the 5p film reviews of the works we've seen thus far:

W: OMG boring. maybe this film was made for the generation after us that didn't live through this? was it supposed to be funny? why did I find myself offended at the thin/stupid/silent portrayal of Condi Rice? Yikes.

I've Loved you So Long: see it. amazingly well-acted, written, directed, and not as French as you worry it will be. we found the ending to be a cop-out, but hey, we are constitutionally unable to like any film wholeheartedly. Kristin Scott Thomas is amazing; Elsa Zylberstein is utterly transcendent.

Capote: F didn't like Capote himself--that is, he thought Capote was a bit of a twat. which he was, so the movie did a good job there. the film fell short of offering up an arc of: wow this guy is conceited---look how he has a crisis---look how he's fallen... because frankly, you don't really like him anyway, and he's never not conceited. the acting was good, but in a "I'm supposed to think this acting is good" sort of a way. I wanted it to be about Harper Lee instead, but whatever.

King Corn: very well put together, small documentary about corn. See it if you've driven through Iowa (or similar) and wondered who eats all that corn, anyway, in order to discover the horror that is our food system from a slightly different perspective. props for not going all Michael Moore on us.

photography books

2009-08-03T10:10:00.003-04:00

I finished Richard Powers' Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance, based on an August Sander photograph from just before WWI (see Getty collection). It goes without saying really, that it is a wonderful book--in part he does what I do for a living (close readings of photographs/images etc.) but since he's a novelist he gets to spin out the stories he sees in the work. What's wonderful about the book is that he gets photography: photographs are stories, are histories, are moments that spin out both backwards and forwards in time, producing an eerie simultaneity.

I thought, therefore: wouldn't it be fabulous to teach a course on photography through novels? Three Farmers, of course, and then also Rushdie's Ground Beneath Her Feet, which despite being about music was also, at base, about a photograph, its photographer, and immortality. Other suggestions?

Discussion in examination room 1: further thoughts on MJ

2009-07-30T17:41:00.003-04:00

Q:
Discuss the claim that in order to appreciate the 'Jackson phenomenon' it is necessary to conceptualize his oeuvre 'post-colonially', attending to the multiple routes of transmission, flow and contraflow, followed by his work as it traversed and transversed the charged circuits of globalizing capital commodities paradoxically enabling acts of post-hegemonic resistant-recuperation in the form of hybridizing reappropriation. In your answer make specific reference to examples such as this:

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/LG/Wing_-_Beat_It.mp3

A:
Despite the widespread adoption of Michael Jackson (MJ) by formerly colonized peoples as a deified avatar of a pan-racial, brown-man-makes-good figure, his oeuvre defies the label 'post-colonial' and, I argue, embodies instead a shift in the locus of economic-political globalizing power from the center to the ostensible periphery, in which said periphery is simultaneously the media capital of Los Angeles, its racialized underbelly, and the (literally) self-effacing sculptural form represented globally by plastic surgery performance art (eg. Orlan), and particularly by the frisson effected by MJ's near-lifelike mask. This essay (in order to fulfill requirements of the hegemonic academic establishment) will address these issues in three parts.

First marker: 76 (solid first)

Second marker:
I concur with this grading. I particularly appreciate the way in which the candidate proposes to, as it were, 'get under the skin' of Jackson-ism, playing on the themes of the 'underbelly' and plastic surgery. Indeed, could we not say (should we? must we?) that in fact Jackson as performance artist renders his fleshly self a synecdoche for the late-modern-post-hyper-capitalist urban city; for Los Angeles itself? Adopting his own 'angelic' personae he remoulds and remakes the boundaries/borders of his city-self radically unsettling our dominant conceptions of the imperviousness of the border and exposing an unsettling porosity - even, daresay, a fungibility - inherent within the very instantating act of 'bordering' or 'emborderment'. Jackson's body thus emblematises and literalises sub-urban white flight, its own suburbs becoming whitened and lightened through the organised and commodified violence of the 'surgical' upon a body that then subjects itself to a kind of gang warfare, battles raging over the provenance and ownership of the territory as well as over the right to supply it with narcotics. Is this not the ultimate meaning of all Jacksonist phenomena and phenomenalising and summed up in that plaintive and quintessentially Jacksonist wail;

What about the crying man
(What about us)
What about Abraham
(What was us)
What about death again
(ooo, ooo)
Do we give a damn

I feel however that the essay was marred by a lack of consideration of the moonwalk.

Response:
Moonwalk: is this not just another moment of frisson, undermining physical and modernist norms (gravity, progress) in line with the larger remaking of the body/city/universe described above? Or, if you prefer (and I'm not sure I do), a kind of historical contextualism in which MJ relaunches the joy/imperialism of the 1969 moon landing in the conquering from below (literally, in terms of his feet) of the anti-progress, anti-modernist, decidedly enchanted moonwalk?

[hat-tip to Questioner, Candidate, First and Second Marker, whose names have been changed to protect, well, everyone. and no-one.]

The Weather Forecast

2009-07-28T11:23:00.002-04:00

Here's what the forecast says for Thursday of this week:

Baltimore, MD, low temperature: 74 degrees F

La Veta, CO, high temperature: 68 degrees F

And this, by way of an (admittedly weak) explanation of why I haven't been blogging...

dwt: driving while texting/talking

2009-07-21T17:48:00.004-04:00

NYT piece today on the 2003 suppression of governmental research that shows the dangers of talking on a cell phone while driving, whether with or without one's hands: your ability to drive is approximately equal to someone with a .08 blood alcohol level.

In other words, hang up and drive.

In driving across the country (MD to CO, so not quite all of the country), instead of playing the "spot the drunk" game, as we used to when commuting or driving after 5 pm anywhere, we began playing the "talking or texting" game when approaching a vehicle swerving from one side of the lane to another, slowing to 10 mph below the speed limit only to subsequently speed up to 20 mph above (once call is over), or otherwise exhibit behavior formerly associated with drunkenness.

Extra points if you are not only endangering yourself but also other people in your car!
Super-bonus points if you are also carrying children, who, because of childseat safety laws will probably survive the wreck that you will perish in because you had to chit chat to pass the time on the freeway!

I have had a very strict rule from early on in the "car phone" era: no driving and cell phone at the same time. corollary: if I discover I am talking to someone who is driving, I tell them to call me back when they're stationary, and I hang up.

I know. Your life is really jam-packed, and you need that time to finish some business/call your mother/make dentist appointments etc. Hang up anyway. You are driving a machine that kills people. Have some respect for that, and for your own life.

more mountain musings

2009-07-16T15:37:00.002-04:00

We brought with us the latest New York Review of Books, to which we subscribed upon return to the US, giving into its inexpensive yearly cost and its gift of well-written text discussing other well-written texts that I will probably never read. As a bonus, they advertised my new book on the back cover a few issues ago, which was exciting.

In this issue, Michael Chabon writes a great piece on adventure stories of childhood, the spaces of "wild" suburban Maryland where he grew up, and the loss of such wilderness for his own children--as well as what that might mean in terms of the next generation's ability to engage in imaginative, adult-free play. His argument (crudely) is that the maps you find in the front of adventure novels and stories aren't there to allow you to escape to another world--they are there to remind you of that world you created when you were a kid in the strip of land behind your house, or asphalt behind the local corner store, or patch of green somewhere nearby. My sisters and I built a fort at the edge of the national forest near our family's Breckenridge CO summer getaway spot--it was up an abandoned logging road and involved dead, decaying trees draped over one another to form a square, building-like shape from which we could see little but other trees. But we could play various games involving territorial possession (ah, childhood imperialism), throwing objects on one another's heads, and generally reenacting the violence and competition international relations realists now make their careers in analyzing. We were out of shouting range of our parents for sure, and surrounded by potentially dangerous falling trees, abandoned logs, bugs, biting animals likely carrying dread diseases, dirt, twisted ankle up to broken neck scenarios, amoeba infested streams--the whole bit. It was paradise.

Chabon's point (or one of them) is that we as humans need this space of the non-adult in order to develop an imagination, in order to see ourselves as actors in a larger drama, to enable our next steps into growing up, to posit the truth that adults don't have all the answers and can't save you from yourself nearly as much as they would like to.

I pondered after reading his piece that this loss was evident, but that contemporary children might have other ways of flexing the imagination: video games take you to alternate universes, for example, where you play with your friends, fight for territory, take on alternate identities. The difference is this (at least in my mind): teleology. In the fort-based games we played up in Breckenridge, there was no end, really. No goal. You played game X that you made up until your sister decided she'd had enough of your crappy game and she created her own fort from which a new game emerged. Or she decided to scale Mt. Grabadora (my father's moniker for the hill behind the condo) instead.

While I remember working very hard on fortifications, making little spaces for various activities in the fort, stockpiling potential weapons, seeking out sources of water, and the like (can you see why architectural history appealed to me?) the goal was to build, to play, not to get to the next level or save the princess or finish the game. I suppose that's partly true of some video/on-line games as well, but I see in my college-aged students a remarkable inability to think outside of the teleological box, perhaps spurred by the fact that this kind of open play was not emphasized in their childhood, but instead games of a closed nature: let's do X until Y occurs in a safe, adult-controlled space, so that you don't scrape a knee/break your neck.

My students, for example, rarely understand that research isn't about finding an answer that's out there, but is a creative process of making an answer out of available information, often to the extent of changing the question entirely to make an answer or two possible. It's not a treasure hunt in which a magic Google deity has placed the answers in the webiverse. It's a wooden, bug-infested fort made of abandoned logs that your sister is gradually poaching to make a new, better fort the next clearing over. And the question is not: how can I stop her, but perhaps might be: how can I change the parameters of the game such that no new fort will allow her to prevail? The answer is not out there waiting. It's in you, and it may or may not emerge depending on how creative and imaginative you are. That, I think, is one of the major losses of our safety-obsession.

missive from the mountain

2009-07-15T11:47:00.002-04:00

I'm gazing out at the 13-er that sits outside the shop window, pondering the arbitrariness of the 14-er mystique. I have a desire to climb the 13-er, because it is not the 14-er. Because I'd like to go where fewer people have gone. Because I'd like to contest the -est part of the 14-er mindset.

Transient Gadfly has been musing on similar questions regarding the superlative, and in that case how cream might rise to the top in a vat of pasteurized milk in which the cream is in fact largely vegetable oil puffed up by the capitalist milk establishment to appear as cream, while the real cream is ignored on the shelf by self-described health-conscious, low-fat worshipers.

I heart butter.

If we all keep churning in a milieu of mediocrity, as evidenced by my hour-long stint watching CNN's Situation Room yesterday while rowing at the local gym, and if the cream is not cream but hailed as cream by the milk-lowfat lobby and advertised in hip commercials touting "I can't believe it's not" in-between the repeated, mediocre questions of the Sotomayor hearing, then perhaps we need to change the way we identify, mark, and package the superlative. (Or perhaps it should not be packaged.)

We need to find the fabulous in the 13er, enjoy the butter inadvertently churned in my mixer as I overshot whipping the cream, acknowledge the genius in a book with a print-run of 400, and know that good music and great music alike spread the love in the world. All you need is to produce that one shiver of goosebumps, that one moment of yum, that feeling of a thing well done. Call that success, and people will begin to identify the real cream rising, they'll drink it in their coffee every morning, and be happier, healthier folk. Redefine the -est.

wax on, wax off

2009-07-02T11:08:00.002-04:00

What, so it's been a month. whatever. June involved writing a lot in not-blog land, teaching a summer class that involved un-bee-lee-va-ble trips to museums where I got to see some really amazing stuff shown to me and my class by the top experts in the field, and well, not blogging.

I waxed off. waned, if you will. but now I have a killer karate upper arm block, so it was totally worth it.

I also just finished the Atrocity Exhibition, a book that is an avowed favorite of some of my dearest friends who are now confirmed as deeply disturbed and also completely awesome. I quite liked it, really. I read the annotated edition, which included Ballard's mid-1990s reflections on some of the sections of each chapter. It is about (if I can use that phrase) the fundamental intersection of violence, death, and pornography and how it is ultimately being distanced from us through media and other mechanisms largely beyond our control. The spatial mapping of highway overpasses-as-woman's body, the angles of an apartment room depicting the destruction of a car crash. the pseudo-science, pseudo-knowledge of the survey format that interrogates stay-at-home moms, the people who witnessed the Kennedy assassination in the plaza itself, and mentally ill children only to draw conclusions about the best therapy for the last group. It is, as you can see, a laugh riot (really, quite funny, esp. with Ballard's later reflections on it).

The book is simultaneously very much about the 1960s while also eerily speaking to us about the world we live in now. Its understanding of celebrity makes me wonder what Ballard would have said about the synchronic deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. Or the televised, reality-show death of Jade Goody. Actually, we don't have to wonder. it's already in Atrocity Exhibition. Recommended.

Red Sox Fans > Yankees Fans Or, Things I Learned at the Game Last Night

2009-06-30T08:44:00.004-04:00

The Orioles starting pitching, after Uehara, really is awful.
Camden Yards is gorgeous and perfect for baseball, but we really could use some cool evening breezes - 82 degrees and humid at 9:30 at night is slightly too much for me.
Despite the (i.e. yet another) loss, the game was probably worth it just to watch Alex Jones steal one from well over the center field all. There's a decent photo here, but I have to ask how it is that the Baltimore Sun has no photo of this amazing catch.
Finally, I learned that Red Sox fans come out in droves and fill up Camden Yards, just like Yankees fans. I learned that on "Prime Game" nights you will not only pay more for an extra ticket, but you will have to endure opposing team's fans being much louder than Orioles fans. However, and most importantly, I learned that the Red Sox fans are MUCH more pleasant to deal with. They were much less arrogant and obnoxious than the Yankees fans, seeming to be there for the game rather than to "be seen" rooting for their team and proving to everyone that their team existed on a different plane than baseball - which appeared to me to be the Yankee's fans m.o. The guys next to us last night stood with all the Orioles fans to applaud Jones's incredible catch.

And another multiple choice question

2009-06-26T09:49:00.003-04:00

Is Clarence Thomas...

A. Insane

B. An Idiot

I've actually read his dissent in Safford v. Redding and found it truly shocking – well beyond the expectations I would already have for Thomas. School officials strip-searched a 13 year-old girl, including making her pull back the elastic on her bra and underwear, all in a failed attempt to locate the suspected Ibuprofen – yes, that's right, the contraband they were explicitly looking for was Ibuprofen – that they could not find in her backpack or clothing. The Court in its 8-1 decision found this a violation of the girl's 4th amendment rights. But not Thomas. His logic goes like this:

The reasonable suspicion that Redding possessed the pills for distribution purposes did not dissipate simply because the search of her backpack turned up nothing. It was eminently reasonable to conclude that the backpack was empty because Redding was secreting the pills in a place she thought no one would look (emphasis added).

That is some powerful logic. Well, it's powerful at least if you are using a logic textbook written by Orwell or Kafka. It's conspiracy theory and Bush-like authority theory elevated to the level of Supreme Court decision.

This is worrying

2009-06-19T16:00:00.002-04:00

The fact that of the entire population of the US House of Representatives, I find myself agreeing only with one, and his name is Ron Paul – coupled with the fact that I find the reasons he gives for his vote not just persuasive but downright eloquent....all this, is worrying.

Follow-Ups

2009-06-10T15:08:00.004-04:00

1. The sports lived up to my hype:

a flawless final round 65 gives Tiger another victory
Federer becomes 'the greatest player ever'
Pens and Wings head on to Game 7

2. It's got to get worse for the housing market:

Median Price AND sales both well down in May
Mortgage rates up means demand for mortgages is way down

Sports Update

2009-06-05T10:59:00.002-04:00

It's a good time for sport, and it's about to get better:

French Open
With Nadal's first ever loss at Roland Garros, Federer has the chance to final win this title and thereby achieve the "Career Grand Slam." This extra excitment at the French will only add to the anticipation of Wimbledon. If you didn't see last year's final between Nadal and Federer, and you are a fan of sports, then I'm very sorry for you.

I would also note that Nadal may be the most genuine individual we find who is also a sports megastar. Everyone could learn from his press releases. Here's how he announced that he won't be able to defend his title at Queen's, due to an injury:

To play in London has always been special for me, to play at the Queen's Club is an honor and the fans in the UK are among the best I have ever seen, always supporting me since the first time I played there. I have been having some problems in the past months with my knees and [need to] get ready for the grass to play at Wimbledon. I hope I can be ready to compete by then. I am really sorry and I hope that the people at the tournament will still want me to come next year.

Stanley Cup Finals
It's pretty simple: if you can't enjoy this year's Cup Finals, then you have no business ever trying to become a hockey fan. It's the best hockey I have seen since I watched the Oilers win a few cups in the 80s.

Golf
This week's Memorial Tournament (Jack's tournament), is a serious tune-up for the US Open. This year the US Open returns to Bethpage Black, making this the first time in history that the US Open has been played back to back on public courses. Bethpage will have 3 par 5's over 500 yards and is likely to increase its almost mythic status as one of the hardest golf courses in the world. Tiger seems to be headed in the right direction, and everyone hopes that Amy Mickelson's treatment for breast cancer is progressing such that Phil can be there to give Tiger a good run.

Multiple Choice

2009-06-04T14:28:00.002-04:00

A. The housing market is near bottom now, with some great deals on certain properties. With the $8K housing bribe, historically low interest rates, and deals to be had, now is THE time to buy - especially if you can get a property at 35% to 45% off peak prices.

B. The housing tumble has barely started. Foreclosures in May will be at an all time high (fact), the Alt-A crisis is as big as the sub-prime crisis, and we now have a looming 'prime crisis' when people with good credit and some assets lose their job or walk away from their mortgage because they are under water. With interests rates sure to rise significantly over the next few years and the effects of the recession yet to really hit the housing market (the housing collapse CAUSED the recession, but there will be a feedback loop), prices have much further to go. With a very FLAT bottom still a couple of years away, you would be INSANE to buy right now.

Please give precise and convincing evidence for your answer. And do it quickly, because we're having an awful time trying to figure out if we should put in an offer...

A small slice of my very peculiar utopia

2009-06-02T07:03:00.003-04:00

As the post below revealed starkly, and as many out there already knew, I play golf. It's important to note the construction of that declaration. First, despite the somewhat odd contribution from a commenter (on the previous post) unknown to me, I'm not making any claims about whether golf is a sport - an inane debate that I refuse to engage in. Next, golf is not a verb. One does not 'go golfing'. I don't care that people say that, they are just as wrong as if they said they were going 'tennising'. One plays golf, or plays a round of golf. In Britain, one can even 'have a game' of golf or ask 'how was your game?' but that construction walks a fine line that few Americans can pull off.

Now, when I say 'I play golf' I mean something much different than when a lot of Americans, today, say it. For me it is not a past-time, but a passion. I want to play golf not to enjoy the outdoors (though that is a nice side-benefit), nor to drink beer, nor to smoke cigars, nor to ride around in a ridiculous golf cart. I play golf in order to get better at playing golf. It is a terribly difficult and endlessly frustrating game; it is unconquerable, unmasterable, and tests any individual's limits of patience. And it's a very different (and mostly better) game when there is some real pressure involved - when each shot matters. This is why tournament golf is actually a totally different game, and why most people who say they play golf are talking about something different.

Given my line of work and given my friends, I know almost no one who plays golf. One reader of this blog is an exception, and perhaps the only one I can think of. So in addition to all the other things I'm whinging about above, there's the issue of always having to join up with strangers when I play.

That's all context...on to the story

Yesterday it was about 72 degrees here with bright blue skies and almost no humidity. And I got a text inviting me to join a foursome that included:
1) a veteran competetive amateur in the area who has won a number of local and regional tournaments.
2) another local who has qualified for the mid-amateur twice and won his local club championship by 23 strokes (!)
3) a senior on a top NCAA golf team who qualified for the US amateur last year.

It was a dream round. After 8 holes our foursome had 8 birdies. They partnered me, the relative hack, with #3 (no, not that #3) and together we shot about 66 better ball. He was 3 under after 6 and finished around 70. I held my own with a 74. Our oppenents were both around that number as well. In addition, they gave me strokes, and were not happy about it as the round went on. So I netted a few dollars in the end...But it wasn't about the money and it was only about the match to the extent that twice on the back 9 I had to make difficult par putts when my partner had bogied, and it's hard to describe what it's like when you feel all that pressure and then execute properly.

To paraphrase Bob Johnson, it was a great day for golf.

A list of bad ideas

2009-05-24T09:13:00.002-04:00

Having gone so long without blogging, I feel like I've lost the "right" to blog, as in "who does he think he is?" But I'm going to give it a shot anyway. Here's a list of items recently generated in my head that I will describe under the broad category of "bad ideas."

1. 3 year college degrees
I won't make the liberal arts speech, because it would go on too long. I will say this: proponents point to the British 3 year system, but they only mention Oxford and Cambridge, as if having Northeastern Baluga Regional College cut a year off their degree will make them like Oxbridge. Ask most folks who teach in the UK system broadly and they'll tell you that 3 years is too few and that a BA in the UK is a bit thin.

2. Golf Carts
In Wales I got to play golf at a club where there were no "buggies." I knew it would be hard to return to golf cart land (aka America) but I didn't realize how much worse it has gotten. Folks have NO IDEA how to play golf in a cart: they insist on driving directly to each ball, and no one ever gets out of the cart. It slows the game down terribly.

3. Watching your HD flat panel without feeding it an HD source
I would add to #3's account: it's not just the HDMI cable you need. You also need to be watching an HD channel; regular DVD's and all non-HD channels will look slightly to quite a bit worse on an HD panel than they do on an SD or ED panel.
Also, to #3: dude, don't you know that you are always supposed to call me when you are setting up a new a/v or home network system. I thought you knew the rule! :)

4. Option ARMs and Alt-A loans
We've been looking at houses for a while now. It's hard not to when the Obama administration has offered us such a juicy $8K bribe to buy a house in 2009. And it's true that there's a seasonal uptick in some markets, that the declines are slowing in some places, and that for cheaper properties, they are close the bottom in places like CA and AZ. But we aren't to the bottom yet. DC prices dropped by 8% last month alone. And anything except the cheapest houses have a long way to fall. Most importantly, we have not yet seen the worst of the foreclosure "crisis" and it's the flooding of the market with foreclosed properties that forces the real price correction. If you can buy now at rental prices, then it might be worth it if you also get the bribe, but the bottom in prices won't come before late 2010 at the earliest. So buyers now need to be prepared to stay in their house for at least 8 years, because it's likely that 4 or 5 years from now their house will be worth about what they paid for it, but probably slightly less.

5. Smoking Cigars while playing golf
I'm not commenting on the health considerations, except to say I'm not personally all that worried about secondhand smoke effects from the cigars. I do think it's a terrible, terrible idea for many reasons. But my main question is, why? What makes you think you need to smoke a cigar while you are playing golf. Is it a masculinity issue? You feel like more of a man? Because you should realize that you are playing golf, riding around in a golf cart, and wearing a sweater vest. Is it a class thing? You feel like you are elite? Because you should realize that you are on a public golf course, with your belly sticking out, and you don't even know the rules or etiquette of the game.

get your kumbay-ya-yas out

2009-05-23T17:18:00.002-04:00

Moving from the UK culture of dripping cynicism with a hint of self-loathing to the seemingly too-earnest, naievete of some elements of US culture sometimes hits you metaphorically over the head. Baseball, for instance. We got partial season tickets to the Orioles' games, and have been to several so far. They involve watching the game, yelling, eating fried food and drinking beer--the universal components of sport, no matter where you are. But they also involve:

(1) a group-sing during 7th inning stretch (also at national anthem but that feels like a duty, not a group sing)

(2) gleeful and intensive following of silly virtual shell-game in which (I am not kidding for those of you unfamiliar with the insanity of MD's obsession/self-identification with sea creatures) three animated crabs are sprinkled with Old Bay seasoning (MD's state spice and the sponsor for this particular interlude), they turn red, and after one secrets away a pearl (note: do not comment on the inconsistency for fear of being knocked on head with neighbor's fried food and/or beer. also, it could be a baseball. It's tough to tell.). The entire crowd then watches in focused attentiveness as the crabs move around, flip over, get chased away by some sort of bird, and then reconfigure themselves, pause, and reveal which crab has the pearl. excited, energetic, loud cheers emanate from the entire crowd--often louder than any at any other moment in the game--to exclaim how they indeed have successfully followed the pearl (I get it every time! The middle one! I picked the middle one!).

As a recently decamped near-British person, I can say that this is all a bit too, er, unselfconscious. Where's the cynic noting the crab-pearl inconsistency? Where's the commentary on corporate sponsorship of silly interludes while the TV audience is also watching the shilling of same corporate product? Where's the Freudian commentary on the abjected nature of the pearl, consumed, hidden, constantly watched by obsessed viewers, only to be revealed to the evident satisfaction of all? What about the historic connections to the sideshow and carnival, in which we are the rubes, rapt in attention to see if we can beat the shell game? What about the scathing commentary about the attention span of the masses and wouldn't it be nice if they'd pay as much attention to a novel or a newspaper or an opera?

At the end of the day, when all is said and done, I'm not going to lie to you, bod yn onest: it's kind of fun. Sitting in an unselfconscious crowd. Cheering along with them. Watching them watch. Deciding to go along with it. Following the silly pearl inside the silly crab. Finding out that you know what? cynicism? It takes a hell of a lot of energy. And at the end of the day, you're at a ball game. Get on with the big group sing. Get your kumbayayas out. Huzzah for uncalculated glee.

Movie redux

2009-05-05T11:35:00.002-04:00

We are caught up on our TV, after a spring of being behind by at least 3-4 episodes on all of our various addictions, to wit:

United States of Tara
Mad Men
Breaking Bad
Dollhouse
House
Burn Notice
Chuck
Ugly Betty
30 Rock
whatever I'm forgetting

We have thus begun renting movies, something that the AppleTV combined with the TiVo Amazon makes incredibly easy. Our feeling about movies is this: they are 2 hour (plus) commitments, they are singular entities, and thus if you dislike them, you've just wasted an evening, you have a bad taste in your mouth, and it's just not a Good Thing. We had a bad run of films 6 months or so ago, and so it seems that we are returning to the film genre with trepidation. We had mixed results.

To wit!

Rachel Getting Married: um, not for us. Perhaps the title would have warned us of this, what with the married bit, and what with our lack of love for the whole wedding process. But it has Rosemary DeWitt! We love her in Madmen and in Tara, right? And there were nominations for acting awards, and people were excited, so maybe it's not that thing. But it pretty much was that thing, in an artsy way: 2 hours of documentary-style filming of a wedding. With only ambient soundtrack, but of course the family is hooked into super-artsy musicy people, so they have a normal soundtrack to their lives of jazz musicians and string quartets anyway, which is utterly realistic. Problems with the film included the neo-liberal oh-so-wealthy yet hippie multiculti how many different musical dance styles can we pack into a wedding thing, the tragic narrative of drug addict/rehab/horrible family truth buried, the I love you I hate you sister/mother/father thing, and the filming that said in all caps: hey, look! here's great acting! here! look! great acting! So, no. Not for us.

Role Models: expectations not so high for this, although reviews were good, so we were up for some light entertainment. It delivers. Well-crafted, a modicum of stupid frat-boy jokes, but not too many, the deadpan Paul Rudd worked well, and the medieval battles were awesome. Typical comedic narrative, but does it well. Not trying too hard.

Zach and Miri Make a Porno: Also good, with Kevin Smith delivering again, better acting (or fewer bad actors) than some of his earlier efforts, and the development of the relationship between Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks was well crafted. 10-year high school reunion scene made us feel old. Probably because we are. Sigh. Didn't try to do more than it set out to do, and that was refreshing. Recommended.

State of Play (in the theater): Good remake of the excellent British series (that one starring our fave British actor, John Simm, and the woman with the best scottish accent known to man, Kelly Macdonald, along with Bill Nighy (can't go wrong) so we went in reminding ourselves that it couldn't be as awesome as that). Russell Crowe, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren deliver. Why does Crowe have to be fat for the film? I don't understand that, except that perhaps they were going for "typical american" which means obese? Hm. Maybe he's just fat now. Seems odd. Rachel McAdams' eyes are a bit too doe-y, Affleck isn't quite believable as a Gulf War vet-now-representative. And he switches between Massachusetts accent at the beginning and a Pennsylvania and/or flat accent in the remaining 3/4ths of the film. Odd. The real star of the movie, though, are the locations. A love for DC's 1950s-70s architecture (I know, unbelievable, right?) shows through here: gorgeous shots of the Kennedy Center, Watergate Hotel, and then fun shots of hangouts like Ben's Chili Bowl. The movie is about the street-level work reporters do, and the locations underscore that. Well done.

Charlie Wilson's War: Why did this not get more press/acclaim/interest? Wonderful film, very interesting in relation to present day interests in Afghanistan without being heavy-handed about it, Tom Hanks is amazing. Aaron Sorkin screenplay (say no more). Rent it asap if you have not yet seen it. Provides insight into answers about why Washington can screw things up so badly, and also how politics works in general. Also: cool architecture in this one too.

We are back to watching Northern Exposure, catching up mid-4th season where we left off. Burn Notice new season starts early June--how I miss the voiceovers. And Dollhouse: getting very very good.

The Wire aesthetic

2009-04-22T15:06:00.005-04:00

I've been thinking a bit about photography lately, investigating various moments in its history, particularly in the context of India. But in surfing life I often check the In Pictures section of the BBC--or similar sections of any news organization--to see what they've got up, what kinds of images they choose, this sort of thing. So today, I went over to the BBC for the first time in a while and discovered a set of images titled Urban Decay. About Baltimore.

What struck me about the photographs was the aesthetic of the "failed city" to riff on the "failed state" phrase. I teach the picturesque: a valuing of the ruin, of the once great and now fallen, of the vegetation taking over human-constructed monuments, buildings, homes. Usually these images, in the context of India especially, are dotted with small "natives" that add scale and a sense that there are people here, just not anyone that really cares about the city.

I'm not sure this is some sort of failed city picturesque, but it does strike me that images of Baltimore, a city without a really recognizable skyline, without an obvious "landmark" (and don't say: the first Washington Monument, because no one outside of B'more knows about that), that a city without that but with other iconic images from television may remain in this mode of ruined city aesthetics for a while, perhaps forever. Even the photograph of the bannister in Mount Vernon, a downtown neighborhood that's a mix of grit and high-end, even that celebrates the agedness, the moment in the past when curved iron railings decorated the homes of the railway barons and shipping magnates in haute B'more.

It strikes me as similar to that Indian picturesque: the construction of urban decay and its relation to B'more will remain with the city for a long time. As will the reality of urban decay. This kind of picturesque doesn't tell me anything new about poverty, cities, or B'more. It repeats. But if people continue to come to B'more (as they do) looking for "the Wire tour" of the bad neighborhoods, then we continue to reenact an understanding of the city that constitutes it as a place of devastating, immovable poverty. I think that doesn't do justice to Simon's love of the city, and I think that doesn't help cities like B'more figure out ways of becoming un-broken.

SWISH

2009-04-14T11:41:00.002-04:00

South Waziristan Institute of Strategic Hermeneutics
has just published its 14th report, in this case advising al-Qaeda of their current situation in a Barack Obama era.

I've been reading these reports on and off for the last few years, and they are both tongue-in-cheek and very very illuminating. I love the format. Provides quick overviews of current events as they impact particular groups, usually al-Qaeda but occasionally other actors...check them out:
Link

landing between blast-offs

2009-03-23T20:11:00.002-04:00

The flight attendant on our YVR-ORD leg asked us to prepare for "blast off" which was both funny and a bit disturbing. but he did it in a Canadian accent (simultaneously clipped and rounded, with perfect enunciation) and so it was alright. I find I am able to grade papers on planes and nowhere else. something about the confined tube of the aircraft, the lack of space to move elbows, get up and have some more tea, walk the dog, watch Rachel Maddow on the TiVo, make yogurt, do a bit of rowing--yes. that must be it. Got to see friends and family and friends who are family and family who are friends while in the great northwest, and it is great. Big. Trees, mountains, sky, water. The materiality of the northwest is quite astounding.

Vancouver was both the glass city and the rainy city. did they source all of the glass for the high rises from the same manufacturer? in the same slightly-off shade of blue? Stanley park is as remembered in past visits. I went by my childhood home, if one has a single childhood home, this would be mine I suppose, where we lived from age 1.5 to age 8. The new owners (or one of the intervening occupants) has painted it a garish bright white with sea-blue trim. And I think the porch/steps are new. So it was not as disconcerting as it could have been. I walked to school again. Had trouble believing my mother let me do so at age 5. Oak trees. church where we met for Brownies. playground. newer than the one I remember (which was renewed when I was there and has since been re-renewed in the era of rubber mats everywhere and wood that doesn't splinter. they took out the cool but dangerous zip wire ride, sadly). reminisced about the violence of 2nd grade. much of it perpetrated, in my memory, by me. probably the source for my interest in Gandhi today. hm. I also was fairly arrogant, I recall, about my ability with the group-play dual jump-rope, in which one jumped into the moving ropes....

Cinderella
Dressed in yella
went upstairs to kiss a fella
made a mistake and kissed a snake
how many doctors did it take?
one, two, three....

perhaps it was: how many doctors would it take? that would make sense from a Canadian, clipped, rounded, enunciated perspective.

O Canada. Loonies and Twonies. Canucks. Hockey. totem poles. ferries. zip wire rides. what's not to like?

best coffee in Vancouver Wa: Peets
best coffee in Vancouver BC: Caffe Artigiano
best Chinese: Wong's King, Portland
best pork: Hapa Izakaya, Vancouver BC (mm. pork.)
best grilled cheese dessert: Rain City Grill, Vancouver BC
best chips & salsa on the trip: Provecho in Vancouver BC