Category Archives: longreads

Endorsement: Grinding Your Coffee by Hand

Posted on May 29, 2020 | 1 comment
Woman grinding coffee

I recently came across a paean to grinding your coffee by hand on Gear Patrol by Tyler Chin. It caught my eye because Chin uses the same manual tool I use every day, a relatively inexpensive ceramic burr grinder from Hario.

Like Chin, I’ve flirted with the idea of buying an electric burr grinder but never moved on one, partly for some of the same reasons Chin puts forward in favor of good ol’ fashioned hand-powered pulverizing.1

For starters, hand grinding elicits a different kind of engagement than an electric grinder does. As Chin writes,

hand grinding my beans brings me closer to the hands that farmed them. I try to buy coffee from roasters that are sustainably and ethically sourcing their beans. Coffee farming is a labor-intensive job, sometimes with minimal profit. As cheesy as it sounds, I feel a connection to the farmers who spend their days making sure the rest of the world stays caffeinated.

Chin may worry this sounds cheesy, but he’s actually getting at something rather profound, something Michael Sacasas discussed in a recent edition of his excellent newsletter The Convivial Society — that is, philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann’s distinction between focal things and devices. Borgmann explains the distinction in greater detail in his 1984 book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, but Sacasas offers a good précis.

He starts by explaining what Borgmann means by “devices”:

In Borgmann’s view devices are characterized by how they combine a heightened availability of the commodity they offer with a machinery that is increasingly hidden from view. Basically, they make things easier while simultaneously making them harder to understand. Devices excel at making what they offer “instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.”

An electric burr grinder is a device in the Borgmannian sense. It’s easy to use and produces ground coffee quickly, but its operations are at least partially obscured behind plastic.

By contrast, focal things, Sacasas explains, “ask something of you. Borgmann speaks of their having a commanding presence. They don’t easily yield to our desire for ease and convenience. A radio and a musical instrument both produce music, but only one asks something of you in return.” A manual burr grinder, for example, asks you to grind, which, while not too strenuous for most able-bodied people, is an inconvenience, just as it’s usually “easier” to turn on the radio to hear music than it is to play an instrument and make it yourself.

A good way to think about the difference between devices and focal things, Sacasas suggests, is “the ideal device renders us altogether passive while the ideal focal thing renders us wholly engaged.”

But what about the connection Chin feels to the farmers of his coffee? Can a manual burr grinder produce that? Yeah, maybe. As Sacasas writes, quoting Borgmann,

a focal thing … “is inseparable from its context, namely, its world, and from our commerce with the thing and its world, namely, engagement.” In other words, focal things draw us into a web of practices and relations. Immediately thereafter, Borgmann adds, “The experience of a thing is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing’s world.”

Put differently, to use a focal thing like a manual burr grinder is to feel not only a direct, physical connection to the coffee you’re grinding, but a connection to the web of practices and relations of its production as well. The farmers who grew the coffee handled it, now you’re handling it.

If that weren’t enough, manual grinders also have the virtue of being less obtrusive. As Chin notes, “Electric coffee grinders are much more efficient, but they also take up much more counter space.”

Moreover, grinding coffee by hand makes available time for contemplation, which, if indispensable in the best of times, is doubly so nowadays. As Chin writes:

Hand grinding takes me at most a couple minutes — despite the strain, which makes it feel much longer — but in that time I can think about the day that lies ahead of me. I’m not making big batches of coffee, so the size of the Skerton is perfect for my daily grind. I’ve had my current model for almost two years now, but if it were to break, I wouldn’t hesitate about buying another one.

I feel exactly the same way. I’ve had my little Hario grinder for over a decade now; if it ever broke, I’d get another one.

The other thing that comes to mind here is a list at the end of Wendell Berry’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” (PDF). First published in the New England Review & Bread Loaf Quarterly and reprinted in Harper’s in 1988, I think I first encountered it in the obscure-but-delightful 1996 collection Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club: Second Thoughts on the Electronic Revolution.

As its title suggests, the essay is about why Berry isn’t going to switch from writing with pencil and paper to writing on a computer. I’m less interested in Berry’s position on computers per se than I am in the criteria he uses to decide if a new tool is worth adopting. Here’s his list in full:

  1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
  2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
  3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
  4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
  5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
  6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
  7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
  8. It should come from a small, privately-owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
  9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

I find this list useful for thinking about whether to “upgrade” all sorts of things. Of course, if one were to evaluate an electric burr grinder in light of these criteria as opposed to a manual burr grinder, it would fail most of them. An electric burr grinder is more expensive (#1), bigger (#2), uses more energy (#4), isn’t body powered (#5), and is harder to repair (#6). I’ll concede, however, that it might produce better ground coffee (#3). Still, like Chin, I am going to stick with my manual burr grinder. If nothing else, in addition to all the reasons touched upon above, it has the salubrious effect of limiting my coffee consumption to that which I grind myself. Ne quid nimis.

Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash.

1. Needless to say, if you’re serious about coffee, you should be grinding your own beans, not buying them pre-ground.

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On Academic Bios

Posted on April 30, 2020 | 6 comments
Be proud of doing it your own way

Branko Milanovic reads the bios of “several contemporary economists” and is struck by their “bareness”: “The lives sounded like CVs. Actually, there was hardly any difference between their CVs and their lives (to the extent that I could tell).”

He continues:

The lives (i.e. CVs) typically went like this. He/she graduated from a very prestigious university as the best in their class; had many offers from equally prestigious universities; became an assistant professor at X, tenured at Y; wrote a seminal paper on Z when he/she was W. Served on one or two government panels. Moved to another prestigious university. Wrote another seminal paper. Then wrote a book. And then…this went on and on. You could create a single template, and just input the name of the author, and the titles of the papers, and perhaps only slight differences in age for each of them.

Surely there are some generic conventions at play here — indeed, Milanovic could be describing his own academic bio in the paragraph above — but is the boringness of so many academic bios indicative of some special paucity of life among the contemporary professoriate?

If so, Milanovic wonders about the implications:

[H]ow can people who had lived such boring lives, mostly in one or two countries, with the knowledge of at most two languages, having read only the literature in one language, having travelled only from one campus to another, and perhaps from one hiking resort to another, have meaningful things to say about social sciences with all their fights, corruption, struggles, wars, betrayals and cheating. Had they been physicists or chemists, it would not matter. You do not have to lead an interesting life in order to understand how atoms move, but perhaps you do need it to understand what moves humans (cf. Vico).

I think Milanovic has point, but again, part of this is genre. Academic bios elide all kinds of interesting stuff. That’s what makes them academic bios. Remember, too, that Milanovic is talking about economists. Yet I also wonder if the template he skewers has a normative function. There is a danger, it seems to me, of trying to live a life that might lead to one of these conventional bios, rather than a life that flows from other concerns. If you’ve ever warily asked yourself, “How would X look on my CV?,” where X is something that’s maybe just slightly unusual, and which is a question academics (particularly junior academics) are encouraged to ask themselves, you’ve submitted to the subtle tyranny of the boring academic bio.

I imagine such self-disciplining happens in other professions, too.

One school of thought says, as per Flaubert, “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” But another school of thought — the school I increasingly find myself admiring, if not fully a part of — wonders if something about Flaubert’s formula doesn’t add up, or is at least a kind of privilege. “Orderly and boring lives are a privilege of rich and orderly societies,” asserts Milanovic.

Recents events have exposed the fact — if it was ever really hidden — that maybe we aren’t living in as rich or as orderly a society as we might have once liked to think we were. Paths that once seemed straight have become more obviously crooked. If the perfectly neat and tidy academic bio was always a sort of humblebrag by those who made it to the top, the résuméic equivalent of a millionaire wearing jeans, now it seems fanciful in its lifelessness.

Let us turn instead to unconventional, unacademic bios and advice for inspiration, as I have long found myself doing.

For example…

Sinclair Lewis argues that aspiring writers should “become a doctor or a grocer, a mail-flying aviator or a carpenter, a farmer or a bacteriologist, a priest or a Communist agitator” in addition to seeking to become a writer. Decades later, Werner Herzog would proffer advice to aspiring filmmakers, encouraging them to “work as a bouncer in a sex-club, a warden in a lunatic asylum or in a slaughterhouse. Walk on foot, learn languages, learn a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema.” This, needless to say, isn’t the advice given to aspiring academics. If, for example, you’re an academic who dabbles as a dominatrix, you might be blackballed.

Writer Charles Bukowski famously worked a number of odd jobs while cranking out poems and stories. Composer Philip Glass worked as a taxi driver, plumber, gallery assistant, and furniture mover until he was 41. Before becoming a bestselling author, Louis L’Amour was “a longshoreman, a lumberjack, an elephant handler, a fruit picker and an officer on a tank destroyer in World War II. He had also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, been shipwrecked in the West Indies and been stranded in the Mojave Desert, and had won 51 of 59 fights as a professional boxer.” Compare these biographical sketches, which I draw energy from, to the one Milanovic puts forward above, which puts me to sleep.

Similarly, before he was an actor, James Garner worked as “telephone installer, oilfield roughneck, chauffeur, dishwasher, janitor, lifeguard, grocery clerk, salesman and, fatefully, gas station attendant.” Kris Kristofferson was a “Rhodes scholar, a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger, a boxer, [and] a professional helicopter pilot” before becoming a songwriter and actor. Viggo Mortensen’s “previous careers included driving a truck, delivering flowers, and loading ships in Denmark. For years he lived from gig to gig, check to check, mostly broke. It probably didn’t help that, on a whim, he left L. A. and moved to Idaho. He supported his acting career for years by bartending and waiting tables.” These were jobs these guys did before they made it big, yes, but they weren’t merely that; they were constitutive of who they were/are later as people and artists.

Even if an academic once worked as, say, a bartender, and I imagine a lot of academics have done some bartending, it’s not something you expect to see listed in their bio, which is a shame. Something like bartending, as Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner write in Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969), “can be taken as evidence … that the teacher has been in contact with reality at some point in his life.” “One of the common sources of difficulty with teachers,” they continue, “can be found in the fact that most of them simply move from one side of the desk (as students) to the other side (as ‘teachers’) and they have not had much contact with the ways things are outside of school rooms.” Putting aside the eternal debate over whether the classroom is part of the “real world,” I’ll simply say this: rather than omit bartending stints from their bios, academics should be encouraged to include them.

The above are all examples taken from this blog, and admittedly white and masculinist ones at that. But there are many more such cases. And there has never been a better time to draw inspiration from them, whatever your career. Don’t worry if your story is messy, I say. Shun the boilerplate bio, and the conformity it hints at. Embrace the idiosyncratic and vibrant path you surely are already on, and let your bio be a testament to as much. In the end, those are the ones people like to read, not CVs.

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Posted in academe, inspiration, longreads, work

Fall In

Posted on September 22, 2017 | 15 comments

chris-lawton-154388

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash.

I’m writing this on the first day of fall in the Northern Hemisphere.

Depending upon where you are, it might not feel like fall yet. Right now, for instance, it’s 92°F outside where I live. And humid. More summer than fall. Yet, at the same time, school’s back in session, football is being played, and Halloween paraphernalia is appearing in stores.

The leaves on one of the trees outside my window are starting to change color. Some leaves have even started to fall. It’s getting darker earlier and lighter later. And even though it’s still hot out during the day, it’s cooling down more at night.

Change is in the air.

This leads to a question: Should one also change in conjunction with the seasons? By this I mean more than donning a natty scarf when the temperature drops below a certain level—I mean changing things about the way you eat, sleep, live, and work.

Conventional productivity advice doesn’t really take up this question. One of the things, in fact, that irks me about such advice is that it tends to frame things in terms of daily routines, routines that are ostensibly the same regardless of the season. In other words, most productivity advice is seasonless. Here I’m thinking of things like Mason Currey’s engrossing 2013 book Daily Rituals and Tim Ferriss’s more tech bro-y late-2016 knockoff Tools for Titans.

Now, I’m as interested in famous people’s daily routines as anyone. But at the same time, I feel it’s important to resist the tyranny of “the day.”

What do I mean by that?

Well, we live in a world of seasons—and increasingly more variable and violent seasons at that—but productivity advice seems to always think in terms of the day, the week, the year, or five years, never the season, the sun, and the shadow.

In Lewis Mumford’s endlessly-rich 1937 book Technics and Civilization, he explains how the clock altered human relations by organizing everything around twenty-four little hours instead of, say, the rhythm of the seasons.

The consequences of this, Mumford argues, are profound:

When one thinks of the day as an abstract span of time, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter’s night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When one thinks of time, not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minutes, and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence.

Because of the clock, Mumford continues, “Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it. A generalized time-consciousness accompanied the wider use of clocks: dissociating time from organic sequences….”

Since we all pretty much live according to “clock time” now, the autumnal equinox presents us with an opportunity to cast off our Apple Watches and reflect on some of the benefits of living according to what might be called “seasonal time.” To that end, I encourage you to step out of “clock time” and into “seasonal time.”

This will, no doubt, strike some as unappealing. Many people see nature as something to overcome or counteract, not as something to flow with or submit to. For others, it will be impossible. “Clock time” is simply imposed on them too strongly. But if you can do it, even just a little bit, I strongly recommend it, if only for the perspective it brings.

To quote Ecclesiastes 3:1, “To every thing there is a season.” What if we took that adage seriously, not just by buying pumpkin spice lattes but by doing key things in a more fall-like way? Fall-like might take different forms. The point is to embrace fall in particular and seasonal change in general. I’m definitely not recommending becoming “Mr. Autumn Man”. I’m talking about something else, something deeper.

One example I like is how novelist Lee Child sits down every September and begins work on a new Jack Reacher novel. He finishes up sometime the following spring and then spends the rest of the year doing other stuff—stuff like spending the entire month of August on vacation. (I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty nice.) Note, too, that this routine produces a book a year. (As someone who writes much more slowly, this sounds pretty nice to me as well.) And Child has been doing things this way since the late 1990s. (For more on Child’s process, see Andy Martin’s Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me.)

Fall is a time to write for me as well, but it also means welcoming—rather than fighting against—the shorter days, the football games, the decorative gourds. Productivity writer Nicholas Bate’s seven fall basics are more sleep, more reading, more hiking, more reflection, more soup, more movies, and more night sky. I like those too. The winter will bring with it new things, new adjustments. Hygge not hay rides. Ditto the spring. Come summer, I’ll feel less stress about stopping work early to go to a barbecue or movie because I know, come autumn, I’ll be hunkering down. More and more, I try to live in harmony with the seasons, not the clock. The result has been I’m able to prioritize better.

And yes, fall for me also means some of the stereotypical stuff: apple picking, leafy walks, we’re even trying to go to a corn maze this year.

In sum, as the Earth wobbles around the Sun, don’t be afraid to switch things up. I can’t promise an uptick in productivity, but when you think of things in terms of seasons instead of a single day, the entire year becomes your canvas.

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Zoe’s Desk

Posted on February 13, 2013 | 5 comments

Netflix’s first second original series House of Cards appeared online earlier this month. Set in a parallel universe Washington D.C. circa the present, House of Cards follows the rib-eating, Southern American English-speaking Representative Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) as he maneuvers for position after being passed over for Secretary of State. David Fincher is one of the show’s producers and directed the first two episodes. The whole thing is based on a BBC miniseries by the same name that was based on a novel by Michael Dobbs. I found it addictive but ridiculous.

Perhaps most of all I was struck by the shots of Zoe Barnes, the intrepid female reporter character played by Kate Mara, working in her apartment in show’s first episode.

establishingofzoe

Shots like this are consistent with Fincher’s habit of documenting — in films like Zodiac, The Social Network, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — work. Or rather, his habit of conveying the feeling of massive amounts of what is often referred to as knowledge work taking place. In a number of Fincher’s films we’re given glimpses of characters doing things like researching, writing, or coding. At some level, the bulk of his films are about characters trying to make sense of information. But such glimpses are by definition fleeting. Fincher does not so much film work as cleverly give the impression of its occurrence.

Another good example of this from House of Cards is the education bill Underwood — whose name recalls a brand of typewriter — commissions. (Minor spoilers ahead.) We see Underwood hire a bunch of young speechwriter, K Street types, we see him charge them with writing a bill, we see them with their laptops open, we see them batting around ideas, we see them with their ties undone and their no-iron khakis wrinkled, we see them struggling to stay awake, and finally we see the 300+ page document they produce, but we never actually see them working. It’s a neat trick on Fincher’s part. It’s difficult to render knowledge work cinematically (quick, what’s the last great movie about writing you remember seeing?), as opposed to physical work which more readily lends itself to Rocky-style montages, but Fincher has figured out a way to short circuit the process. Like all good filmmakers, he knows that if he gives us the signs, we will fill in the rest.

closeuponzoe

On a more basic level, I just love images like this. I am a workspace voyeur — especially writer’s workspaces. My bible here is Jill Krementz’s The Writer’s Desk, a collection of wonderfully evocative photographs of, well, writer’s desks. In the introduction, John Updike writes, “I look at these photographs with a prurient interest, the way that I might look at the beds of notorious courtesans. Except that the beds would tell me less than these desks do. Here the intimacy of the literary act is caught in flagrante delicto: at these desks characters are spawned, plots are spun, imaginative distances are spanned.”

Now, Zoe Barnes isn’t really a famous writer, and her workspace has been meticulously constructed by a production designer right down to the garbage, but there’s still something thrilling about getting a peek at it. Sadly, it’s the only peek we get. It’s as if Fincher knows this one look-see can legitimize all the work Zoe does throughout the rest of the series that we never see.

Finally, I know her apartment is supposed to be junky — in a later episode Spacey’s character essentially asks her whether her parents know her place is a dump — but I sort of like it. With its stacks of paper, piles of books, and conspicuous coffee pot, it reminds me of a prototypical grad student’s apartment. Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that Zoe seems to be halfway living with Lucas by the end of the thirteen episodes. Living like a grad student is no way to live.

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Posted in longreads, movies, TV, work, writing

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Coors

Posted on June 21, 2012 | Leave a comment

Paul Newman

“This may sound absurd to anyone born after 1975, but there was actually a time when Coors – and I mean Coors, not the watered-down Silver Bullet stuff your girlfriend drank on spring break – was, bar none, beer of choice for the man’s man. Both Hud and the real-life Paul Newman loved the stuff. Tom Waits was known to knock back a few. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young swilled it while hanging out in Laurel Canyon (okay, so Nash was never quite a paragon of masculinity, but back in the day Stephen Stills was a country-blues-slinging demigod – look it up). And what did The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock take to drinking while drifting in the pool after getting his first taste of red-hot American cougar? Coors.”

—Tyler Thoreson, “Coors Original: An Appreciation” (2009)

Other famous Coors fans? Burt Reynolds, at least in Smokey and the Bandit, a movie whose McGuffin is smuggling a truckload of Coors from Texas to Georgia. Also, king-of-cool Steve McQueen, who not only loved the stuff so much he asked for it on his deathbed, but for whom the beer figured so prominently in his cosmology, a lover once described his penis as “two Coors beer cans welded together.” Then there’s singer-songwriter John Denver, baseball hall-of-famer Carl Yastrzemski, 38th President of the United States Gerald Ford, the late, great Ray Bradbury, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestial. Yes, even E.T.

Now, I realize that appealing to celebrity is a common fallacious appeal to authority, but maybe, just maybe, these (white, save for E.T.) guys knew something – at least when it comes to easy-drinking, pale, fizzy lagers in a can – the beer connoisseurs don’t.

Dean Martin

Dean Martin

Keith Richards

Keith Richards

Coors the company, it must be said, has, by some accounts, a pretty shady record, Ice Cube’s recent shilling for them notwithstanding. But that certainly doesn’t make them unique among corporations.1 Assuming products can stand on their own merit regardless of what company produced them, let it be said that I like their beer, not their (past) politics. Besides, I never pay for my Coors, I steal it.2

  1. All sorts of corporations do all sorts of shady things, and while that’s not good, it doesn’t, for the most part, stop us from giving our money to them. As Adrian Woolridge notes in Masters of Management, “Philip Morris is still one of the best-performing stocks in the world. A study by the Wharton Business School … found that ‘ethical’ funds underperform the general market by 31 points a year. A study by the European Union showed that while 75 percent of consumers said they were willing to adjust their shopping habits in light of ethical and environmental considerations, only 3 percent had actually done so.” In other words, people tend to like products from companies that are evil.  ↩
  2. Not really. ↩

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Jamin’ on the One

Posted on February 10, 2011 | 8 comments

Prince at the drums back in the day

On what was an otherwise quiet Sunday evening for me a couple of weeks ago, Questlove – of The Roots and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon fame – tweeted this:

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Posted in longreads, music, Prince

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The L-Word

Posted on January 15, 2011 | 5 comments

One week ago, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner tried to kill U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords outside of a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona. Nineteen other people were shot in the process, six of them fatally, including cute-as-a-button–9-year-old Christina Green.

People wasted no time in branding Loughner a loner.

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Posted in longreads, media

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Books vs. E-Books

Posted on February 16, 2010 | 14 comments

Photo by troyholden.

Much of the discourse surrounding electronic books – e.g., Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s nook, and Sony’s Reader – is what David Edgerton might call “innovation-centric.” That is, a lot of the talk about electronic books is about how, at some indeterminate but nevertheless rapidly approaching point in the future, after having definitively obsolesced printed periodicals, electronic books will supplant the granddaddy of all media: printed books.

Here, for instance, is Jacob Weisberg on the Kindle:

The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy, 550-year union, reading and printing are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.

Yet old and new technologies tend, more often than not, to co-exist for a while. Old technologies, to borrow a line from General Douglas MacArthur, never die, they just fade way.

Moreover, new doesn’t necessarily mean better. Indeed, printed books may actually be technologically superior in many ways – at this stage of the game at least – to the e-books vying to supersede them. (People sometimes forget that books are a technology.)

To explain what I mean by this, I turn to Gabriel Zaid’s wonderful little book So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance. In it, Zaid gives six reasons why books are superior to other forms of media.

Let’s look at each in turn.

Zaid’s first point is that books can be skimmed easily. That is, one can flip through a book to get a quick idea of its content. In this respect, Zaid argues, only paintings and photographs are superior to books because you can take them in all at once. Yes, you can scrub through video and audio recordings, but not nearly as easily as you can flip through a book. At this point I think it’s probably safe to say it’s actually easier to skim articles on the Web than it is to skim e-books, and that’s a pretty damning indictment of e-books in my view. Electronics books can, of course, be searched, but they can’t easily be skimmed. This strikes me as an important distinction.

Zaid’s second point is that books can be read at a pace determined by the reader. He writes, “A book can be explored at thousands of words per minute with speed-reading techniques, or one revelatory line can be lingerly contemplated. And it is so easy to turn back, to reread, to halt, to skip things that are of no interest.” In theory, you can read e-books at your own pace as well, but I wonder if the fact that electronic texts are hard to skim also makes it hard to take them in at different speeds. After all, if you can’t skim an e-book first, how do you know what to linger over and what to skip?

Zaid’s third point is that books are portable. But then so are e-books. You never have to plug a book in first in order read it however. [Idea for a Twilight Zone episode set in the not-too-distant future: Everyone on Earth is killed in a nuclear war except for one man who loves to read, and finally he has all the time in the world in which to do so. By this point, however, all books are e-books. The twist is, just as our main character is sitting down in the ruins of the public library to read, the power goes out and he has no way to recharge his Kindle.] And although something like an unabridged dictionary isn’t very portable, a small, slim paperback is clearly more portable than any present-day e-book device expect for maybe the iPhone, not to mention infinitely more flexible.

His fourth point is that you don’t need to make an appointment to read a book. This is one of the major advantages books have over something like television, though digital video recorders increasingly allow people to “time shift” TV shows, but that’s interesting in and of itself because it points to one of the areas where books have had the advantage all along. Zaid’s larger point here seems to be that books are available whenever and wherever, that you can move between books easily, and that you can move within books easily, a potent trifecta.

Zaid’s fifth point is that books are cheap. “Millions of readers,” he observes, “can afford to buy a collection of great books.” E-books might be cheaper in the long run because they can be copied for free and distributed for pennies, but the initial costs are still pretty high. E-book readers are bourgeois devices. Think about how many books can you buy for the price of the cheapest iPad (currently $499). Particularly if they’re used books.

His final point is that books permit greater variety. One day, I suppose, nearly all books will be available electronically. But that day isn’t here yet. And there are some real legal and technological hurdles to be worked out before that happens.

Taken as a whole, Zaid’s points make me think not only that books have some real advantages over other forms of media but that other forms of media may actually be trying, without realizing it, to become more like books, e.g., DVRs help make TV shows more like books.

As Zaid puts it:

Perhaps modern technology’s greatest tribute to the advantages of the age-old book is the attempt to develop electronic screens as thin and flexible as paper, hundreds of which could be bound into something like a book, which would have the same visual and typographic appearance as a book and even the same tactile feel, without electric or electronic cords, e-book readers disguised as printed books.

Viewed from this perspective, it’s not so much that books are getting replaced as it is perhaps that new media forms, in order to compete with books, are increasingly taking on some of the characteristics of books. All of which raises the question: Why not just read an old-fashioned, printed book?

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Posted in books, longreads, reading, technology

Get Yourself a College Girl

Posted on July 15, 2009 | 2 comments

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Last week I was watching TCM in the middle of the afternoon when Get Yourself a College Girl (1964) came on. It’s a Beach Party clone, one of those mindless ’60s movies where girls wear bikinis almost exclusively and everyone dances the Watusi.

Though I’ve never felt any particular affection for the genre, I literally couldn’t stop watching Get Yourself a College Girl. I found myself feeling a bit like Giles De’Ath (John Hurt) in the criminally-underrated Love and Death on Long Island (1997) when he stumbles upon the work of Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley), star of such B-movies as Hotpants College 2 – i.e., inexplicably finding great depth and beauty in kitsch.

The film is easy to dismiss, and as dismissals go, Howard Thompson’s 1965 New York Times review is a classic: “Get Yourself a College Girl deserves – and gets here – a one-line verdict: idiocy strictly for the birds. Or maybe the Animals. They’re in it, if anybody cares.”

On one level, Thompson may have been right. The movie isn’t available on home video, which suggests maybe nobody does care. (If you want to watch it, you’ll have to wait until TCM airs it again.)

The film’s plot – such as it is – revolves around a demure college student named Terry (played by 24-year-old former Miss America Mary Ann Mobley) who is paying her way through college by writing provocative pop songs.

There’s some interesting stuff to be found here about academe, nascent second wave feminism, and race (e.g., the scene in which, in order to show the Senator Morrison character’s fuddy-duddy point of view, shots of white American teenagers dancing are intercut with stock footage of African “savages” jumping around).

Perhaps the most notable thing about the film, however, is its music. Indeed, after watching it, I felt compelled to buy a used copy of the soundtrack (which, as luck would have it, was released on compact disc in 1992).

Produced by Sam Katzman (who was also responsible for Rock Around the Clock [1956]), the movie features performances by The Dave Clark Five, The Animals, Stan Getz, the Jimmy Smith Trio, The Standells, and Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys with Roberta Linn. As perhaps the definitive overview of the film puts it,

Get Yourself A College Girl features not just a great list of starring musical acts, but an extensive one: in addition to a performance of the title number by Mobley, we’re treated almost every ten minutes [to] … a wonderfully broad array of acts, running the gamut from two variants of the British invasion, to Latin-flavored jazz, to early garage rock, and even Las Vegas-type lounge.

The Dave Clark Five’s appearance is noteworthy because it’s apparently the first time a British rock & roll group appeared in an American 1960s pop film, but it’s the Stan Getz Quartet featuring Astrud Gilbero’s performance of “The Girl from Ipanema” that’s the real show-stopper. It may even be “the single finest performance of the entire Beach Party genre.”

In true Giles De’Ath fashion, however, it’s the stupid, sexy title number by Mobley that captivates me the most. Have a listen.

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Posted in endorsements, longreads, movies, music, TV

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Did the Joker Kill Heath Ledger?

Posted on March 1, 2008 | 26 comments

One of the more intriguing things bandied about in the days following Heath Ledger’s tragic death last month was that the Joker — the comic book character Ledger plays in the upcoming The Dark Knight — killed him.

By this people didn’t mean that the Joker, a fictional character, literally killed Ledger, but they didn’t exactly mean it in a wholly figurative sense either. Rather, people seemed to be suggesting that Ledger was haunted by the Joker, unable to get him out of his system after playing him, and that this might at least partially explain his untimely death. In the words of John Brackett, “So did the Joker take over his mind and eventually end his life in a horribly ironic twist worthy of his green haired alter-ego?”

As more of the facts surrounding Ledger’s death came to light, the less people suggested that the Joker killed him. Yet, after reading Rolling Stone’s recent obituary for/appreciation of Ledger, I’m not entirely convinced it’s frivolous to ask whether the Joker might in some weird way be responsible for Ledger’s death. And if that is indeed the case, what does it say about the psychic power of fictional characters?

The following lines in the Rolling Stone piece seem to reinforce, if only subtly at times, the idea that the Joker killed Ledger:

  1. “He couldn’t seem to disengage; the inexactness bothered him.”
  2. “Ledger had no formal training, and there’s this to be said for acting school: it teaches you to approach a role as foreign, as a language you’ll temporarily speak. Ledger didn’t appear to have that. He needed to dig for (and inhabit) the part of himself that was the character. ‘Performance comes from absolutely believing what you’re doing,’ he said. ‘You convince yourself, and believe in the story with all your heart.’ It didn’t always shut off when a production did, and I think it ground him.”
  3. “As The Joker in next summer’s The Dark Knight, he will appear as a man severed from all connection. A ‘psychopathic, mass-murdering clown with zero empathy,’ is how he described it to the New York Times. On set, Michael Caine said the performance sometimes turned so frightening he forgot his own lines.”

I find these three quotes really provocative.

Interestingly, the article begins by mentioning Daniel Day-Lewis’s heartfelt reaction to the news of Ledger’s death on Oprah.

Most people probably thought that Day-Lewis was simply being classy and emotional, and that he deserved kudos for saying what was really on his mind, for acknowledging something Oprah probably wouldn’t have mentioned otherwise. But maybe Day-Lewis’s reaction had more to do with the fact that both he and Ledger approached acting in the same way, i.e., they both sought to become the characters they played. Maybe Day-Lewis expression of grief had something to do with the kinship he felt with Ledger, not just as a fellow actor, but as someone who knows how hard it is to detach after inhabiting a character body and soul.

Consider, for instance, a recent profile of Day-Lewis in The Guardian which tries halfheartedly to debunk “the popular image of him, namely that, for all his extraordinary talent, he is a tortured genius, living the life of a recluse, reluctantly breaking cover once every few years to inhabit body and soul hugely demanding screen roles,” but in the end simply reinforces this view.

The article notes that for The Last of the Mohicans (1992), “Day-Lewis underwent rigorous weight training during which he added 20lb of muscle to his body. Not content with that, he also learnt to live off the land and forest, as his character would have done, by spending six months learning how to camp, fish and skin animals. By the end of his training he had built himself a canoe. He also carried a Kentucky rifle at all times during filming and learnt how to load and fire it while running.”

Likewise, for In the Name of the Father (1993), “Day-Lewis lived on prison rations to lose 30 lb and spent extended periods in the jail cell on set, while crew hurled abuse and cold water at him.”

For The Crucible (1996), “Day-Lewis went back in time. He stayed on a Massachusetts island in the film set’s replica village — without electricity or running water — planted fields with 17th- century tools, and built his character’s house.”

For The Boxer (1997), Day-Lewis “trained with former world champion Barry McGuigan, who said he could have been a professional: ‘He was in the gym twice a day, seven days a week for nearly three years.’ Injuries included a broken nose and a herniated disc in his lower back.”

For Gangs of New York (2002), “Day-Lewis hired circus performers to teach him how to throw daggers and trained as a butcher. He got pneumonia during shooting, initially refusing to have treatment or trade his coat for a warmer one.”

Stories like these make me think that maybe Ledger couldn’t leave the Joker behind as well as Day-Lewis seems to be able to leave the characters he plays behind. Callous as it may sound, if the Joker really did have something to do with Ledger’s death, it actually makes me even more interested in seeing The Dark Knight.

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Posted in Heath Ledger, longreads, movies

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