Inconspicuous Consumption

This past Sunday I had the distinct honor of chaperoning 35 children--preteens, mostly--while they visited Wal-Mart. This particular excursion lasted two hours, giving one preteen the opportunity to buy $150 of candy and soda. I usually get antsy after 25 minutes of shopping (and I only bought $125 worth of candy and soda) so I ambled over to the magazine section and purchased a copy of Vanity Fair, mostly because the cover advertised the presence of an article written by Michael Lewis (which was, not surprisingly, excellent). This is the first time I've cracked open a copy of this particular periodical, and I was impressed with what I found. This is mostly because of a piece written by James Wolcott, titled "What's a Culture Snob to Do?" In it Wolcott says,

Books not only furnish a room, to paraphrase the title of an Anthony Powell novel, but also accessorize our outfits. They help brand our identities. At the rate technology is progressing, however, we may eventually be traipsing around culturally nude in an urban rain forest, androids seamlessly integrated with our devices. As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects—digitize and dematerialize—we approach a Star Trek future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles.

It's a good question that Wolcott raises: now that our books and music and movies are all contained in shiny but indistinguishable iPhones and Kindles and whatever comes next, how can people communicate their intellectual consumption?

Wolcott raises other questions related to the preponderance of these devices (for example, what will become of album cover and book jacket design?), but, to me, the shift of our reading material from conspicuous to un- is the most interesting. Here is Wolcott's conclusion:

I suspect that once this downturn plateaus and shrinks in the rearview mirror, we’ll just stock up on other possessions, which will be arrayed and arranged to show off not our personal aesthetics or expensive whims but our ethics—our progressive virtues. A place where we could play host to Barack and Michelle and feel assured they’d find nothing amiss.

I'm not sure that I agree with him. Humans have been using objects to communicate certain characteristics to the general public for a long time now. I'm not sure that we're ready to give up this personal marketing system just yet. I like knowing what people on the train are reading. I feel a modest kinship with those people who read The New Yorker on the subway. I don't even have to see the cover; the three-columned layout and interspersed cartoons and poetry are distinctive enough. I would hate to give that up, and I imagine other people would agree with the general sentiment. I base this partly on the habit people have of posting their currently playing music choice on Google Chat. Are we going to figure out a way to continue broadcasting our reading habits? Would the Kindle be a better product if it allowed for the option of listing the book currently being read? (The optional part would allow people to hide from embarrassing reading choices.) Is this the type of thing that might eventually migrate to a Twitter-integrated reading device? That would ruin most of the fun, because I already have a general sense of what types of things my friends like to read--it's way more interesting to try to judge strangers based only on the book they have open. I can't know for sure--and I have no idea what the mechanism might turn out to be--but I have confidence that intellectual snobs will figure out a way to continue making snap-judgments of others.

Don't See Movies That You Know Are Bad

From A.O. Scott's recent The New York Times article, "Open Wide: Spoon-Fed Cinema:"

Nearly every big hit so far has been part of a franchise built on an established
cultural brand.

In the case of the comedies, raunchy or romantic, the

genre functions as the brand, and in the case of “Up,” the Pixar label, almost

uniquely in today’s Hollywood, carries its own cachet and appeal. But otherwise
(and to some extent in these cases as well) the last few months have been a
festival of the known, the stuff you already bought and, from force of habit or
loyalty or maybe even satisfaction, decided to upgrade.

[snip]

Commercial success may represent the public’s embrace of a piece of
creative work, or it may just represent the vindication of a marketing strategy.
In bottom-line terms, this is a distinction without a difference. A movie that
people will go and see, almost as if they had no choice, is a safer business
proposition than one they may have to bother thinking about. In this respect
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is exemplary. It brilliantly stymies
reflection, thwarts argument, arrests intelligent response. The most interesting
thing about the movie — apart from Megan Fox’s outfits, I suppose — is that it
has made nearly $400 million domestically.

This last point might be the most important one Scott makes. There's only way to break this cycle of the movie studios spoon-feeding films to the public that appeal to the lowest common denominator, that gain approval based on marketability and not quality, that are familiar and un-inventive and bad: we need to vote with our wallets. Transformers received some of the worst reviews I've seen. I made an exception to my long-standing rule of avoiding movie reviews before actually seeing the film in order to read Roger Ebert's reaction, because I had heard that he offered such a thorough evisceration that his review turned out to be way more entertaining than the actual movie. And yet, the movie was a success because it earned tons of money.

The saddest part about the rise of a system which rewards studios for playing it safe is that we miss out on what should be cool films. I had about 8,000 G.I. Joes as a kid. They were my favorite toy, by far. The only way to keep me from seeing a movie based on my favorite childhood toy would be to inform me, in various ways, that this movie stinks. Paramount managed to achieve that. By refusing to let reviewers see the movie in advance and by releasing an awful trailer, Paramount communicated to me that they had decided to rely on nostalgia and familiarity--and not good movie-making--to draw in viewers.

If we want better movies we need to stop seeing movies that we know are bad.

How We Remember War

There's really no objective reason to connect these two things I'm about to compare. It might be nothing more than an accident that I happened to, on the same day, read a The New York Times story on the day after it was published and watch an Israeli documentary first released in June 2008. But the topics are similar (and, more important, distinct) and I'll take advantage of the happy coincidence of running across them on the same day, in order to think through how we remember war.

I find war monuments to be just about the most interesting things in the whole wide world. They reveal in a very tangible, very visible way how these major human events are thought of, in retrospect. That would be interesting enough in its own right, but, I posit, war memorials do more than that. As times passes and first-hand knowledge of these wars fades, these memorials play a huge role in determining how the wars themselves are remembered. That's why I found this The New York Times article about a dispute over the inclusion of a bronzed representation of a South Vietnamese fighter in the Veterans Memorial Park of Wichita, Kansas so interesting. Some American veterans want to maintain the American identity of the Park. Some Vietnamese-Americans want to have their cooperation in the war effort remembered. And according to The Times, "after long, tense talks, a compromise emerged last month at City Hall: the monument will sit just outside the John S. Stevens Veterans Memorial Park (named for a former local official and veteran), set apart from the rest of the memorials by a landscaped, six-foot earthen berm, with no sidewalk between."

I'm not sure which side is in the right here. The important point is that this decision matters, and that the players involved (in addition to Monica Davey and the editorial staff of The Times) recognize that, more than 34 years after the last of the American personnel was evacuated from Vietnam, we're still struggling to come to terms with how our official memory of this event will be formulated.

The 2008 Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir follows director Ari Folman as he attempts to overcome the official memory of Israel's 1982 Lebanon War. This film has gained a measure of notoriety for being an animated documentary. The animations and illustrations are routinely breathtaking--especially the repeated use of a toxic yellow, hinting equally at the trauma of the original event and the danger in remembering. But the documentary is important for reasons far beyond the decision to offer the tale in an animated form. At the start of the film, Folman finds himself unable to recall his involvement in the war. His memory is stirred through conversations with friends and fellow-soldiers, and he slowly pieces together what happened in Lebanon and what he did or did not do. The film contains conversations with psychologists and trauma experts who explain that the human brain can turn off, in a way, certain disturbing memories. The psychological basis of Folman's memory outage is fascinating, but I can't help but think that the official Israeli policy of embarrassment and silence contributed to the difficulty with which an individual soldier finds himself able to remember what happened. This is a case of an individual digging through the standardized national memory, in order to arrive at a more personal--and, perhaps, more authentic--memory of an important event.

Food should be true to itself

As you know, I have changed the way I eat, so I really eat fruits, vegetables, meats, and some dairy.
Eating like that really gives me options and I get to taste food that I have never been able to before.

But I will tell someone now that I want an apple. They always give me this type of answer:

"I love apples also! Have you ever tried it with Fat Free Cool Whip, a dash of cinnamon, a touch of maple syrup and three packets of Splenda. It tastes like an apple pie!!!"

This is where I have to be different now. I do not want something that tastes like something else. I do not want to fool myself anymore. If I wanted an apple pie I would make one.

A really good one! I do not want to dress up food anymore.

--Tony Posnanski, The Anti Jared

Today is the ninth day of Av, a month of the Jewish calendar. It has all sorts of historical significances, because this is the date traditionally remembered as the day on which both Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and its sequel were destroyed. There are a whole host of traditions and laws which govern behavior during the twenty-one days leading to this date, and many Jews have a custom to refrain from eating meat during the last nine of these days. Under normal circumstances this temporary vegetarianism wouldn’t affect me much—I’m more likely on a day-to-day basis to eat grilled cheese sandwiches or breakfast cereals than I am to eat meat. But I’ve been working in a Jewish camp for part of this summer and they, I suppose, consider it inappropriate to repeat meals. This has led to some inspired choices by the kitchen staff along with some real head-scratchers (English muffins, scrambled eggs, tater tots, and broccoli—just about the weirdest combination of foods you can imagine).

But I want to focus on one lunch. This lunch consisted of fake sloppy joe meat, fake schwarma meat, and a selection of rolls and wraps. The fake meat wasn’t at all offensive; it was even pretty good, although the sloppy joes basically tasted like tomato sauce. But the decision to serve fake meat just called further attention to the fact that we weren’t eating the real thing. Even though the food tasted fine, the meal failed because the food tried to be something it wasn’t.

I can’t help but think of all the sugared candies and beverages we consume which masquerade as fruit. It sometimes feels as if we’re much more likely to wash down our cherry candies with orange soda than we are to, you know, eat cherries and oranges. Let’s go back to eating food that is real.

Postmodern, Contemporary Food

I don't have tons of blogging time available, but I do want to reward your reading commitment by passing along three recent links I really enjoyed. Here they are, with the briefest of introductions:

• A wonderful and sad excerpt from Frank Bruni's soon-to-be-published memoir. Bruni, the The New York Times food critic, delves into a childhood of overeating and bulimia. I'm fascinated by autobiography--and, really, any instance of conscious remembering--and this piece is particularly rich because the childhood remembrances are so obviously related to Bruni's career. Bruni's a fantastic writer, writing about his passion and his relationship to his passion. Really strong stuff.
• Wired magazine's compendium of etiquette for the contemporary age. A lot of this has to do with basic rules of social networking civility, but I was most impressed by the recommended healthy media consumption pyramid.
• The Los Angeles Times' Jacket Copy blog's list of 61 essential Postmodern works of literature. I've read 9 from this list. It also includes a helpful key of defining postmodern characteristics, including "author is a character," "disrupts/plays with form," "comments on its own bookishness," and "blurs reality and fiction." I have some nits to pick with the list (I think Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 needs to be included in any list of this type), but I appreciate the effort that went into compiling what may turn into the reading list for the next several years of my life.

This Is Why We're Fat

One of the real pleasures of reading The New Yorker over the past two months has been a string of excellent articles written by Elizabeth Kolbert, including the story of James Hansen (abstract only, except for subscribers), a NASA scientist so concerned with climate change that he attends protests and rallies, and an appraisal of the fact that we're living through--and possibly causing--a mass extinction (also, abstract only, except for subscribers) the likes of which the Earth has not seen in the past 65 million years.

Her latest effort, "XXXL," is a focused review of seven books published in the past six years that all attempt to explain why humans, including but not limited to Americans, are gaining weight. You should read the article to learn what these books and Kolbert theorize, but here are some scary highlights:

• American "[m]en are now on average seventeen pounds heavier that they were in the late seventies, and for women that figure is even higher: nineteen pounds."
• "Today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States (!), making them 'the number one food consumed in the American diet.' If, instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water, [health economist Eric] Finkelstein calculates, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less."
• We eat just about whatever food is in front of us, without, it would seem, taking into account how hungry we are: "In another experiment, [director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, Brian] Wansink invited participants to cook dinner for themselves with ingredients that he provided. One group got big boxes of pasta and big boxes of sauces, a second smaller boxes and smaller bottles. The first group prepared twenty-three per cent more, and downed it all."
• "According to the federally supported National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the bagels that Americans eat have in the past twenty years swelled from a hundred and forty to three hundred and fifty calories each. If, as Wansink argues, people are relying on external cues to determine their consumption, then the new, bigger bagel is sneaking in an additional two hundred and ten calories. For someone who is in the habit of eating a bagel a day, these extra calories translate into a weight gain of more than a pound a month."

Yikes.

[Update: Though Kolbert addresses a similar movement in her article, I found it interesting that The New York Times yesterday published a piece titled "Tossing Out the Diet and Embracing the Fat."]

Tour de Midwest

As I see it, it probably really is a good thing for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way--hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

--David Foster Wallace

Well OK, that's one way to think about being a tourist. And it is, I believe, an interesting way to begin a post that is largely focused on my experiences driving nearly half-way across the country to watch baseball games. Because I agree both with DFW in both theory and practice about tourism and the effect that being a tourist has on me. And yet, I didn't feel any of this humbling angst on my baseball trip.

I think this may be true for at least two reasons:

1) This baseball trip was not undertaken under any pretense of broadening horizons. Just about the only places we went were baseball stadia and a beer ad masquerading as a beer factory. (There seems to be a lack of consensus on this, but some media experts estimate that the average American is exposed to as many as 5,000 ads per day; this figure always seems way too high to me, except for those days when I visit a stadium which hosts a Major League Baseball team.) So yes, we went to visit places that are already--and, in a way, need to be--spoiled. Case in point: the thing in Cleveland which excited me most was this Nike ad.


So my expectations were set appropriately.

2) Maybe more than being excited about going to Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, etc., I was excited about getting away from the day-to-day of New York/Jersey. I remember not much about the actual games we saw (I remember Joel Zumaya throwing smoke, the Royals late-inning defensive replacement at shortstop booting a play, the Mexecutioner, Albert Pujols being pitched around, and a nice double play in Chicago, and that might be about it). But it was great to be unable to check the ~dozen of job boards I check every day. (Upon checking these websites after a week away, I learned that I had missed maybe one relevant job.) The general idea of going away and keeping a full schedule (complete with a rarely referenced itinerary!) and basically skipping sleep for two out of five nights and not sitting around waiting for someone from HR to call me, felt great. I recommend it.

A few leftovers.

• We drove 1913 miles over the course of a bit more than four days. This means we averaged 19 miles per hour. For more than four days. Including the times we were sleeping.
• I slept in a different city seven consecutive nights.
• I think because I felt nervous about being disconnected from the internet, I binge-tweeted from my cell phone. If you want to read those tweets, you should follow me on twitter here.
• We took many pictures. You can view the ones I decided were worth saving here.
  
• We saw this:
  
  
  
  

[Update: My friend The Midnight Toker reminded me of this cool graphically enhanced video thing of DFW reading the excerpt quoted above:



]