I’m Not Going to Do This Every Day

Our impossibly cool art director R showed me these guys, and I’m totally hooked:

from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

Arthur C. Clarke, Premier Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 90

from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

Sad News in the Times today: Richard Knerr, alleged creator of the Hula Hoop, is dead. From the paper’s excellent obit:

Mr. Knerr and Mr. Melin came up with the idea for the Hula Hoop after encountering a wooden hoop used in exercise classes in Australia. Their epiphany came when a friend from Australia showed them how to gyrate their hips to spin the thing.

Still, it’s clear that the Times doesn’t wholly have its facts straight. As everyone knows, the Hula Hoop was invented by Norville Barnes:

You know, for kids!

Um, well, no, though Dennis Johnson’s sprawling novel, about Vietnam, & etc. is getting the kind of critical praise that’s making me blush just to read it. And the people have spoken; in the past week, three people have approached me on the subway to ask me about it, which never happens (or, you know, I maybe I’m usually reading crappy books on the train, so no one cares). Still, it is a pretty amazing piece of work. I’m about 400 pages in, and I’m still not entirely sure where this train is taking me, but Johnson is such a beautiful writer that I’m happy to go along.

Typical is this passage, which actually made me put the book down while riding the D train the other day, it’s so nicely done:

Minh disembarked at the roadside and bought a roll and a cup of tea in a store whose proprietress remembered him and asked about his family and said the water taxis were running again these days, but not many. The ville lay two miles down the brown river. He walked. After the city, things smelled different here. the reeking water. The smoke from the burn piles of deadfall and trash had the odor of legend, the chicken droppings, even. Everything carried him off-where? To here. But not to this moment. Here he had fished from the back of a buffalo while beside him Brother Thu had held the string of a kite surging in the winds above . . . even then their lines plumbing opposite depths. One to high school and the air force, one to the monks.

He saw a little traffic on the water. An old woman with an old woman’s mashed-in face poled past in a skiff keeping to the shallows, every push of the pole threatening to steal her last breath.

Minh walked under a gray sky, sorrow biting at his throat. He stepped into a banana grove and tore off three of the fruits and ate, tossing the peels in the water as he and Thu had done in a better world.

He imagined his brother burning—he often did—Thu’s body in the flame, dreadful pain outside, going up his nostrils and in. And then as a monkey holds two branches for an instant, lets go of the first and clings to the new one, he was no longer the body, but the fire.

Tony Karon, who’s got a blogful of smart postings about the Bush Administration’s adventures in Iraq, outdoes himself with this really nice assessment of the media’s role in the runup to the Iraq War, and the parallels he sees today in making the case for attacking Iran:

Imagine, for a moment, that U.S. troops invading Iraq had, as they neared Baghdad, been fired on by an artillery unit using shells filled VX nerve gas — an attack that would have lasted minutes before a U.S. aircrew had taken out the battery, and may have brought a horrible death to a handful of American soldiers. Imagine, further, that the conquering troops had later discovered two warehouses full of VX and mustard gas shells. And later, that inspectors in a science lab had discovered a refrigerator full of Botulinum toxin or even anthrax.

The Administration and its allies in the punditocracy would have “proved” their case for war, and the media would have hailed President Bush as the kind of Churchillian visionary that he imagines himself to be. And goodness knows what new adventures the Pentagon ideologues would have immediately begun planning.

Now, ask yourself, had the above scenario unfolded and the “case for war” (on the terms accepted by the media and the Democrats) been proven, would Iraq look any different today? Would it be any less of a bloodbath; any less of a quagmire for U.S. troops; any less of a geopolitical disaster; any less of a drain on U.S. blood and treasure? Would the U.S. mainland or U.S. interests and allies worldwide be any safer today? In short, would the Iraq invasion seem any less of a catastrophic strategic blunder had the U.S. discovered some caches of unconventional weapons in Iraq?

The answer to all of those questions is obviously no.

And it’s from that point that we must begin our discussion on Iran, and the media’s role in preparing the American public for another disastrous war of choice. The “necessity” in the American public mind to go to war in Iraq was established through the mass media — a failure for which there has been precious little accounting. But that failure runs far deeper than is typically acknowledged even by critics: It was not simply a case of the media failing to properly and critically interrogate the spurious claims by the Administration of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction capability. Sure, even the likes of France and Germany suspected that Saddam may, in fact, have still had a few piles of chemical munitions left over from the Iran-Iraq war. The point, however, is that they did not see these as justifying a war. They recognized from the outset that invading Iraq would cause more problems than it would solve.

The more important failure of the U.S. media, then, is its failure to question the basic proposition that if Iraq had, indeed, had unconventional weapons, then an invasion and occupation of that country was a wise and prudent course of action.

There’s more:

The very idea that there are certain categories of weapons that draw down a red mist over rational discussion of geopolitical options is an exceedingly dangerous one — that should be one of the key lessons drawn from Iraq. And that’s exactly what’s being cooked up over Iran, too.

The very same crew of neocons and liberal hawks and the Israeli political establishment and its allies in Washington, are goading America to attack Iran. They insist Iran is going hell for leather to acquire nuclear weapons, and allowing it to do so represents a mortal threat to the West, Arab moderates and Israel. And just when a convenient excuse was needed for the U.S. failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, wouldn’t you know it, it’s those darn Iranians “interfering”. Don’t even think about discussing, what, are you Neville Chamberlain or something? Don’t you know it’s 1938 all over again?

Really, it’s one the smarter things you’ll read on the topic. What are thinking? Check it out now.

For those of you who’ve seen Wong Kar-Wai’s Hong Kong gangster/love story, this needs no explanation; for those who haven’t, Shame On You! And break out your metro cards for a trip to Brooklyn, where BAM cinema is showing this all week on the big screen:

I’ve long been a fan of Lewis Lapham; he put out a great Harpers magazine for many years, and I’m intrigued by the new Lapham’s Quarterly (though I was a little distressed when, in 2004, Lapham published an essay in Harpers in which he talked about his bad experiences sitting in the crowd at the GOP convention in NYC–a week before the convention actually, um, happened). Still, Lewis is on the history tip now, which is probably safer ground, and has started a new blog; you can check out the first entry, here.

A couple of weeks ago, finally giving in to JL’s demand that I watch The Wire (more on that later), I picked up Season One on DVD. And who shows up, halfway through, but Steve Earle, as a recovering addict. He’s pretty good—he’s clearly got the background for the role.

Though he’s been in the news more over the past few years over his political songwriting (and the fuss over John Walker’s Blues seems especially silly now), my favorite Steve Earle was the mid-90s model, the one who was just out of prison and writing songs like his life depended on it. Here’s a good document from that period:

Jen Chung, whose Gothamist is one of the earliest, and certainly the best, of the new generation of hyperlocal blogs, finally gets the recognition she so richly deserves in the new issue of Wired. There are some other people on the list that you may have heard of–Arnold, for instance–but if anyone deserves to be a recipient of the 2007 Rave Awards, it’s Jen. Check it out here.