- Jeff Sharlet, Harper’s, Straight Man’s Burden
- Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, Letting Go
- Patrick Symmes, Harper’s, Thirty Days as a Cuban
- Chris Jones, Esquire, What Happened to Roger Ebert?
- Moe Tkacik, Columbia Journalism Review, Look at Me!
A handmade electric car in the cornfields at night: Illuminati Motor Works, Divernon, IL, June 14, 2010.
From A.J. Baime’s excellent Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans:
At the Cavallino, a waiter slid a plate onto a table in front of Enzo Ferrari — a simple dish of fish and rice. Ferrari had invited a journalist from The New Yorker to sit with him at lunch. It was a rare occasion: he was in the mood to talk, and he unburdened himself on an array of philosophical topics.
“Women are more intelligent and dominating than men,” Ferrari said. “Men are creatures of their passions, and this makes them victims of women. Ettore Bugatti, a great driver and racing car builder, and a fine gentleman, once told me, ‘The perfect machine does not exist, mechanically speaking. The only perfect machine is a woman.’”
Did Ferrari have friends?
“There is something disgusting about the word friendship. To me it represents something sublime, but I have not found it so in reality. I have no friends.”
A social life?
“No, none. Life passes soon enough. If you want to do one thing well, you have to work at it fast. A Ferrari may not be a masterpiece in exactly the same way that a great work of painting or sculpture is. It represents the work of many men bringing to life the ideas of Ferrari.”
Religion?
“I prefer living in a state of problems and contradictions to believing in religion. You must be courageous in looking at the truth. Only he who looks at the truth is a whole man. He who says, ‘Everything is good — let’s go on,’ is a fool. There are two kinds of people who do not ask themselves questions — those who are without conscience, and those who are religious. To me, religion is action. Sometimes, when driving on the autostrada at night, seeing the stars, I feel that there must be something infinitely grand that created this gigantic mechanism — but something that has no bodily existence. Not like what they teach you about religion in the schools. Moreover, I do not believe that this power, if it exists, is necessarily benign. It may also be evil.”
Lots of buzz about this Vanity Fair story on two American journalists who ran a scandalous, muckraking magazine called Exile in Russia in the ’90s. The story’s backdrop is drugs and prostitution and the looting of post-Communist Russia by American capitalists, but fundamentally it’s a story about a great friendship and partnership gone sour. Two ambitious guys conquered the world together and now hate each other and haven’t spoken in years.
The piece, by James Verini, is wonderfully written, full of great quiet lines and tales of passionate debauchery told in a dispassionate voice. But what I love the most about it is that it’s a profile of these two guys, right? And one of the guys is a former heroin addict who once boasted in print about sleeping with a Russia scholar’s wife (he was lying), and the other guy is a former speed addict who once attempted to sleep with nine prostitutes in nine hours to celebrate the ninth anniversary of their magazine. And the author of the Vanity Fair piece takes sides. He sides with one guy against the other. And probably gets it right, I’m guessing. Because while the guy who comes off badly in Vanity Fair (i.e. the ex-heroin addict) has certainly gone on to produce some excellent journalism, he has also produced some creepily bad and malicious journalism, like a piece for Rolling Stone that resulted from the guy going “undercover” on a religious retreat with a bunch of earnest Christians, lying to them about who he was, and then turning around and writing a long cruel exposé that mocked their customs and laughed at their struggles and made them all look like kooks and assholes:
I sat down next to a frankly obese Hispanic woman who was carrying what both looked and smelled like a paper bag full of cheeseburgers.
“Some weather we’re having, with this rain,” I said.
“Tell me about it!” she said, introducing herself as Maria. “It truly is an act of God that I even made it here today.” She told a story about having to drive down from Austin in bad weather. God had helped her four or five steps along the way. “It just seems like God really wants me to come on this trip,” she said. “Otherwise, I would never have made it.”
“It looks like God is going to give us a rainstorm all the way to Tarpley,” I heard a voice behind me say.
This oddly uniform style of dialogue ringing all around me made me shift in my seat. I felt nervous and unpleasantly certain that I was about to be found out. When Maria asked me why I’d come on the retreat, I bit my lip. When in Rome, I thought.
“Well,” I said, “since the new year, I’ve just been feeling like God has been telling me that I need to get right spiritually. So here I am.”
I paused, wincing inwardly. An outsider coming into this world will feel sure that the moment he coughs up one of those “God told me to put more English on my tee shot” lines, his dark game will be instantly visible to all, and he’ll be made the target of one of those Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style point-and-screech mob scenes. But nothing could be further from the truth. You simply cannot go wrong praising God in this world; overdoing it is literally impossible. I would understand this better by the end of the weekend.
Maria smiled. “I feel the same way.”
I think the guy who wrote this needs to re-read his Hunter S. Thompson and ask himself if Thompson ever lied to get access to a group of people solely to make fun of them, not to attempt to understand them.
And then, of course, there’s this, from the end of the Vanity Fair piece, when the author finally sits down to coffee with with Mr. Matt Taibbi:
“I just don’t see why you’re doing this story,” [Taibbi] said. When I told him that Ames was now living in New York he grew more agitated. I mentioned some of the Exile pieces of his I planned to write about, and he said, “That was covered in the book.” I told him yes, that was true, but the book had been published in 2000, and, frankly, I didn’t think it was very good.
“The book wasn’t good?” he said.
“No, I didn’t think so,” I said.
“My book?” he said.
“Yes, the Exile book. I thought it was redundant and discursive and you guys left out a lot of the good stuff you did,” I said.
At this, Taibbi’s mouth turned down and his eyes narrowed.
“Fuck you,” he snarled, and then picked up his mug from the table, threw his coffee at me, and stormed out.
The restaurant was packed with customers, and they all turned to watch as I sat there, stunned, coffee dripping from my face. The waiter arrived with the milkshake Taibbi had ordered. After wiping myself off a bit, I went outside, where Taibbi was putting on his coat, and asked him to calm down and come back into the restaurant. He walked up to me, glaring, beside himself with rage.
“Fuck you!” he yelled. “Did you bring me here to insult me? Who are you? What have you ever written? Fuck you!”
The question about Taibbi isn’t whether he’s good. He’s good (though not as good as he thinks). It’s whether the good outweighs the bad.
(hat tip to katiebakes)
(photo by Pete Duvall, lifted from Aural States)
Last week J. Robbins played an acoustic set in Bethesda, Maryland, backed by a cellist named Gordon Withers. It’s a great stretch of music, beautifully performed and recorded, with a nice intimate feel and patter by J. that makes it clear he’s terrified to be doing this, to be playing a bunch of punk-influenced rock songs on nothing but an acoustic guitar and a cello.
For those of you not familiar with J. Robbins, he’s a D.C.-area songwriter who fronted several very influential bands in the ’90s and early ’00s — Jawbox, Burning Airlines — and has recorded many other bands in his day job as a sound engineer. To me and my buddies, he has always been simply “J”. We never knew him personally but he loomed large for us as an artistic hero, every bit as badass as Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, but better in a way, because unlike MacKaye, J. could carry a tune.
J’s stage presence was intensely serious and focused. He rarely smiled. He was a scowling perfectionist playing intricate, precise, pounding music that didn’t leave much room for error. Which is why this acoustic set floors me — the current of fear and almost a giddy curiosity on J.’s part about whether he can pull it off (“This is crazy. None of these songs were meant to be played this way… This is really fun”). J’s voice is more fragile than I remember, and more affecting. He’s taking a risk, he’s got a sense of humor about it, and the songs actually hold up amazing well when stripped down. Standouts for me are “Outside the Aviary,” “Spoiler” (never one of my favorite Jawbox songs but Withers’s cello adds a lushness), “Savory,” and “Your Several Selves,” a fork-tongued love song for the era of social networking, which is apparently a new song from J.’s new band, Office of Future Plans. More please.
I should probably be doing real work now, but I can’t get this book out of my head.
Facing Future is a very tiny book about a 1993 album by a very enormous Hawaiian musician I’d never heard of, Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwo’ole. The book is so small it almost fits in a pocket. I read most of it last night while begging my wife to handle all the pre-bedtime childcare stuff. (It’s ok, I cooked. That was my contribution for the night.) I’d say the book pretty squarely accomplishes the following:
- vividly brings to life a dead fat Hawaiian guy who played a ukelele
- makes you care about a dead fat Hawaiian guy who played a ukelele
- uses the complex afterlife of “Iz” as a means to explore timeless questions about art, commerce, and colonialism, in a metaphor that’s organic to the material
- conjures Hawaii as an “old, weird” place with its own history and landscape apart from whatever you see in the background of Lost as Evangeline Lilly’s nipples are poking out
- tells a credible anecdote about Iz beating the shit out of Jimmy Buffett in a urinal
- includes prose such as this: “For long stretches the road’s shoulder is hard by the water. To your left the mountains rise in undulating waves, unthinkably lush and green even to their tips, pali climbing one atop the other and disappearing into the clouds that never seem to evaporate from their peaks. In the winter the waves roar to your right, the mist salting your windshield as you drive close to the spray. In the summer the sea is flat and clear and, as you brake behind the tricked-out Honda turning right into one of the countless local beach parks, you can hear, blaring out of a junk boom box in the parking lot, an unearthly voice, a lilting falsetto singing over ‘ukulele, or heavy South Seas drums, or cheesy synthesizers.”
- rescues the word “bruddah” from terminal corniness — indeed, deploys “bruddah” in a way to almost make you weep
Not bad for 168 pages. It’s an obvious labor of love, it’s brilliant, and I’d recommend it to anyone. Congrats to author Dan Kois, who also wrote this.
…there were jocks, and there were nerds. There were preppy jocks and power nerds and geeky prankster preps and date rapists, but in the end the distinctions between them were so superficial and meaningless as to be discernible only to the grown-up fratboys who perpetuated them. The flow of capital had come under the control of 180-pound children who still viewed life as a game they could win the way they’d won their way into the Ivy League. The Fat Tonys retired, and the world of finance had no adults left.
Washington wasn’t much different, the former jock Hank Paulson would learn as he pleaded with his ideological frat buddies in Congress to help him fend off the cataclysm that had resulted from their old project of dismantling the financial regulatory structure. Paulson, a former offensive lineman and Dartmouth alum, was accustomed to “two-facedness” among Congressional Republicans, but he was aghast when they privately agreed that he needed to act to save the system but refused to support him publicly with their votes. Before acting, others in the capital demanded some simple way to visualize and understand the panic in the credit markets, the sort of thing that comes from publicly available information, the collection and dissemination of which is the barest, most basic role of government oversight. Alas, almost no such oversight existed in the bond and derivatives markets, and thus there was no easy way to convey the magnitude of the panic even as it was happening, much less in the years before and even a year afterward. Perhaps Hank Paulson should have sponsored a viewing of the movie Redline.
What was easy to convey was that something about the past ten years had been unsustainable. But the truth—that an entire ideology had been unsustainable—is one that we have not yet grasped. And that is why so many journalists, economists, intellectuals and financiers now scramble to churn out books that for the most part read like the memoirs of people trying to make themselves feel less stupid. The current financial system was constructed to make us all feel stupid, and in the process of building it the architects allowed themselves to become stupid as well. That ignorance begat infantilization, which bred cowardice and systemic moral decay. The only sustainable way out is to reacquaint ourselves and our fellow citizens with the wisdom of asking stupid questions.
High-school kids made this. In West Philly. It gets 100 miles per gallon and looks pretty hot, yes?
