THE TALK OF THE TOWN
TRANSITIONING by Hendrik Hertzberg
You can always count on Hendrick Hertzberg to tell you what your new political stance is; more than that, he makes your already liberal opinions smarter and better focused. Since it’s Inauguration Week (or any week at all), all talk turns to Obama, the guy who “can do anything. He even reviews restaurants.” And this is what I’ll regurgitate in my next conversation centered around politics, when I’m looking to come off sage and well-informed: “If [Obama’s] selections for the top legal, intelligence, science, and environmental jobs are any guide, he is serious about ending the American government’s sickening embrace of torture, its hostility to science, its subservience to polluters, and its suicide-bomber approach to global warming.” My advice: always read Hertzberg. The guy can do anything.
CUZ by Lauren Collins
I enjoyed this comment, if only for the Alec Baldwin reference and his advice: “‘I would say, to thine own self be true. If this is really in your heart, then you’ve got to do it. Fuck what people say.’”
HACK ATTACK by Jeffrey Toobin
I had a dream the other night that Jeffrey Toobin vowed to be mad at me if I didn’t like something he’d written. I loved this piece! Liberal blogs hacked and restored: cool. Read.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
MY HOLOCAUST MEMOIR by Ben Greenman
The only thing in the world I don’t find funny is the Holocaust. Skip.
FEATURES
SPREADING THE WORD by Judith Thurman
(This article only available online to subscribers.)
The competitive Scrabble subculture is endless and varied, stemming from its first incarnation in the early 1900s to Mattel’s recent appeal of a Delhi High Court ruling it was legitimate to clone the Scabble board for online play. First I loved this piece for its buffet of characters: G.I. Joel, whose “nickname refers to the soundtrack of gastrointestinal disturbances that often punctuate his games”; Adam Logan who “doesn’t talk much, but he went to Princeton at 16”; Sal Piro, “the president of the ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ fan club”; and Joe Edley who “was inspired by Seth [an enlightened being] to realize his full human potential, and he chose to express it through Scrabble.” Edley continues to say, “’There is no point to play Scrabble unless I make it a spiritual practice.’” Amen. There’s a Scrabble for everyone, even Ludacris, “who plays ‘hip-hop’ Scrabble, using words like ‘crunk,’ hizzo,’ and ‘pajawa’—a version of the ‘dirty’ Scrabble that was popular with Hollywood swingers fifty years ago.”
Scrabble is the meeting place for mastering language, inventing computer programs, and engaging in competitive play. “Scrabble is both mindless and cerebral, which may account for its appeal to writers—it gives you a chance to push words around without having to make them mean something.” But it seems like they mean everything, especially in Scrabble, which is like the game of life, but at the same time smarter and more meaningless. It is a time-waster after all, but we’re all wasting our time doing something, and at least “the Thai government promotes Scrabble as a tool for learning English.”
This article made me appreciate words more: for their structure, their endless mutations, their mystery and deception–how we control them, arrange them, manipulate them–all to communicate, to win, to avoid losing. “The game” will always have a loser and a winner, and that’s somehow arousing (number of references to sex: I counted five) and life-sustaining. A “must read.”
THE COBRA By Tad Friend
Reading this article about Tim Palen, movie executive made me feel hot. I would even assume statements like “marketing, very often, is selling what you don’t have; it’s the art of the tease”; “love a ruckus”; and “average of thirty-six million dollars to market one of their films” get most people excited.
Movie making is all about marketing, which can be said about a lot of things. It’s about the bottom line, but this idea is much sexier in movies than in book publishing, for example. Not only is it about money, but it’s also about manipulation, which is awesome. I’m so intrigued by this world, the one that puts up one-way mirror/viewer thing (like in the movie True Lies) between “us” and “them” / “consumers” and “producers” / “the wealthy” and “the rest.” This article is like, “Here are the strings the movie industry pulls to move your arm this way and your head this way.” This is how I felt when I read about movie producer Brian Grazer’s take on making East of Eden into a movie: “‘but I don’t know how I’d ever made it, because I don’t know how I’d sell it.’” That’s so fucked up. All the world’s a stage, and we are merely idiots, mesmerized by the what the people behind the stage are telling us what we like, stuff that’s “straight out of the American-loves-cheese playbook.” At least someone’s admitting people deliberately play with our emotions and monitor our tastes to get our money and secure our return rate. I feel so used, and in some ways, I like it (as Tim Palen predicted I would).
Definitely read this one, and then go see a movie to feel the meta-ness wash over you.
