Archive for February, 2010
Might as Well Dig in Our Heels, Then
by Joshua Malbin on Feb.28, 2010, under Politics
That’s how I imagine the first thoughts of CEOs and chairmen of boards upon reading this:
The cost of pollution and other damage to the natural environment caused by the world’s biggest companies would wipe out more than one-third of their profits if they were held financially accountable, a major unpublished study for the United Nations has found.
The primary reaction is supposed to be shock that these externalities add up to so much, I suppose. And it is shocking. But anyone with a passing knowledge of the current relationships between business and government in America and China, to take two highly important examples, has to have a sinking feeling in his heart.
“It’s going to be a significant proportion of a lot of companies’ profit margins,” Mattison told the Guardian. “Whether they actually have to pay for these costs will be determined by the appetite for policy makers to enforce the ‘polluter pays’ principle.”
For that, taken collectively they have the appetite of a single anorexic sparrow.
Ignition City
by Joshua Malbin on Feb.26, 2010, under Comics
I didn’t think so much of the last Warren Ellis alternate sci-fi history I wrote about, Ministry of Space, so I’m happy to report that the new collected trade paperback of Ignition City is a whole lot better. Where Ministry of Space let its business be telling its alternate sci-fi history, Ignition City leaves that alternate history in the background to tell a character-based story.
This time it’s the mid-1950s, and the people of Earth have had regular flights into space and contact with aliens from Mars and Venus for years. That contact hasn’t gone so well, though, so all the governments of Earth have one by one suspended space flight, leaving only one spaceport operating, a government-free island called Ignition City. There live the inveterate spaceboys and spacegirls who went up in the early days and can’t get anyone to take them back—and there’s where Mary Raven, a young spacegirl herself, has to go to reclaim her just-deceased father’s things. It’s a straightforward, hoary tale of a new sheriff coming to spacetown, but well told.
No previews, but you can see samples of the artwork at the Flickr page.
I Suppose This Is What They Meant
by Joshua Malbin on Feb.24, 2010, under New York, Politics
Here’s the NY Times big story that was supposed to make David Paterson resign. It won’t, but he really really really won’t win now, as opposed to just really one time.
I assume that when we were all waiting for it before (around Feb. 8, remember), that probably had to do with this bit:
…just before she was due to return to court to seek a final protective order, the woman got a phone call from the governor, according to her lawyer. She failed to appear for her next hearing on Feb. 8, and as a result her case was dismissed.
Writing Advice
by Josh K-sky on Feb.22, 2010, under Movies
Jason Reitman was asked at a WGA event to give the aspiring writers in the audience something to keep them going through their darkest hours.
He said that he had hit a wall after working on Up In The Air for five years (this was part of a no-longer-subtle series of digs at writer Sheldon Turner, with whom he’s been forced to share credit and stage time by a WGA arbitration panel). He ran into Judd Apatow at the Santa Barbara Film Festival and asked him for advice.
Apatow said, “Write the ending. Because, then, theoretically, you’re done.”
And that was how Reitman did it (though pace Apatow he wasn’t immediately done.) He figured out the ending, and that let him go back and charge through things like the 20-page wedding scene. He knew where he had to go.
Axe Cop
by Josh K-sky on Feb.22, 2010, under Comics
Via Unfogged, Axe Cop is “written by a 5-year-old and illustrated by his 29-year-old brother.”
And it is awesome.
A Made-Up Gang Problem?
by Joshua Malbin on Feb.21, 2010, under Los Angeles, Politics
In the course of marshaling statistics to explode the myth of rampant Latino immigrant criminality, Ron Unz of the The American Conservative makes the following observation about LA:
Los Angeles today ranks as America’s least white European large city. Half of the population is Hispanic, and many of these are impoverished illegal immigrants and their families. Yet all crime rates have been falling steadily over the last two decades, with homicide dropping a further 18 percent just last year. As Chart 14 illustrates, most major crime categories are now back down to where they were in the early 1960s, when the population really did look very much like the actors appearing in “Dragnet” and “Leave It to Beaver.” And indeed, violent crime is now roughly the same as for Portland, Oregon, America’s whitest major city.
This Los Angeles example also raises important questions about the official claims that Latino youths have exceptionally high rates of gang membership, 1800 percent higher than for whites. Los Angeles supposedly has among the worst Hispanic gang problems, yet the city’s actual crime rates are roughly the same as what they were back in the lily-white days of the early 1960s. So if these local gangs aren’t committing much crime, what exactly is the definition of a “gang”?
A cynical observer might draw a connection between the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government distributes each year for gang-prevention programs and the zeal with which local officials uncover the severity of their gang problems. In the case of Los Angeles, public officials have held January press conferences each of the last several years hailing the unprecedented drops in serious crime rates. They often follow these up a few months later with contrary press conferences on the horrific state of local gang violence and the desperate need for increased federal funds to cope with this scourge. If the federal government pays cities to find gang problems, many city officials will surely oblige them.
This has the ring of truth to me, but I don’t live in Los Angeles. What say you, Angelenos?
Voice of a Generation
by Josh K-sky on Feb.20, 2010, under Books
The Millions proposes that Dave Eggers take over the editorship of the Paris Review from Phillip Gourevitch. My first thought was “what’s in it for Dave?” My guess, uninformed (McSweeney’s “doesn’t do numbers”) is that Eggers’s current gig has to have a wider circulation than the Review. The Millions has an answer, although it’s a kind a spinach prescription: they think that the editorship would force Eggers to finally get past his experiments in cute and forever side with the kinds of empathetic ventriloquism that runs through books like What is the What and Zeitoun.
This reportorial interest in the wider world is one that The Paris Review could nourish, even as it exposed Eggers to an even wider audience – one that might be less satisfied with his tics, and more demanding of writing in proportion with his enormous gifts.
I agree that this would be good spinach. A longer version of my abbreviated post Great Daves of the 90s would have had a similar hope for him.
Eggers’s innovation was a seemingly paradoxical blend of self-consciousness with generosity. At its best it uses a kind of non-corrosive irony to create a space for empathy. At its worst it becomes twee narcissism. N+1’s first Intellectual Situation called out the “Eggersards” for forming a “regressive avant-garde,” one which valued childhood above all other values. When Eggers’s valorization of children informs his literary good-citizen side, you get magic like 826 Valencia, a tutoring program that has spread from San Francisco across the country and trades on the cultish adoration for Eggers among the urban literate to produce an army of volunteers helping underprivileged youth with their writing homework and encouraging their creativity.
Helping actual children is a less exhaustible project than adopting childhood as an intellectual stance. An Eggers editorship of The Paris Review might reconcile the imagination and experimentation of the McSweeney’s empire with adulthood.
Sparta USA #1
by Joshua Malbin on Feb.19, 2010, under Comics
I believe when last I wrote about David Lapham, I was raving about the close of his underappreciated surrealistic series Young Liars. Now he’s back with something equally weird but more along the lines of mythic allegory than surrealism.
Sparta, USA is a town of just under 10,000. It has a dozen major league pro football teams and 30 minor league ones. In Sparta, explains the advertising blurb, “they believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness through treachery, blackmail and murder – just like the Maestro taught them as he learned it from the U.S. President.”
Or as David Lapham himself described it:
An isolated town filled with young people and with the veneer of normalcy, but underneath they’re all being taught to kill each other. Why? Where are they? Why are they all young? And why is there a big red guy and a big blue guy walking around without everyone pointing and screaming?
Look, nobody said it was a subtle allegory. But there are yetis.
It’s a limited series, so they’ll wrap the whole story in six issues. The art’s nothing special but, you know, whacked-out political allegory and yetis. C’mon.
UPDATE: I don’t know why I was rattling on about yetis. They’re barely in the story and I don’t actually care about yetis.
Preview below the fold.
Two thoughts on freedom
by Josh K-sky on Feb.18, 2010, under Uncategorized
Thomas Mann, via The New Inquiry:
And his favorite word, his ultimate emotional eloquence, the great bell with which he summoned others to the loftiest feasts of the soul—it lured many people…Freedom…He truly understood more and less by freedom than they did when cheering. Freedom—what did that mean? Certainly not a touch of civic dignity in front of princes and thrones. Do you people even dream just what a mind dares to mean with that word? Freedom from what? Ultimately from what else? Perhaps even from happiness, from human happiness, that silken fetter, that soft sweet bond…
Daniel Davies of dsquareddigest:
In the film Braveheart, the Mel Gibson character hardly ever stops talking about “freedom” and, of course, iconically inspires his brave clansmen to charge into battle screaming “FREEDOM!” at the top of their lungs. But in the context of the film, he’s clearly being totally hypocritical. He doesn’t actually propose anything of the sort – the system of government he’s in favour of is another autocratic monarchy, just with him in charge.
Isn’t it interesting a) that nobody seems to spot this (just as in A Few Good Men, surprisingly few critics noticed that despite the contention of the Jack Nicholson character in his big speech, it’s very obviously that you do not “save lives” or “guard people while they sleep” by beating your own recruits to death for minor disciplinary infractions). And b), that as proved by the film’s ticket sales and continuing popularity, the concept of “freedom” embodied in this film (ie, xenophobic authoritarian power-worship) seemed to resonate so deeply across the English-speaking world, which when thinking with its brain rather than its blood, is quite clear that “freedom” means something very different indeed.
All Will Be Revealed
by Josh K-sky on Feb.16, 2010, under Uncategorized
Dan Meyer’s 2009 Annual Report from Dan Meyer on Vimeo. Via Boing Boing.
Why do I love this so much? It’s as much an erotic tendency as a neurotic one, or perhaps shades in the space where the circles overlap (or perhaps there is very little outside that overlap.) Assume as a guiding feature of the techno-professional middle classes a certain belief in perfectibility, then subdivide between a belief in the perfectibility of self-knowledge and a perfectibility of self. I have very little energy for the perfection or even the very great improvement of myself (all right, a nagging urge, but a lazy one. I do still read magazines.) I like the hundred pushups challenge but I prefer the pushups logger. (Week 3, Day 1, had to repeat it.) I tinker endlessly on Mint.com although I don’t spend any more sensibly. I just like to see my household in pie charts.
Come on, you Wendell Berrys, you hippies and one-hand clappers, come and tell me how this digital mapmaking threshes out the romance from the world. You think I’m not chasing the ineffable down to the last quantum? Everything is charted, nothing is known, but the chase is easily as good as the kill.
A friend of the blog has been known to track his consumption of various goods (eggs, vitamins of a sort, movies) in excel sheets. Game on, boy. Here’s how it’s done.