Joshua Malbin

Over at Come In Threes, America’s Favorite Kiwi B-Diddy Disco passed on a request from the Dan Schwartz Blog for contributors’ favorite albums of the decade.

I peered into my iTunes stats, wandered over to my CD shelves in the other room, and put together this list:

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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.

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Via Unfogged, Axe Cop is “written by a 5-year-old and illustrated by his 29-year-old brother.”

And it is awesome.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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For one of my early Valentine’s Days in Los Angeles, my now-ex and I went to Campanile, one of Los Angeles’s best and fanciest restaurants, located in a vaulted home where Charlie Chaplin’s production company once resided. The waiter was efficient but exhausted, and towards the end of his shift, as we struggled down the rest of our second-cheapest-bottle, he saw sympathy in us and unloaded a little.

“Valentine’s Day,” he said, passing us a secret of the trade. “A lot of amateurs come out to eat.”

We weren’t any different, of course — kicking it up one notch in honor of Mandatory Romance — but we appreciated that we were young and somehow assured enough to attract his confidence.

The following year found us exhausted and filthy on the night of February 14th. I’d been sanding the floors in our apartment, and she had been late at work, preparing a gallery show. Unshowered and dusty in our workshirts, we headed out to Palermo, a neighborhood red-check Italian default, and plopped ourselves down at the first available table.

And then we looked around, and saw that Palermo was like every other restaurant on Valentine’s Day, a place where people go one step further than usual. It was mostly teenagers, dressed up better than the restaurant’s usual casual-dining customers in blowy suits and shiny, short dresses, sporting single red roses or buying them from a girl on the floor. A good number of working-class adults were there, not as spiffy as the teens but wearing the ease of having found a babysitter and made it out to the first restaurant in a long time.

We felt a bit out of place in our stains and flannels, but no one was there to notice us. It was a fine dinner, with amateurs everywhere.

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We live in a Golden Age of sports revisionism movies. 2008 brought Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Sugar, a tender hymn to washouts, and Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, the athlete as sex worker, a body for sale. 2009 brought Wrestler writer Robert Siegel’s Big Fan (which the former Onion writer–who claims responsibility for the ‘Area Man’ trope–wrote and directed), which finds the serious fan on a perpetual seesaw of striving and emasculation. Some spoilers after the jump.

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The Los Angeles Times has given good consideration the prospects of taxing soda to pay for rising healthcare costs. An op-ed in October made the case for such a tax, and a front-page story last Sunday detailed the proposal’s murder by the beverage industry.

A few weeks after hearing testimony that a penny-an-ounce tax on soda could reduce consumption by 23%, Rep. Linda Sanchez proposed the tax to colleagues on the House Ways and Means committee to a favorable reception. Beverage industry lobbyists went to work, raising questions about the science and, significantly, bringing minority groups that they had long supported out in opposition to the tax, saying that it would affect minority consumers disproportionately. (It would cost minority consumers more, but these are people with higher rates of diabetes — Sanchez herself was recently diagnosed with gestational diabetes).

As dog ever bites man, lobbying scares Democrats:

By the time the Democratic caucus held its next closed-door meeting in early summer, the atmosphere had changed, Sanchez said — an assessment shared by Pascrell and some committee staffers.

Democratic Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights pioneer who represents Atlanta, the corporate headquarters of Coca-Cola, argued that the soda tax could lead to taxes on other foods, raising prices for hard-pressed consumers during a severe recession. If you begin taxing one sugar product, where do you draw the line?, he asked.

Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), who represents a rural district where dairy farming is widespread, said he became concerned about the fairness of targeting one industry. Kind had heard from local Pepsi and Coke distributors, and he and other members also received letters from the National Milk Producers Assn. concerned that the proposed tax could apply to chocolate milk.

“We went from having real interest in this idea to it just falling off the table,” Sanchez said. “It was my perception that opposition increased as members began hearing from local businesses” that were part of the beverage industry coalition.

Michelle Obama debuted today her Healthy Food Campaign. The most regulation proposed inside it would grant principals the ability to ban unhealthy foods in schools, which is good, but altogether too localized. A soda tax would have discouraged consumption of a product and would reigned in the externalization of its costs.

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I suppose there are some readers of this blog who haven’t met one or the other Joshes in person. Here’s a little taste of what we look (and of course, sound) like.

I am everyone in this video. (Another reason to choose Yale.) That is, everyone except for the one who is Josh Malbin. He can be seen wearing the Chinese dragon costume in the “8 Cultural Centers” bit.

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