Linger

When I was a kid we had a set of World Book encyclopedias, of the sort I'm not even sure you can buy anymore. I used to sit down and just read random volumes, usually starting with an article I had to look up and getting intrigued by the next one in alphabetical order. The same thing happens nowadays with wikipedia, but it's a little more thematic. With an encyclopedia the path was different and often I would find myself fascinated by a topic I would never have thought to look at. Rembrandt -> rhubarb -> RNA -> rock 'n' roll -> Russian. As a result I always had a bunch of facts and names and pictures floating around in my head, but I couldn't really place where I had got them from. In fact, for a long time I didn't know the name of my "favorite" work of art. I had stumbled on it one day, somewhere in one of those 26 volumes, and loved it instantly. I remembered a girl playing alone in the middle of a town square bathed by a harsh afternoon light, but not the name.

Art nerds may have already recognized the piece from my description: Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, painted by Giorgio de Chirico in 1914. (No doubt it had been the "D" volume where I encountered it.) Not sure why that particular image stuck with me. I'm sure I loved the cinematic drama of the scene and the palpable sense of menace. I had no idea who painted it or what it was called, but I carried the shard of memory with me for years. Of course, once the internet rolled around it took just a few quick searches to figure out who the painter was.

I've noticed that there is sometimes a disconnect between the critical opinions of my brain's higher and lower reasoning components. My conscious brain might decide that such and such book, movie, music, art is a favorite. And maybe it has good reasons for thinking that, but probably at least part of it is because it was recommended by a friend, or a critic said it was good, or I admire the author's life story, or I want to signal sophistication to my peer group, etc. And sometimes my lizard brain says, "no. what you really actually like is actually this other thing instead. see I'll show you."

This isn't even so much a "I like action movies but I pretend I'm really into Tarkovsky" sort of thing (although I do like action movies). It's more that certain works of art that I hadn't given much thought to just linger in the mind, coming unbidden into the forefront thanks to some subterranean resonance. I've been trying to pay more attention to that lizard brain, to actively remember art that lingers, as opposed to what is consumed, appreciated and forgotten. I'm trying to get back the feeling of that anonymous painting.

An example. If you've never seen Jim Sheridan's "In America" it's pretty good and well worth watching. It has strong performances from Samantha Morton and Djimon Hounsou (transcending a cliched "magical negro" role) and, especially, the two little girls. It's noways the best film I've ever seen (fore-brain speaking), but it has some nice moments. And there is one scene in particular that has lingered. The movie concerns an Irish family who has immigrated to NYC and one night they head to the fair and the father decides to play one of those carnival games where you throw a baseball through a hole and win a prize. The family is dirt poor and just scraping by, but he lets himself get drawn into a "double-or-nothing" dare after missing the first few throws, and pretty soon the price has doubled and re-doubled until the next missed throw will cost them next month's rent.

It's contrived, but damn if it doesn't pack a punch. For me it was a tremendous dramatization of the way we live -- all of us, not just poor immigrants -- perched on the precipice. We are all one moment of recklessness, or bad luck, or bad driving, or a slip of the tongue away from disaster. When I go to the top of a tall building to admire the view there is always one Evil Neuron in my head that brings up perverse thoughts of jumping. Watching this scene is like a five-minute conversation with the Evil Neuron. It makes me want to take a deep breath and hug my family members. (Unfortunately the scene in question isn't available on YouTube, but here's the trailer for the film.)

Here are some more lingerers. The two books that I have spent more time thinking about over the past few years are Little, Big by John Crowley and The City and the City by China Miéville. At the time I read them I thought "interesting but flawed" and now I can't get them out of my head. The same thing goes for Michael Winterbottom's film Code 46 (also starring, ta da, Samantha Morton), John Greyson's Lillies, and more. Oddly unforgettable, all of them.

Young Earth Blues

A couple of years ago I got into an animated discussion with an acquaintance who is an honest-to-God young earth creationist.  He's a young guy, a huge computer geek and really smart.  In fact he's geeky enough actually sit down and add up the dates in the Bible to get his own estimate for the biblical age of the universe, and to defend his estimate in a highly detailed manner.  Like Bishop Ussher and Isaac Newton before him he estimated that our universe was more or less 6,000 years old.

Clearly this was not the type of conversation I had in grad school, but in a lot of ways this guy was "my people."  I recognized in him a lot of the same mental habits and personality quirks that you find in people who do science for a living. Geeks like me, in other words. But for various reasons he had never really studied much science and had instead read widely on intelligent design and creationism.

The interesting thing about our conversation is that he wasn't really opposed to the idea of evolution. He basically admitted that going forward into the future, species would slowly evolve in response to the environment and natural pressures. The sticking point really was that 6,000 year old universe, and the need to defend a "literal-factual" interpretation of the Bible. Disbelief in macro-evolution flowed directly from there simply not being enough time to get it done. And he's right!  If the universe were only 6,000 years old there wouldn't have been time for humans to evolve from simpler life-forms.

Still, my friend had the whole ID/creationism talking points down pat, starting from the old parable about finding a watch on the beach and "knowing" that it must have been designed rather than evolved. Of course, relying on human intuition about how the world works is pretty much why we believed the Sun went around the Earth for millennia.  (I mean, just look at it! It goes in a circle, right?) My mind naturally rushed to the astronomical objections to a young earth, i.e. the known distances of objects that we can see and observe. (Of course there are LOTS of good arguments against creationism, this was just what came to my mind). I mean, the vast majority of stars in our own galaxy are farther than 6,000 light-years away, to say nothing of distant galaxies or the CMB.

For example, the remnants of the stars that went supernova and were observed in A.D. 1006 and 1054 are located at a distance 7,200 and 6,500 light-years, respectively. Their observation by ancient astronomers, plus the light travel time from the object, already puts the age of the universe older than 6,000 years.  The center of our Milky Way galaxy is at 27,000 light-years. Every time we observe objects orbiting the central black hole we are looking at the universe as it was 27,000 years ago.

Obtaining distances to even more distant objects is a little bit complicated and not necessarily intuitive to a layperson. Let's just say it involves a lot of calibration. (In fact, determining the rungs of the "distance ladder" is one of the great accomplishments of modern astronomy.) But in case you don't buy all that calibration stuff, we have direct, "intuitive," geometrical distance measurements (via parallax and the Hipparcos satellite) for most bright stars within 1,600 light-years of earth (and the recently launched Gaia mission will be able to measure accurate parallax distances out to 30,000 lyrs).

So unless you think scientists are lying about the speed of light, it's clear the universe is pretty big and pretty old -- far older than 6,000 years. But of course my friend knew all this and had an answer waiting. And it was pretty jaw-dropping (to me at least). The apparent answer to all these objections was that our enormous universe was created 6,000 years ago with the light from those distant galaxies already streaming en route towards us. Zoink.

In one respect it's a superficially clever response, as it it severs the link between distance and time and allows you to accept (more or less) most of modern astronomy. But in another respect it's a disaster. The universe in this tale is basically just an illusion, a film projected on a screen, a visual trick that God is playing on humanity. It's hard to reconcile this vision with a reasonable God, not to mention that it's completely extra-biblical (which we were presumably trying to avoid from the start). We started the conversation by appealing to human intuition and now find ourselves arguing something utterly non-intuitive.

I had never heard this argument before and it seemed pretty silly to me, but apparently it has a long heritage among creationists. It is sometimes referred to as the Omphalos Hypothesis (from the greek word for navel) and it belongs to an infinite class of totally un-falsifiable ideas about the universe. Maybe we are just brains in vats being manipulated by an evil demon? Maybe we all live in the matrix? Who knows.

However, apparently not all young earth creationists subscribe to this idea. And this is where it gets even weirder. The big creationist site Answers in Genesis comes down against the idea that God would be deceptive in this way, and instead rounds up a bunch of poorly understood ideas from relativity and cosmology in order to cast doubt on the basic idea that light travels at a constant velocity. For example, this:

Since time can flow at different rates from different points of view, events that would take a long time as measured by one person will take very little time as measured by another person. This also applies to distant starlight. Light that would take billions of years to reach earth (as measured by clocks in deep space) could reach earth in only thousands of years as measured by clocks on earth.

Yeah, no. Relativistic time-dilation doesn't make the universe 6,000 years old. It just doesn't work like that. But there are words written on the page that sound like science, and if you hadn't studied physics it might even sound convincing.

Anyway, it was an interesting conversation and it helped me learn a little bit about where our teaching and public talk about science runs aground. More importantly I think it's good to get outside the bubble and have genuine conversations with people with radically different world views. I doubt I changed his mind during our chat (or he, mine), but I hope maybe I planted the seeds of the idea that you can in fact reconcile science and religion, you just have to read the Bible more metaphorically.

Red vs. Green

There's an interesting conflict brewing in Ecuador these days. In December, the Correa government moved to dissolve an environmental group, the Pachamama Foundation, after accusing them of participating in a violent protest against oil extraction in the Amazon region (which the group denies). Although staffed by Ecuadoreans, the Pachamama Foundation is a group founded by U.S. citizens with considerable funding from foreign donors (including, allegedly, from USAID), and so some have defended the Correa government's move as a legitimate defense of Ecuador's sovereignty. NACLA has a good summary here presenting the two sides of the issue. The Morales government in Bolivia also expelled all USAID funded groups, and USAID voluntarily pulled out of Ecuador around the same time.

But that may not be the end of the story. Amazon Watch passes along the recent news that the Correa government is also cracking down on Ecuadorean indigenous groups opposed to increased oil extraction:

The Secretary of Hydrocarbons has filed a formal complaint against eight indigenous leaders who have dedicated their lives to defending the Amazon, including Franco Viteri (President of GONOAE), the presidents of the Achuar & Zapara nationalities, the president and vice president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and pioneering female leaders Patricia Gualinga from Sarayaku and Gloria Ushigua of the Zapara.

If carried out, this would be a much more serious crack-down on democracy and dissenting voices.

Naturally there is a long history here. As we saw on our trip in 2009, certain parts of Ecuador have been quite heavily polluted by decades of oil extraction, while untouched areas have fought to avoid the same fate. The Correa government had previously put forth a creative plan to avoid having to extract oil from pristine parts of the Amazon. The plan was for wealthy governments who care about climate and the environment to pay Ecuador to leave the oil in the ground. Despite some hopeful signs, the plan failed to gain nearly enough pledges. So the Correa government has decided to go ahead with at least some oil development in Yasuni over the objections of some (but not all) of the indigenous residents of region. Upsidedownworld has a long analysis here of the plan and its fallout.

All this highlights what may be an emerging trend in Latin America, that of a Red vs. Green split. The last decade has seen a number of left governments come to power: Chavez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador, Morales in Bolivia, Ortega in Nicaragua, Lula and Roussef in Brazil and others. Add Pope Francis to the list and you've got a region moving to the left on economic issues. Traditionally green groups have been part of the left coalitions that support these governments, but there have been tensions and conflicts.

Here in Nicaragua, Ortega is planning a trans-oceanic canal which looks to bring him into conflict with environmentalists. Bolivia's Morales has had his own conflicts with indigenous groups over environmental issues, and even Chavez's Bolivarian revolution was fueled by massive oil revenues. The environment poses a problem for all forms of extractive societies, no matter how they distribute the profits after the fact (see Jacobin for more thoughts on this). So I kind of expect these tensions to keep simmering in the future. Something to keep an eye on.

The Magnificent Seven

Check out The Clash playing a live version of "The Magnificent Seven." The Clash recorded this song in early 1980 -- as the 3rd single off their epic 4th album Sandinista! -- way back when hip-hop was still just a local New York thing, and maybe even just a Bronx thing, not the global behemoth it is today. It has the somewhat asterisky distinction of being the first rap song performed by a white group. (The slower album version can be heard here. ).

Even more amazing is that it's kind of awesome. ("Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)", the other rap track on Sandinista! is also pretty great.) Joe Strummer is clearly rapping in the style of early old-school hip-hop, but you don't want to cringe (at least I don't). It's not just that he sells the song, but that he gets it, he understands the power of this new form, way more than you would think a white Brit in 1980 would get it. He absorbs something from old-school rap and melds it to the collection of sounds and riffs and beats that make up the usual Clash style. It's rap, but it's also a kind of spoken word rant, a furious announcement over the PA. It feels organic and very Clash-like, consistent with their own artistic trajectory and not just opportunistic mimicry of a new style.

The Clash, of course, had always been fascinated with black music, especially reggae and dub. All of their albums included covers of reggae songs, like Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves," and Sandinista! in particular goes deep into those styles, turning its back on the punk that made them famous.

The DJ and filmmaker Don Letts is often hailed as one of the people who introduced The Clash to London's black music scene. Letts also directed a pretty cool documentary about The Clash, Westway to the World, which you can watch for free online at Open Culture [*]. I've always felt that The Clash's openness to a variety of music and their solidarity with England's black and immigrant communities is a huge part of what made them such a great band. It sharpened their politics and kept their music diverse and interesting.

White youth, black youth, Better find another solution
Why not phone up Robin Hood and ask him for some wealth distribution?

In his fantastic political history of hip-hop, Can't Stop Won't Stop, Jeff Chang describes this brief historical moment in the early '80s after hip-hop's emergence when it caught on with the downtown punk and art scene in NYC, a meeting of the minds between the Bronx and Manhattan. New wave bands like Blondie recorded rap tracks and members of the Talkingheads played as session musicians on some early rap tracks. The Clash, when they came to America, were also huge fans, apparently. They had Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five as their opening act for several NYC shows, and actually had to reprimand their fans for booing and throwing shit on the stage.

The moment didn't last forever. And of course the idea of a white band taking a black musical subculture and appropriating it to sell records is rock and roll's original sin. Just ask Mos Def.

I was thinking about all this after reading my friend Sandhya's typically thoughtful post on cultural misappropriation, and how difficult it is to distinguish misappropriation from sincere cross-pollination. She teases out a lot of the ambiguities in the question, and provides a good rule of thumb: don't use someone else's culture as a costume. I don't think that's what The Clash are doing on this track, but maybe I would think differently if rap had been less of a brief detour for them and more of a business plan. Like all many great bands, the Clash had the good sense to break-up before fading away. Who knows, maybe with time and more commercial success, they would have turned into U2: sincere, but increasingly corporate. Maybe the follow-up to Sandinista! would have been Rattle & Hum (an album I enjoy, but let's face it, cultural appropriation is basically it's whole reason for existence).

At its best cultural cross-pollination is a two-way street. And indeed, punk did influence black music as well, one example being the 2 Tone ska revival in Coventry, England. The biggest hit to come out of that scene is also pretty topical -- "Free Nelson Mandela." [via Africa is a Country.]


[*] Open Culture actually has compiled a list of over 600 movies that can be watched for free online (and by free I mean, you know, legally). There's a lot of old classics that have fallen out of copyright, including a fair selection of Hitchcock, silent movie classics, old westerns, as well as more recent documentaries and other stuff.

Hugo Chávez

After reading a lot of misguided criticism of Hugo Chávez I am feeling the temptation to write a full-throated defense of the Venezuelan presidente. I'm going to do my best to resist that temptation since I'm not an expert on Venezuela. But it does seem like this is one of those moments where the U.S. media is really missing out on a key part of the story.

Many of the media reports of Chávez's legacy pay lip service to his popularity and his programs to help the poor, but then segue to vaguer criticisms about the economy, or start quoting political scientists about how Chávez is still bad even thought he allowed fair elections. The platonic ideal of this type of criticism has to be this sentence from a 2007 NYT op-ed by Roger Cohen:

"Certainly, the oil money Chávez has plowed into poor neighborhoods (at the expense of an oil industry suffering chronic underinvestment) has reduced poverty. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America said last year that the extreme poverty rate had fallen to 9.9 percent from 15.9 percent."

To be sure, he may have reduced extreme poverty by almost half, but won't someone please think of the oil industry? Bloomberg makes the same rhetorical move in this article. The point is not that these criticisms of Chávez aren't valid (maybe some are, maybe some aren't), but rather that poverty reduction and political inclusion are really, really big deals. All the rest is a second-order correction.

There is tremendous, widespread and deeply-rooted poverty in Latin America. We see it here in Nicaragua every day and I can only imagine that one would see similar scenes in Venezuela. For centuries most Latin American countries were ruled by a thin crust of elites, and no one in power really ever gave a damn about the poor. Not enough of a damn to matter, anyway.

From time to time, the poor would organize themselves into peasant movements or unions or political parties. Very often this would provoke a violent reaction from the local elites, or from the U.S. who spent much of the 20th century "intervening" in one Latin country or another. Occasionally the violence against the poor would reach shocking levels, such as in El Salvador in the '80s. It seems likely that the U.S. had a least some involvement in the failed coup against Chávez in 2002. It's hard not to see that as merely the latest in a long line of shameful U.S. adventures down south.

But Hugo Chávez did give a damn about the poor. Now you may say he cared even more about his own personal power and maybe he used populism as a tool and maybe he was a corrupt bastard to top it all off. Probably all true. But it wasn't all just talk and promises. He actually did divert the gusher of oil money in a direction it doesn't usually flow (including here to Nicaragua), and even more important, he took the people seriously and invited them to become a powerful force in Venezuela. That matters, and explains quite a bit about his enduring popularity in Venezuela. But of course, you won't read too many testimonials from poor Venezuelans in the U.S. press. Take a minute to peruse Andrew Sullivan's round-up of reactions to Chávez's death, here and here, and try to find those voices.

Still, my support is merely half-throated because I'm still uncomfortable with the way movements for social change tend to latch onto charismatic men. My unease with Chávez is similar to my unease with his good friend, Daniel Ortega, and other self-appointed protectors of the revolution. I love their policies but I worry about their politics. Revolutionary idealism has this way of curdling into power for its own sake.

Chávez's detractors are not wrong to care about the health of democratic institutions like a free press, fair elections, a stable constitution, an independent judiciary. We gringos tend to place a lot of faith in institutions because we have had decent luck with ours (more or less). But the corruption of democracy didn't start with Chávez, and by including more Venezuelans in the political process may just help bring the day closer when we have social justice and robust democracy at the same time. Perhaps it's worth remembering that the social change in Venezuela was and is bigger than its presidente, and is continuing still.

Green Libertarianism?

When I used to work at UCS, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about environmental regulations and the forever war waged against them by conservatives, libertarians and business groups.  Since the start of the Great Recession, the conservative line against EPA regulations is that they supposedly kill jobs (even though they don't really) without mentioning that pollution actually kills people and that maybe we should do something about that.  (Warning: long and wonky ahead.)

 Cuyahoga River Fire, 1969

As a progressive (slash lefty slash liberal) the concept of environmental protection is pretty much a no-brainer.  A clean and healthy environment is a common good and something that all humans benefit from.  Environmental degradation therefore arises as a result of some variant of the tragedy of the commons (as described in Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay) where we are all, to some extent, the culprits of pollution as well as its victims.  (Although the environmental justice movement has also shown that environmental burdens and benefits are never shared equally in society.)

At any rate, it makes sense that conserving and protecting the environment should be a collective responsibility -- something worked out through the democratic process with an eye toward fairness and effectiveness.  And while it might be true that "free markets" are occasionally quite good at providing certain goods at a low price (iPods and blue jeans and whatnot), there's no reason to think that a healthy environment is one of them.

But of course, conservatives and libertarians don't really truck with the whole idea of "common" goods, instead preferring to talk about private property rights.  Indeed the typical conservative response to the tragedy of the commons is to say that the commons should simply be privatized.  Voilá! Tragedy solved!  However, we don't actually need to invoke the idea of the commons to see that environmental degradation is harmful.  For one, pollution directly harms the health and private property of people who live downstream or downwind.

In the language of economics, pollution is a negative externality.  If pollution only affected the buyer or the seller in an economic transaction, it wouldn't be as big a deal since the seller would decide if the environmental risk was worth the price she was paying.  But of course, pollution affects third-parties too, people living half a world away who had no involvement with whatever that factory was selling anyway.  To give just one example, read this article about the outrageous harm done to our health and economy by coal power alone.

So you might think that the property rights issue might attract the attention of at least a few C/Ls, right?  Don't Bangladeshi farmers have property rights too?  Don't they deserve compensation when their land gets submerged?  Or home-owners living next to the oil refinerey?  Or is it just rich, politically-connected capitalists who get property rights? (Don't answer that one.)

As it turns out, the vast majority of conservative opinion on the subject is focused on minimizing and downplaying the problem, if not outright denying its existence.  Which is kind of weird.  Libertarians who think all taxes are a form of theft (or even partial slavery) should really be up in arms about this sort of thing.  Past libertarian thinkers like Hayek understood that this was a problem that required government intervention, but it doesn't seem to be much on the radar these days.

Actually there is a traditional libertarian answer to these sort of questions, but it's not very good.  The idea is that, instead of "burdensome" government regulation, people harmed by pollution should sue polluters in the court system ("courts and torts").  This makes a certain sort of sense until you think about it in detail.  For one thing, the harm from pollution is usually statistical.  We may know that exposure to, say, a carcinogen causes an excess of 100 cancer deaths in a population in a year, but cancer has a lot of different causes and it is well-nigh impossible to win a tort claim that cancer Y is directly caused by chemical X.

Even harder are situations like automobile pollution or electricity generation where we are all polluting and all suffering the consequences.  Are we then all financially liable for the harm done (to ourselves)?  What does that mean?  Our clean, elegant solution has turned into a horrible mess.  Why not just have the government set some science-based limits and be done with it?

All of which is an overly-long introduction to this post by James K over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.  He makes the case that libertarians should care about the environment and even advocate for (limited) government action (see also here and here for similar thoughts):

"In many ways environmental issues are “ideologically inconvenient” for libertarians – life would be easier if they didn’t exist. Of course that’s not sufficient reason to actually act as if they didn’t exist, something I don’t think enough libertarians are willing to recognise."

After a brief discussion, James winds-up proposing a tax on pollution "equal to the marginal cost to society of the pollution."  So, on the one hand it's bold of him to use the t-word and it's great that he's even talking about the subject.  On the other it's interesting that he's come around to an idea (a pollution tax) that progressives and environmentalists have been pushing for several decades now.

I think it goes to show that some form of government regulation or taxation is really the only way of dealing with the problem of pollution.  Sure it would be nice if some less intrusive fix was available, but it doesn't seem to be.  It's worth the effort to make these regulations as simple as possible and its worth asking what the balance of costs and benefits might be.  But it's always going to be cheaper to dump waste on your neighbor than to dispose of it properly, so there will basically always have to be some sort of cop there to prevent that.

Fashionable Cynicism Never Won Us A Public Option

These Occupy Wall Street protests are cool, and they tie into a couple of interesting posts from Yglesias and TNC making the point that it is far more effective to organize for change rather than sit back and gripe about Obama.  This is, I think, the main fact of our current political moment.

Prior to the 2008 election there was a ton of energy on the left, first in the anti-war movement and then channeled into Obama's election campaign.  My perception is that after the election that energy largely dissipated when it really needed to keep surging forward.  Some of that was simple exhaustion and a false belief that the battle had been won and that Obama could wave his magic Congress wand and pass his agenda.  Partly it is psychologically easier to be fiercely unified against something than to be for something, particularly if that something (stimulus, health care bill, cap-and-trade, etc.) is the product of political compromises and not 100% to your liking.  Human nature, I guess. 

As an example, I think the Occupy Wall Street protests have been awesome and inspiring, but if they had taken place in early 2009 during the bailouts and (especially) during the Congressional debate over the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, I think we would have ended up both with better policies and a more accurate media narrative that put the blame for the Great Recession on the true culprits rather than the bizarre claims we now get about how the school teachers and cops are are to blame for high deficits (or whatever story it is this week).  Same thing with the health-care bill.

I write this not to absolve Obama or the Dems from the mistakes they did make.  Right this second I'm pretty peeved about Obama's recent cave on ozone regulations (bad policy, bad politics) and the fact that he may have just offed a U.S. citizen without any due process (a scary scary precedent).  Still.  The media loves to build narratives around the personage of the President, but in a democracy the buck ultimately stops with the people.  We need to work to move public opinion in a progressive direction.  The politicians will follow.

The energy just wasn't there in early 2009, and things were moving so fast that it was hard to get a bead on where to best apply popular pressure.  But still, this is what we're supposed to be good at, and the sad fact is that post-2008 the left has simply been out-organized by the tea party -- a bunch of people who as a matter of principle don't really believe in collective action!  Embarrassing!

Yglesias gives a couple recommendations of things to do apart from complaining about Obama on the internet.  I would say it mainly comes down to grassroots organizing in a way that opens up space to Obama's left, and it is nice to see that some of the old energy is starting to return.  I hope it continues.

Unplugging

After having striped our earthly possessions down to the bare essentials, packed them into a truck, cleaned our house, sold our car and flew to California, we are now decompressing in Fresno. After a very stressful and hectic few weeks it feels great to relax and make time for watching movies, swimming, running, hanging out, playing with Quinn. Next week we are off to the mountains for some serious porch-sitting, beer-drinking and possible hiking. Soon enough we'll be pitched back into the uncertainty of moving and change, but for now life is calm.

Relatedly, I am also taking this opportunity to simplify my inbox, under the assumption that my life over the next few months won't have me chained to a computer screen at all times. Over the years I seem to have accumulated a large number of email listservs and rss feeds and it has been quite liberating to let some (if not all) of them go. The ratio of wheat to chaff in my inbox has gone way up. Part of the issue is that for my previous job I served as a kind of human aggregator for a large number of blogs, news sources, activist groups and other information flows.

I will confess to finding information somewhat addicting, and with the internet there will always be more and more and more interesting and important things to read. But no one yet has invented more hours in the day in which to read it all. So it is nice to step back and simplify a bit, before the inevitable information creep starts back up again.

Eating Animals

No, not the book by Jonathan Safran Foer. Rather, over the past six months or so, I've started eating meat again after 15 or so years of being vegetarian.

The impetus, as you might guess, is moving to Nicaragua. The way we figure it, eating a strict vegetarian diet may end up being harder in Nicaragua than it is here. I expect we'll continue to be largely veggie when cooking at home, but if we're eating out there may be a lack of options and if we're guests in someone's house we don't want to be rude. Hence, we are starting to eat a little meat a few times a week ... basically to prep the stomach for the transition.

It's a pragmatic choice, although honestly I've been slowly reassessing my food philosophy for a few years now and I'm not entirely sure what I think these days. Basically, my central reason for being vegetarian has been that meat in the U.S. is often not produced sustainably (e.g. overuse of antibiotics, gigantic lagoons of cow sh*t, etc) and requires a tremendous amount of resources (water, land acreage, fossil fuels) in comparison to other foods. Also, it has probably kept me a little healthier than otherwise.

But the problem is that I've replaced meat in my diet with other things--like fish (not always sustainably fished) or processed foods--that makes me wonder if I'm not really thinking consistently about the big picture. There are other ways of thinking about these issues, such as eating locally or eating less meat or simply enacting smart national policies so we're not all wasting time calculating carbon miles in the grocery store aisle.

So anyway. I expect Central America will give me a different take on this stuff--in addition to a different cuisine. A lot of the first-world problems I mentioned above just aren't as pertinent (or are very different) in a developing country. So we'll see. But for now: meat! At times, it does seem very ... strange, to be eating meat after so long abstaining. But also (more often than not) delicious.

Building A Better City

Spring is here in DC and the city has seen fit to build a fantastic new bike path--called the Metropolitan Branch Trail--that runs about 2 miles, virtually from our house to downtown DC. It's lined with spiffy solar-powered street lights and they have grand plans to extend it all the way from Union Station to Silver Spring. The path has made my bike commute immeasurably more pleasant, not just because the trail avoids busy streets and buses and taxis, but also because it seems to have avoided all the steep hills.

I should back up. Our current house is nestled among a clutch of modest sized hills (DC is surprisingly hilly!) meaning that any reasonable path to work inevitably involved a sweaty uphill slog. (Yes, I'm lazy. But in my defense I'm usually biking before having coffee.) I even went so far as to consult topographic maps to find some sort of minimally vertical route to work, but it turned out that the optimal path actually ran right along the train tracks that snake through Northeast DC leading into Union Station. But then, cleverly, the city decided to route the new bike trail right alongside those tracks. Nice job DC!

Bike trails are one of those things that aren't super-expensive but that you can imagine stressed-out budget cutters eying skeptically. So yay for DC deciding to invest in a small thing that makes the city better, greener, safer, healthier, friendlier. (OK, obviously I'm selfishly invested in this one, but little by little the path is getting more and more use. You can see it from the metro tracks and I bet a lot of people crushed into a 9am train are thinking about buying a bike now.)

In that same vein, I should probably say something about the new gay marriage law. DC has now joined 5 states (and one Indian tribe!) in granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Our church scheduled its first such ceremony for the first available Sunday after the law went into effect. The two grooms in question were both pillars of the church community who had been together for three decades, and they chose a Sunday service to make it 'official.'

Church was packed and everyone was extremely psyched for the couple -- the pastor quipped that the turnout was even higher than Easter. In addition to wedding joyfulness I also remember feeling a distinct (and quite spring/Easter-like) sense of possibility. After all the struggle and frustration and gridlock of modern life, it is in fact possible for progress to happen. Usually change is so slow that it seems like it will never happen, but then all of a sudden, it is there. We can do things.

Social Change

Kevin Drum has a pointed article on what Barack Obama needs to do to actually pass the ambitious progressive agenda he campaigned on. In short, Obama needs to use his considerable rhetorical gifts to convince the nation not just to vote for him (check), but also to support him. The public still needs convincing that his specific policies will indeed bring about peace, prosperity, justice and sustainability. I bet this part will be harder.

Capping greenhouse gas emissions and securing universal health coverage won't come easy - the entrenched interests aren't just going to lay down. It's going to be a fight. Leaving Iraq won't be a cakewalk either. Interestingly, Drum dredges up an old story about Franklin Roosevelt that nicely illustrates the other side of the policy change equation.

In a possibly apocryphal story told by I.F. Stone, FDR once met with a group of reformers who explained at length why he should support their cause. "Okay, you've convinced me," he told them. "Now go on out and bring pressure on me."

Janinsanfran is thinking along the same lines:

One the hardest truths for people in power to remember is that having a noisy, demanding, outsider grassroots constituency helps them govern. This is so even when they are getting jacked up and called names. This is something Obama should understand from his days as an organizer. Pushy people give cover to a progressive politician to get things done.

Having been in DC for over two years now this seems correct to me. Politicians are not leaders; they are followers. Watching the U.S. Senate (and to a lesser extent, the House) deliberate on various topics, I am constantly struck by how slow, conservative, incremental it is ... and how important agitated constituents are in providing cover for wavering politicians.

No successful social movement ever succeeds thanks to elected officials. Rather, the demands of social movements are institutionalized by politicians once they have built enough strength to be undeniable. That said, I think Obama understands this dynamic and his role in it. Here's hoping his supporters do too -- and don't let up after he's sworn in. There are great opportunities here, but still lots of work to do.

Here There Be Dragons

When I was a kid I used to draw my own maps of imaginary worlds, mostly inspired by Tolkien and the other fantasy novels I devoured. I especially remember the upside-down V's I used for the mountain ranges.
(With luck, those maps have been burned, along with any and all teenage attempts at poetry.) Yet even today, a map adorning the inner cover of a novel is an exciting thing. In addition to being helpful for keeping those fantasy place names straight ("Now where/what exactly is Grobulor...?") maps are instrumental in preserving some of the mystery that draws us in to fantasy in the first place.

The twin hearts of fantasy (and science-fiction, too) are deciphering the ideas that make the book work and exploring the worlds created by those ideas. In the beginning, all is mysterious--names and places and concepts are tossed around with little explanation--and gradually the pieces fit together and become clear. But a smart fantasist will always leave a whiff of mystery hanging in the air, a feeling that there are still frontiers to be explored (the better to set the stage for an infinite number of sequels, of course).

With Tolkien, I was always fascinated by the parts of the map that didn't enter into the storyline: Far Harad, the Northern Waste, Rhûn. As I got older, I also realized that a lot of fantasy never really dragged itself out from under Tolkien's shadow (trolls! swords! Old English diction!). But there are a lot of younger writers who are taking deliberate aim at the cliches of the past and I was thrilled to discover that some of them like maps too.

China Mieville's Perdido Street Station is a fantasy novel for urban planning majors. Instead of farmboys and fair maidens, Mieville gives us the teeming metropolis of New Crobuzon where five or six species coexist uneasily with a corrupt police state, organized crime, street gangs, vigilantes and all manner of religious cults, political movements, labor unions. Fittingly, the inner cover map delineates neighborhoods and provides a helpful overview of New Crobuzon's subway system.
The city itself is a tangible character in the story and Mieville delights in describing its streets and hoods and regaling us with stories from its past. (In one corner of the city, life goes on beneath the towering bones and ribcage of a prehistoric beast.) Of course, nothing warms the heart of an urbanite quite like a tube map, but the book as a lot more to recommend it than geography. Mieville also writes terrific, grown-up characters and has a smart nose for science and politics (in real life, he's a committed socialist). Like a lot of genre novels, the ending is lame, but the road there is terrific (full review here, he's also written two further novels in this world which I haven't read yet).

To Mieville I would also add Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is famous for reworking ancient myths into a modern context, and in his first non-graphic novel Neverwhere he constructs a netherworld (London Below) out of the 40 odd abandoned Tube stations on the London Underground.


Ultimately, Neverwhere is not Gaiman's strongest book, but it is quite charming in how it weaves magic into the everyday of grit of London. Gaiman treads lightly -- I could easily imagine a series of books inhabiting this world, but many of his most promising ideas are given only a glance. In this sense, Neverwhere is a little sketchier and less ambitious than PSS -- but I thoroughly enjoyed its merging of fantasy and modernity.

Maps: Pub Trans Edition

DC has a really great Metro system. Measured in terms of density and usefulness, I would place it on the second tier of subway systems I've experienced, behind the London Tube or the NYC subway, but better than BART, CTA and everyone else. In terms of architecture and cleanliness, it really has no equal. It's easy to gripe about, but really, the Metro is quality.

But it could always be improved! Every time I look at the system map I mentally play connect-the-dots and create new and useful subway routes. Greater Greater Washington likes this game too and resurrects a map of proposed Metro additions from the early '90s. Click the image for the full-size version; the current system map is here.

This fantasy version has some nifty features (the Dulles connection and the outbound routes to Baltimore and Annapolis would be great, and the ring line would do miracles for Beltway traffic, I'm sure) but I have to take exception to the Georgetown-Chevy Chase-Wheaton route.

Granted, a Georgetown station would be super-popular and would help the kids who want to go drinking on the weekend not have to pile into taxis to get home. But there are so, so many places in DC more in need of a Metro stop than these. Not for nothing does ggwash dub this the "rich white people's line."

Instead, we really should head north from Georgetown up to Cathedral (drop off some tourists) and then turn east back to Woodley, cross the Rock Creek into Adams-Morgan (another hit with the bar and restaurant crowd) and connect to the Green Line at Columbia Heights. From there the line could turn north up 14th or 16th streets towards Takoma and north DC.

Or, alternately, the route could continue into Northeast towards the Washington Hospital Center (currently not served by Metro!), the Rhode Island Ave station, turn south through Trinidad and Capitol Hill and connect to the Orange/Blue Lines at Potomac Ave. It could even (gasp) jump the river and add some options for the folks in Anacostia.

Anyway, those are my fantasy picks. Granted, a tradeoff does exist between expanding service for suburban commuters (which would take a lot of cars of the road) and creating a truly usable public transportation service for city and inner-suburb people that need it most (i.e. those hardest hit by rising gas prices).

Realistically, the politics of expanding Metro revolve around getting either Maryland or Virginia to pony up some cash (hence the planned Silver Line to Dulles or the Purple Line proposal) whereas increasing transit density and usefulness for DC residents falls mainly on our already overstretched tax base. Still, these types of investments are bound to payoff in the long run.

(via transit pornographer Matt Yglesias. More Metro extension proposals found here.)

Hyde Park Hit

This week the cover article for the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard is about Chicago's Hyde Park -- home to the University of Chicago and, of course, Barack Obama. The article is a mix of insight, glaring oversight and a handful of cheap shots. The author, Andrew Ferguson, more or less concludes that Hyde Park, for all its racial integration, is really an exclusive country club in disguise. To paraphrase one interviewee, Hyde Park doesn't have any class conflict because there is only one class -- upper. And thus, Obama's neighborhood betrays all his supposed faults, especially his lack of authenticity, wealth and elitism.

This would hardly be blog-worthy if it were just the same old line used on every democratic nominee since McGovern. But, damn it, I lived in Hyde Park for six years, and if you're going to slam the hood (and all the good people who live there) at least get your story straight. My main impression of the article was that Ferguson had spent a couple of days there, walked around a bit, talked to a bunch of rich acquaintances and then wrote it up. He mentions all the pieces that don't fit this cozy thesis (like the lack of expensive restaurants), and breezes right over them.

To be sure Hyde Park has some wealthy inhabitants and the university loves to burnish its image as the ivory-est of ivory towers. And crucially, as Ferguson relates, there is an ugly history to its isolationism that the university is still trying to live down (although considerably less ugly than other parts of Chicago).

Yet when I lived there, I had friends who were waiters and construction workers and, you know, starving humanities grad students living out of their cars. Our church had a handful of professors but a larger number of regular neighborhood folks. Next door was an immigrant family who were running a church out of an un-rented apartment in our building. In the summer, everyone goes to the beach and plays softball in the park and enjoys the long evenings. Among the students, there was a fair bit of griping about the place - but almost none of it had to do with HP being too upscale.

In fact, the rep was usually just the opposite. One prof of mine used to complain about how hard it was to find a decent latte. Non-south-siders often worried for your safety when you told them where you lived. Obnoxious freshmen made jokes about bullet-proof vests. But that's not fair either. HP isn't the ghetto - it's a middle class black neighborhood with a world class university grafted onto it. This combination makes it unusual, but not in the trite ways Ferguson implies. In short, a college town, warts and all.

Hyde Park is by no means perfect, but I loved living there, and it deserves a fuller telling of its charms and flaws and history than this cheap political pop psychology.

Web 2.0 reinvents the chain letter

I've been on Facebook for several months now and I have to say it is both addicting and annoying. Clearly, they have created a social networking site that works. This is what friendster always wanted to be. The web-design is very clean and appealing (as opposed to blinky, flashy and cluttered) and they cleverly got in on the ground floor with college frosh nationwide. Then they let the oldsters like me in the door. And as a way of finding and re-connecting with old friends, it's effective if only due to its vast size. So ... w00t for them.

As many have pointed out, Facebook is also evil (or potentially evil), with connections to the CIA's venture capital firm, the DOD and the founder of (shudder) the Stanford Review. That's not to say Facebook is necessarily doing anything vastly more evil than Google (i.e. corporate data-mining and targetted ads), but if anyone in government ever gets the bright idea of re-starting the Total Information Awareness system, I guess they know who to talk to.

But really, my main gripe with Facebook is all the requests. In the 90s we all got chain letters asking us to Save Sesame Street or forwards brimming with inspirational sayings -- now I'm being asked to turn my friends to zombies or forward FunWall posts or take quizes on how many kids I'll eventually have. The big improvement seems to be that the chain letter now installs itself on your profile page and automatically selects a list of friends to forward on to. Really? No thanks. Maybe I'm just being grumpy, but with Facebook there is an exhausting expectation that you're supposed to communicate through an endless volley of thrown sheep.

Don't get me wrong - some of the apps are pretty cool. The Wall is nice, and SuperPoke is cute. I love the maps and the webcomic feeds and its nice that they've resurrected Oregon Trail. The open source development of applications is clearly the way to go and I'm sure there are some very creative people writing some cool and useful programs out there. But I don't think it's quite the killer app that will help grow a true online community - there's too much noise right now.

Of course, I still want you to be my friend...

Cheap 'n' Green

We are feeling overwhelmed by our 'stuff.' The reasons for this are clear: we moved from a house to an apartment (less space) and we added a new member of the family (more stuff). So, with a constant reminder of the material economy surrounding us (and often underfoot) we decided to make a new year's resolution: buy nothing new for an entire year.*

[ There's a group in San Francisco called the Compact that evangelizes for this sort of thing (interesting stories about them here and here, plus a listserv). They seem idealistic, nicely pragmatic and not, you know, psychotically dogmatic about it. Also check out "Ask A Brokeass" -- Gristmill's fountain of "cheap green" advice. ]

So, why? Well, obviously I bet we can save a ton of money if we work at it. Plus there's something hard-wired in my brain that thinks landfills and disposable consumer products are pretty-much the dumbest ideas ever. I will walk several miles to find a recyling bin. I mean, what ever happened to using every part of the buffalo? What mega-genius came up with those cheap plastic happy-meal toys? The environmental costs of the American high-consumption lifestyle are bad and bound to get worse. For example, do you know where your old TV ends up once you're done with it? Why not take it to your friendly neighborhood TV repairman (hi Dad!) and get a few more years out of it?

And then there's the psychological aspect to it. Unplugging from commercial culture can be very liberating. There's something eye-opening in thinking hard about what we really need and how much is 'enough' and what a sustainable economy might actually look like. And anybody can do it - you don't have to be able to afford the organic section at Whole Foods to play.

And yet, and yet, disposable stuff is so convenient and useful ... and so easy to get rid of. There is certainly something undeniably exciting about saying: I don't need this anymore and I can just make it disappear! Sigh. Too much stuff is definitely an input and output problem, and this is our current plan to deal with the inputs. *Now, of course, there are caveats:

• Food. This is a clear exception to the rule. The idea of eating 'used' food is gross. (I suppose we could restrict ourselves to dumpster-diving -- and, hey, people do -- but, that doesn't quite seem like our style. Plus, my sister made me promise I wouldn't.)
• Experiences. Movies, concerns, cultural events, video rentals are all exceptions.
• Travel. Gas for the car, plane tickets -- not technically stuff, although it would probably be a good idea to reduce these too.
• Necessity. And of course, if there's a pressing need for something essential that we can't really find a replacement for (I'm thinking ... diapers), then yeah, we'll buy it.
  

But, in general, we seem to be doing pretty well for our first month, and I expect it really won't be all that hard. There are thriving second-hand markets for most of the stuff I spend money on (books and CDs). High-quality used baby stuff is easy to find (since babies outgrow clothes and toys so rapidly) -- not to mention Quinn has several doting, loving grandparents happy ensure she wants for nothing. Clothes shouldn't be too hard either: I haaate shopping for clothes and will happily avoid doing it for years. I'm pretty sure I've subsisted on free t-shirts for decades now anyway. (fyi-- there is a also well-established exception for used underwear.)

Anyway, between craigslist and freecycle, we seem to be doing pretty well. I got a great used bike a few months ago for a cool hundred bucks from this guy who runs a bike repair business out of his backyard. Now, I really need a new pair of dress shoes, so I expect I'll be checking out the shoe section of the Goodwill soon enough.

Correct Beliefs

Sean over at Cosmic Variance often wonders about religious belief and morality:

People sometimes argue back and forth about whether religious belief is a good thing, because it induces believers to be moral or charitable. In a big-picture sense, I think arguments of this form completely miss the point; beliefs should be judged on whether they are correct or incorrect, not on whether they cause people to do good or bad things.

I generally agree with some of the things he says on this topic, although I am often puzzled by his focus on "correct beliefs" and the idea that you actually can judge beliefs on whether they are correct or incorrect. Also, I don't get a lot of utility out of telling people that their religious beliefs are wrong and that mine are correct (although plenty of people on the internet seem to find this quite enjoyable) so I suppose I fall into the camp of those who are quite happy to have people religious people in the world and don't generally see that they are more or less moral than the non-religious.

Generally I place politics over epistemology. I don't really care what people believe -- because, let's face it, people believe some crazy stuff and no one really agrees with anyone else -- but because I do have to share the planet with other people, I am concerned about what they do. Religious folks who share my values and are out there doing good in the world are pretty damn awesome in my book and I am happy to work with them to make a better and more just world. This isn't to say that non-religious folks aren't doing good work, just that there are a lot of religious people who undoubtedly are.

What's more, I have serious doubts that most beliefs are even falsifiable - i.e. that there is even a framework for deciding correct vs. incorrect. Leaving religion aside, not every belief conforms to the high standards of scientific discourse, even for people who are working scientists. Honestly, most political beliefs (right, left, up, down) are more about values than rational appraisal of evidence and thus fall into this category.

Anyway, I agree with Sean that it's pointless to try to measure the aggregate good caused by religion and compare it against the aggregate evil, but I'm also suspicious of the idea that our all of our beliefs can or should be judged by scientific standards. I'm sure this makes me an "appeaser" in the eyes of the New Atheism Movement, but the only people I've ever met who claimed to be "totally rational in every facet of their life" were Objectivists. And that just ain't cool.

night light

Last night as I was falling asleep I was visited by a (menacing, ominous) flashy green flying thing hovering at the end of my bed. In my half-awake state and in the dark room my mind automatically interpreted the little light as -- naturally -- someone standing at the end of my bed waving a green laser pointer at me. I'll admit it sounds a little crazy in the light of day, but at the time I swear my brain filled in the shadowy outline of a laser-pointered intruder. Creepy.

Naturally I freaked (a little).

My waking brain did the whole fight-or-flight thing before finally deciding that the sinister laser-pointer was actually just a firefly that had wriggled its way through the screen in the open window and couldn't get back out. And I have to say, sharing a closed, dark space with a firefly is actually kind of cool -- they're very bright. I opened the screen a bit and eventually its light went out, so I assume it returned to its firefly home.

Free Trade Skepticism, Part 1

I find myself annoyed by smart people who summarily dismiss the scientific consenses supporting anthropogenic global warming or evolution because the science conflicts with their political beliefs. Yet I confess to being skeptical about the supposed benefits of unfettered free trade - a concept which commands a similarly broad consensus among economic experts (and among both political parties and the mainstram media). So what gives?

In the interest of self-critique and intellectual honesty (or at the very least, knowing thy enemy) I thought it would behoove me to learn some of the arguments behind free trade boosterism. Since this is an enormous topic I'll try to limit myself to understanding a narrower question: does trade liberalism lead to a "race to the bottom" in environmental and labor standards?

Thankfully the libertarian Cato Institute website freetrade.org has a helpful (if elderly) FAQ addressing just this very question:

Does free trade lead to a “race to the bottom” in global labor and environmental standards?
While this is a frequently heard complaint, there is no evidence of such a “race to the bottom.” In fact, the opposite is true: expanding trade and rising incomes tend to promote higher social standards. (continues)

Ah. So, um ... not initially very enlightening. What I really want is for someone to honestly engage with this common concern about globalization and lay out some evidence for why its misguided. It gets a little better if you read one of their many longer reports, for example WTO Report Card III (pdf) by Aaron Lukas, which fleshes out the argument a little bit more (p. 10).

"The most important result of trade and investment, however, is economic growth, which in turn leads to a better environment. That is true because, as incomes rise, the demand for improved environmental quality also rises. Numerous studies have confirmed that, in practice, trade and investment activities usually have a positive impact on the environment.

This is not to imply that a cleaner environment is the immediate result of economic development. Empirical studies have revealed the existence of an inverted U–shaped relationship, often called an “Environmental Kuznets Curve,” after the late American economist Simon Kuznets, between environmental degradation and income per capita."

So the initial impact of trade liberalization is in fact very likely to be environmental degradation and lowered labor standards. Nations often compete to attract foreign investment by setting up Export Processing Zones -- areas with lower tariff barriers and relaxed labor and environmental regulations. This is, of course, what free trade skeptics mean when they refer to the "race to the bottom" -- the first part of the "U".

The Cato-ites don't seem to deny that this occurs. What they argue that a competing force is actually more important in the long run, and they go on and on about how the environment in the U.S. and Europe has gotten cleaner and cleaner over the past 30 years, despite the fact that we've liberalized our trade policies.

However, this line of argument strikes me as completely disingenuous, however descriptive it might be. Trade policy didn't clean up the environment; government regulation did. The Clean Water Act. Banning leaded gasoline. Onerous burdens placed on the noble free market by meddling government agencies, or so sayeth libertarian Cato.

Anyway, there are numerous justice issues here that I won't go into, except to point out that the implied model of development here is for the poor in the developing world to suck it up and wait for their country to get over the hump -- if it ever does.

I will say that reading through Cato's reports clarified in my mind that many (but not all) of my objections to "free trade" aren't about trade policy per se, but are instead about the onerous structural adjustment programs imposed on developing nations as part of economic aid packages. Lowering tariffs is one thing, but privatizing water utilities and raising fees for school enrollment is entirely another.

In other words the solution for poverty and environmental degradation in developing countries is not necessarily trade protectionism -- although giving the finger to the IMF might actually help a lot. At any rate, the so-called Washington Consensus is much less of a sure thing among economists than the more vanilla free-trade arguments that Cato is talking about.

But these are all fine ideas for future posts, sorry this one was so long. And please feel free to tell me I'm wrong, or at least point me in the right direction...

cinema vs. celebrity

We went to the movies the other night and the price for a regular ticket was $10! No attempt to paper over the fact that you're being totally screwed: $10 straight up. Unsurprisingly the enormous theatre was almost empty. Totally ridiculous -- and it's too bad because I really love seeing good movies on the big screen. Chicago had an awesome student-run film series and we would buy passes and go almost weekly to see second-run blockbusters, art films, foreign films, cult classics, you name it. Cut the price of a movie ticket in half and I for one would go to the movies more than twice as often.

What's more, there are definitely certain movies that you really do want to see on the big screen, and others that you might as well wait for on Netflix. This most recent shakedown reminded me that not only should a movie be pretty good to warrant ten bucks, it should also have a certain cinematic quality that's lost when seeing it on your 12" TV. I've talked before about how I have a soft spot in my heart for intrinsically cinematic movies -- films with that rush of moving image excitement you just can't get from the printed word or even a stage play. By this I don't specifically mean action movies with explosions, or even 'tasteful' costume design or 'lush' cinematography. It's more intangible than that: Lord of the Rings, Lawrence of Arabia, even the original Star Wars ... stuff like that.

Can I also gripe for a minute about the ascendancy of the biopic? By this I mean a movie primarily about the life of a celebrity. Over the last few years Hollywood has provided us with impressive documentation of the lives of the famous and name-worthy. To mention a few (Oscar contenders all): Ray, Walk The Line (which is the exact same movie as Ray), Capote, the Aviator, Finding Neverland, Kinsey, the Motorcycle Diaries, the Hours, Frida, A Beautiful Mind, Ali, Iris, Before Night Falls, Pollock, Quills, the Hurricane, Malcolm X, Nixon, Gandhi to name just a few. This year brings us several more biopics (The Queen and The Last King of Scotland) that are at the top of everyone's Oscar lists. Apparently the highest accolades accrue to movie stars playing yet another famous person.


My gripe with these movies is not that they're bad: some are certainly tedious, but others I would rank among my faves. Rather, the problem is that they're a bit lazy. Your typical biopic often has (1) an eye-catching performance in the titular role, and (2) a lousy story. This is a simple consequence of the fact that the lives of famous people (even someone as nutty as Howard Hughes) are simply not interesting enough to warrant a full-length motion picture about their year-to-year existence.

The best of the bunch succeed in spite of the genre's limitations. Gandhi is really the story of the founding of modern India, Ray succeeds on the considerable strength of the music, and the Motorcycle Diaries is a story about personal awakening to injustice. But, even when watching your better biographies I often wonder whether these interesting themes could just as easily be the basis for telling a new story, rather than draping them across the mundane biographical outline of a real person's life.

For example, one of the most interesting movies I've seen recently was actually a fake biography: Velvet Goldmine (I've raved about the sweet soundtrack elsewhere). The movie takes the 70's glam-rock milieu of Roxy Music, Brian Eno and David Bowie and crafts a fictional story about a very Bowie-esque rock star. You gotta love any film the ties together Oscar Wilde, space aliens, talking Ken dolls and several tons of glitter make-up. Unlike the fictional John Slade, Bowie never faked his own death on stage, but it sorta seems like something he might have tried. And the stunt doubles as a great metaphor for glam-rock's death at the hands of 80s-pop, for Bowie's perpetual reinventions and for the end of a certain sexual idealism in our popular culture. VG isn't tied down by the tyrannies of fact and history, and that freedom seems to allow it to say something far more true and interesting.

To return to my earlier point, when you strip away the remakes of TV shows, biopics, adaptations of books, comics and extended SNL skits, is there anyone in Hollywood actually telling original stories in films? Or, put it another way, which movies need to be seen as films in order to truly capture their spirit. A few come to mind that you couldn't even begin to reproduce as a book, a TV show, a stage play, a comic book, a newscast: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, City of God, Mulholland Drive, 2046, Pulp Fiction, animation from Pixar, Miyazaki or Aardman. These types of films won't win Best Picture, but might garner an Original Screenplay nomination. These types of films I would pay $10 to see again and again.