the zeitgeist report

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the Dubai port deal a case of straight racism? This from The Note:

The Washington Wire has a Port of Seattle official saying that Americans are "xenophobic" about globalization, but they "like their '$1.98 underwear at Wal-Mart.'"

"The outcome did nothing to solve the underlying issue exposed by an uproar that has consumed the capital for weeks. A vast majority of containers that flow daily into the United States remain uninspired and vulnerable to security gaps at many points," writes David Sanger of the New York Times. (And Note how high up he plays the sell vs. transfer language.)

I am not sure what to think about this, just that I find it extremely curious:

Some Chicago-area pastors who incorporate jazz into worship services use it as an evangelical tool for attracting new members. Others embrace the music as a spiritual connector.

"I see jazz as mirroring God's continuing creation in the world," said Pastor Janet Volk of Northlake Lutheran Church in Northlake. "You never know what's going to happen."

Volk's church was awarded a $14,000 church grant last spring to introduce jazz services, which include secular and faith-based songs. "We were looking at target audiences and casting a wide net as fishers of people," she said.

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with this:

The South Michigan Avenue church has no choir, but as the congregation lifts its collective voice to the melodies of the King Fleming Trio, soulfulness sweeps the room. Members tap feet and pat their hands on laps while bopping to the buoyant notes. They smile.

Slate has an article that may prove controversial or just, you know... duh:

In The Feminine Mystique, the late Betty Friedan attributed the malaise of married women largely to traditionalist marriages in which wives ran the home and men did the bread-winning. Her book helped spark the sexual revolution of the 1970s and fueled the notion that egalitarian partnerships—where both partners have domestic responsibilities and pursue jobs—would make wives happier. Last week, two sociologists at the University of Virginia published an exhaustive study of marital happiness among women that challenges this assumption. Stay-at-home wives, according to the authors, are more content than their working counterparts. And happiness, they found, has less to do with division of labor than with the level of commitment and "emotional work" men contribute (or are perceived to contribute). But the most interesting data may be that the women who strongly identify as progressive—the 15 percent who agree most with feminist ideals—have a harder time being happy than their peers, according to an analysis that has been provided exclusively to Slate. Feminist ideals, not domestic duties, seem to be what make wives morose. Progressive married women—who should be enjoying some or all of the fruits that Freidan lobbied for—are less happy, it would appear, than women who live as if Friedan never existed.

Ms. Coulter always has a bitey little voice when commenting on the American culture:

Jon Stewart, this year's host, was very funny -- but not quite as funny as the fact that the audience didn't get the jokes. (There were a lot of actors in the audience.) Apparently, the one comedy bit capable of bringing down a house of actors is: Ben Stiller hopping around in a green unitard.

However liberal Stewart is personally, his best jokes are always mildly conservative.

He twitted the Hollywood audience, saying:

"I have to say it is a little shocking to see all these big names here, these huge stars. The Oscars is really, I guess, the one night of the year where you can see all your favorite stars without having to donate any money to the Democratic Party."

Clooney made a speach where he claimed that Hollywood was on the cutting edge of reform in America. Not so claims Coulter:

The point is: The Hollywood set didn't start wearing AIDS ribbons to the Oscars until 1992: 10 years after The New York Times described AIDS; seven years after AIDS was the cover story on Life magazine; seven years after AIDS was in People magazine; five years after Oprah did a show on AIDS.

Only recently has George Clooney heard about segregation. (He's against it.) But he still can't nail down the details of something that ended nearly half a century ago.

Contrary to Clooney's impassioned speech, no theaters ever forced black people to sit in the back. If you were trying to oppress people, you would make them sit in the front, which are the worst seats in the house. Or you'd just make them watch a George Clooney movie.

Nat Hentoff makes some good points about liberty in the Village Voice:

In a lead editorial on February 17, the British Financial Times said of the Abu Ghraib revelations, and this also applies to what has happened at Gitmo since: "There was no independent investigation and no real accountability: the two most visible privates in the photos were jailed, and a junior general was demoted.

"But responsibility lay—and lies—further up the chain of command, as far as Donald Rumsfeld . . . and officials such as Alberto Gonzales, now attorney general, who devised a framework for circumventing the Geneva Conventions. It is they who should be held to account."

In the fifities and sixties (and earlier) churches were burned in the south by frightened racists trying to intimidate African Americans. In the Eighties there was a rash of church burnings to collect insurance money. In the 21st century college kids burn churches for kicks:

Three college students from the prosperous suburbs of Birmingham, Ala., were arrested yesterday in the burning of nine Baptist churches last month in rural Alabama. Federal officials said the fires were a "joke" that spun out of control while the students were deer hunting.

After initially setting ablaze five churches in the county just south of Birmingham, two students burned four additional churches days later in more remote areas, hoping to divert investigators, the authorities said.

In a Wonkette post entitled "The Exquisite Disillusionment of Pierce Bush" we are given a blog posting which I just could not look at hard enough or long enough. The story is that of President Bush's nephew leaving Georgetown University because he is fed up with the Washington political scene:

“Half the reason I wanted to leave Georgetown is that I was kind of burnt out by politics,” he said. “Living in Washington for a year and a half, you kind of see what kind of BS it is.”

He added:

“My uncle is this guy with all this power and he gets blamed for everything.”

Young Bush unburdened himself in a phone interview in the Houston Chronicle. He had previously written a letter to the Chronicle over the Dubai Port issue:

When the political firestorm over Dubai Ports World broke out last month, President Bush's nephew sent the Houston Chronicle an electronic letter to the editor, defending his uncle's drive to allow the United Arab Emirates company to buy a firm that helps run six U.S. ports.

To the University of Texas at Austin student, opposition to the deal — it had been approved by the administration before being scuttled Thursday — sent an "ignorant and offensive" message that the owners were being discriminated against because they are Arab. The protests of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and other congressional leaders seemed "racially prejudiced," he said in the letter, which the Chronicle published.

So we have one of the greatest blog posting headlines ever. We have the earnest ruminations of a fortunate young man and than to illustrate the story is a vintage cover to J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. On the cover is a drawing representing Holden Caulfield with the words:

This unusual book may shock you, you will laugh, and may break your heart-- but you will never forget it

This oddly worded description may characterize Pierce Bush as well as Catcher. Someone needs to keep an eye on this Bush. It seems like there is some kind of movie or book or MTV special here.

I love lists and even though the methodology is a little flakey, this is probably as good a list as any to moniter what people are doing on the internet:

How do we come up with our 50 best? Short answer: we take your suggestions, probe friends and colleagues about their favorite online haunts and then surf like mad. This year's finalists are a mix of newcomers, new discoveries and veterans that have learned some new tricks

There are a number of online museums and art galleries. The blog section has several of Nick Denton's Gawker Media blogs but doesn't include two of my favorites Wonkette and Gawker about Washington D.C. and New York respectively.

And just what is cool anyway? And when did Time become the arbiter of cool.

Justification for your hardcore religious practices:

What does the pious person get in return for all of his or her time and effort? A church full of passionate members; a community of people deeply involved in one another's lives and more willing than most to come to one another's aid; a peer group of knowledgeable souls who speak the same language (or languages), are moved by the same texts, and cherish the same dreams. Religion is a " 'commodity' that people produce collectively," says Iannaccone. "My religious satisfaction thus depends both on my 'inputs' and those of others." If a rich and textured spiritual experience is what you seek, then a storefront Holy Roller church or an Orthodox shtiebl is a better fit than a suburban church made up of distracted, ambitious people who can barely manage to find a morning free for Sunday services, let alone several evenings a week for text study and volunteer work.

At some point, of course, the disadvantages of zealotry outweigh the benefits. A church reaches that point when it fails to offer acceptable substitutes for everything it has asked its members to give up. Cults that lure their followers into the wilderness but provide them with no livelihood soon fade into history.

Slate is publishing a serialized online novel starting during March:

On Monday, March 13, Slate will launch an exciting new publishing venture: an online novel written in real time, by award-winning novelist Walter Kirn. Installments of the novel, titled The Unbinding , will appear in Slate roughly twice a week from March through June. While novels have been serialized in mainstream online publications before, this is the first time a prominent novelist has published a genuine Net Novel—one that takes advantage of, and draws inspiration from, the capacities of the Internet. The Unbinding ,a dark comedy set in the near future, is a compilation of "found documents"—online diary entries, e-mails, surveillance reports, etc. It will make use of the Internet's unique capacity to respond to events as they happen, linking to documents and other Web sites. In other words, The Unbinding is conceived for the Web, rather than adapted to it.

Some of my Zeitgeist observation includes a little wishful thinking. I have a model for progress that I have been working on -- a set of standards that I can moniter -- stories that I could look for which indicated a society moving forward, according to a set of criteria that, I admit, are my own, but which, I hope, have universal appeal.

For example, in the field of health, progress would be recorded if people were living longer and if diseases were being cured at a reasonable cost. In the area of morality, if society was moving towards more ten commandment style behavior. This might show up as a cut in crime or divorce rates. In economics, increased incomes, increased savings, decreased debt, and lowered unemployment and participation in government programs. An innovation which makes people more productive or less reliant on drudgery would be noted. In the area of education, increased literacy and increased availability of educational materials.

Anyway. This is one of those stories that fits into that model:

The D.C. government is preparing to ask companies to bid on building a wireless Internet system through much of the city, including free service for low-income residents.

But unlike other municipalities such as Philadelphia and San Francisco that have commissioned such networks city-wide, the District plans to give its contract to the company that goes furthest in serving low-income residents with free Web access and even free computers and training.

Perhaps a parallel model of decline from Gibbon would be helpful at this point to contrast decline with progress:

Referring to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he lists five attributes that marked the end of Rome:–

1. a mounting love of luxury (ie. Affluence)

2. a widening gap between the very rich and poor

3. an obsession with sex

4. freakishness in the arts (masquerading as originality)

5. an increased desire to live off the state.

It seems like someone could make a slamming reality show based on this list:

A “dictator” is a head of state who exercises arbitrary authority over the lives of his citizens and who cannot be removed from power through legal means. The worst commit terrible human-rights abuses. This present list draws in part on reports by global human-rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International. While the three worst from 2005 have retained their places, two on last year’s list (Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan) have slipped out of the Top 10—not because their conduct has improved but because other dictators have gotten worse.

Don't forget the 10 runners up.

This is the article that I read, from Rolling Stone which made me want to move to Portland, sight unseen:

This unpretentious city has long been home to influential indie acts that generate cult rather than Top Forty followings.

And there was this from Fast Company.

And this from the Utne Reader:

The result of all this planning is a beautiful, pedestrian-friendly downtown area where people love to live and work. Life in Portland takes place not inside autos but in great rainy-day hangouts like the block-long Powell's bookstore and the restored 1920s Bagdad Theater, where you can watch a second-run movie for a dollar, and order pizza and a beer too.

From August of 2003 for about a year I had another blog. Check it out.

What was it about?:

art, culture and ideas: film, books, poetry, online learning, random text and number generators, hockey and bob dylan

There seems to be a concensus that these newcomers are the future of the show. There is a great deal of talent here. Kristen Wiig is very funny and has several spot on impersonations:

The four newcomers of SNL 's 2005-6 season—Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, Jason Sudeikis, and Kristen Wiig —have begun to make their mark on the show, as well as stake their claim on its future: Hader is a master of impersonation, while Sudeikis, an SNL writer for two years, has proven to be a solid player. Wiig already has a recurring character (The Target Lady) under her belt, while Andy Samberg, of Lonely Island fame, has ensured SNL will be running digital shorts until 2008 at least.

Last weeks Natalie Portman rap video is everywhere.

This article gives interesting insights on the inner workings of the show. I understand that Seth Meyers had a head writer credit on lat weeks show.

I am interested in seeing how this goes. Most people hate minimalism:

In a groundbreaking first by a major orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic presents a wide-ranging survey of Minimalism. Under the watchful ear of Festival Director John Adams, Minimalist Jukebox reflects on where we've been, the current state of the art, and things to come. Run Minimalism's musical gamut from African drums to Branca’s electric guitars, from Riley, Glass and Reich to Andriessen, Pärt and Adams himself. Open your ears and expand your mind.

I intend to see Adams' "Nixon in China" performed in Portland.

John Adams writes an essay on minimalism for the LAPhil website:

Grand historical pronouncements are always dangerous and especially so in the arts, where tastes and value judgments can often turn upside down from generation to generation. For a sober reminder we need only to look at how, in the immediate years after his death, J.S. Bach was held in such low esteem by educated listeners. What one generation might consider fussy and needlessly ornate a succeeding generation can rediscover as endlessly inventive and profoundly meaningful.

"Minimalism" as an aesthetic credo came of age during the 1960s and flourished in its purest forms for roughly 15 years.

Humans are still useful:

Speaking to a room filled with Internet developers at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego this week, Luis Felipe Cabrera, Amazon's vice president of software development, outlined a project to harness human intelligence for tasks that computers can't handle well, such as recognizing objects in images.

The backbone of the plan is a Web-services platform called Mechanical Turk . It uses an auction-style system to farm out complex tasks -- complex for a computer, that is -- such as recognizing the difference between a human face and a nearby bush, or accurately transcribing an audio recording. Cabrera likes to call the platform "artificial artificial intelligence" -- it's computers asking humans to do tasks, rather than the other way around.

To illustrate the idea, Cabrera cited a test in which A9.com , Amazon's search engine, asked average users to fulfill "human intelligence tasks" (HITs) -- jobs that computers are notoriously bad at doing, such as picking out one building or business within a photograph of a city block in order to highlight that part of the image in association with a business address.

Not only did participants supply the necessary answers, but they did so "outstandingly fast,"...

Perhaps someone should compile some sort of list of things that people can do better than computers. And somebody should be in charge of the list. And maybe the list shouldn't be on a computer.

How does one attempt to tell people what good art is? It is usually what somebody likes and tells someone else they should like. Jansen had an interesting, pluralistic approach to art history, in that art was catagorized by medium rather than by chronology or ethnic identification. You saw Picasso's bicycle seat next to a primitive fertility idol next to David.

I've seen this in discount sections of the larger bookstores for some time. I was introduced to it by architectural designer Brian Murphy who I spoke with at his Santa Monica design office several years ago.

The new edition of the book sparks controversy, though I'm not sure how one asserts the deservability of one piece of art for inclusion over another:

In some ways, art history is like an episode of "The Sopranos." A relatively small number of artists are welcomed into the family of the famous, their works immortalized in museums and on postcard racks — in other words, they are made. But hit men, otherwise known as critics and scholars, are lurking around every corner, waiting to whack even the most sterling reputation.

Almost no one is safe. Not even, as it turns out, Whistler's mother.

This month, the publisher Pearson Prentice Hall is introducing the first thoroughly revised version of "Janson's History of Art," a doorstopper first published in 1962 that has been a classroom hit ever since Horst Woldemar Janson wrote it while working at New York University . For a generation of baby boomers, it defined what was what and who was who in art, from Angelico (Fra) to Zurbarán (Francisco de).

But in recent years it has lost its perch as the best-selling art survey and has been criticized for becoming a scholarly chestnut. So its publisher recruited six scholars from around the country and told them to rewrite as much as they wanted, to cast a critical eye on every reproduction, chapter heading and sacred cow.

....From The Note:

The Chicago Tribune editorial board points out how Gov. Rounds may have actually damaged the anti-abortion cause: "As conservatives, Roberts and Alito have stressed that they will not lightly overturn venerable precedents. Forced to confront the issue so early in their tenure, the court could end up reaffirming Roe by an even bigger margin than before—effectively settling the question for another 30 years."

I am reading the following six books, with bookmarks in various locations in each of them:

1. The Message in the Bottle by Walker Percy
2. Herzog by Saul Bellow
3. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
4. a selection of poems by e.e.cummings
5. Night by Elie Wiesel
6. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

The latest book published is Percy from 1985. It is collection of essays on man and language. Herzog is a book about an odd academic writing strange cranky letters to people famous and infamous, living and dead. Vonnegut is one of his early dystopic science fiction novels. Night is Wiesel's WWII deathcamp experience. Kafka is Kafka and cummings is cummings. Does this presage the times or is it all just ancient history?

Is time speeding forward and compressing, wherein the recent past is considered the distant past and an "oldies" show called "Back in the Day" plays "Tonight, Tonight" by the Smashing Pumkins and "Freak on a Leash" by Korn. What exactly is the demographic on FUSE? Fourteen?

After that show they run the Led Zeppelin movie "The Song Remains the Same" with a twist. Viewers are invited to run their opinions/reviews of the film from the website in a crawl at the bottom of the movie. Most of the comments are along the lines of "this sucks" or more commonly they use the space to send personel messages to friends.

In 1973 the seminal rock band Led Zeppelin, one of the founders of the music genre known as "heavy metal," went on tour and performed in Madison Square Garden. This documentary has concert footage, including the 23-minute-long version of the song "Dazed and Confused." The film also shows the musicians at home, pursuing some of their hobbies including drag-racing. The concert coverage also has scenes revealing what took place backstage, and a discussion of the theft of the band's cash during their visit to New York.

Ah, a simpler time.

They are currently playing the 23 minute opus "Dazed and Confused". There have been three commercial breaks during the song.

Robert Plant introduces the song "Stairway to Heaven" by saying "this is a song of hope" against a New York city skyline -- at the center of the still is most prominantly the World Trade Center Towers. Does anybody remember laughter?

What do we do when it's raining out?:

But the chill rain splashing the sidewalks outside felt like a handwritten permission slip from Mother Nature herself to enjoy Portland from the comfort of a barstool. Call it hoppy hour instead.

For people partial to fine craft brews and plenty of local color, Portland's rainy winter season is a great time to visit the city that is king of beers. Indeed, Portland has more breweries - 28 - than any other city in the nation if not the world, and it has arguably become one of the best destinations anywhere for beer-tasting.

And from Gridskipper:

Despite a few silly “gourmet” vanity microbrews (black currants? squash?), Portland has emerged as the most brewery-heavy city in the U.S. (and possibly the world).

I thought I was reading a satirical news story from the Onion when I read this, and it took me a minute to verify that, yes, this was a real story:

Rock act Mute Math is so frustrated at being branded a Christian band by Warner Music Group's Christian outlet Word Records, it has taken matters into its own hands, self-releasing its debut album Feb. 1.

And last September, Billboard has learned, Teleprompt Records -- a label co-founded by Mute Math keyboardist Paul Meany -- filed suit against Warner Bros. Records and Word.

The suit is for breach of contract and negligent misrepresentation, and seeks punitive damages. Warner, however, might be somewhat pardoned for the marketing approach.

This is my favorite quote from the article:

Meany says he never wanted an EP to come out on Word, a well-known Christian brand. "It was just assumed that because that's where I once was, that was where I was always going to be," he says. "I had no desire to be the Christian version of a real band."

I was reminded of the line by George Costanza,"I like Christian music, it's much more relaxing than real music".

Brandchannel provides it's list of best product placements in a film. This is the sort of meta-reference that I enjoy so much:

Already the winner of one 2005 award, “The Island” picks up a second for a stunning display of mind-bendingly complex product placement involving Calvin Klein.

Midway through the film, an escaped clone (played by Scarlett Johansson) makes her way through a futuristic Los Angeles. On the street she comes across a Calvin Klein (CK) storefront display with a television showing a CK commercial. The commercial stars Scarlett Johansson’s clone character. The gist of this whole scene is that the Scarlett Johansson clone character sees herself in the CK display commercial and learns she is a clone of a famous actress.

Fairly banal so far, but this is the part that blows minds: The CK commercial (for Eternity Moment perfume) in which the Scarlett clone sees her non-clone actress self is actually a real CK commercial starring real-life actress Scarlett Johansson.

“The Island” took a real Calvin Klein commercial starring Scarlett Johansson and made the commercial a major part of a fictional film in which Scarlett Johansson plays an actress who isn’t Scarlett Johansson but stars in the same CK commercial.

Let the reality loops wash over you as you think of the two Scarletts in the futuristic dystopia and wonder if the CK Eternity Moment perfumes are real and if so, where can you get some and for how much?

There is much writing this morning about the loss of Brokeback Mountain for best picture:

The victory for "Crash" suggested Oscar voters were more comfortable with a tale that exploited the seamy underbelly of racial conflict in contemporary Los Angeles than with a heartbreaking tale of love between two married men.

"Perhaps the truth really is, Americans don't want cowboys to be gay," said Larry McMurtry, 69, who shared an Oscar for best adapted screenplay with Diana Ossana for "Brokeback."

No overtly gay love story has ever won a best picture award and, as of Monday morning, none has. The big question going into the Oscars was whether Hollywood, often in the forefront of social issues, would break another taboo.

"Film buffs and the politically minded will be arguing this morning about whether the Best Picture Oscar to 'Crash' was really for the film's merit or just a cop-out by the Motion Picture Academy so it wouldn't have to give the prize to 'Brokeback Mountain,"' said Washington Post critic Tom Shales.

Shales on snarky host John Stewart:

It's hard to believe that professional entertainers could have put together a show less entertaining than this year's Oscars, hosted with a smug humorlessness by comic Jon Stewart, a sad and pale shadow of great hosts gone by.

The most fatal and unforgivable flaw of Brokeback Mountain was a simple one: it was boring.

I can see it now. Univeral wireless hubs with $100 MIT laptops and people downloading Homer and Shakespeare and Luther and Calvin. We have (almost) free education!

For now you can piggyback on your neighbors hub.

Piggybacking, the usually unauthorized tapping into someone else's wireless Internet connection, is no longer the exclusive domain of pilfering computer geeks or shady hackers cruising for unguarded networks. Ordinarily upstanding people are tapping in. As they do, new sets of Internet behaviors are creeping into America's popular culture.

"I don't think it's stealing," said Edwin Caroso, a 21-year-old student at Miami Dade College, echoing an often-heard sentiment.

"I always find people out there who aren't protecting their connection, so I just feel free to go ahead and use it," Mr. Caroso said. He added that he tapped into a stranger's network mainly for Web surfing, keeping up with e-mail, text chatting with friends in foreign countries and doing homework.

Many who piggyback say the practice does not feel like theft because it does not seem to take anything away from anyone. One occasional piggybacker recently compared it to "reading the newspaper over someone's shoulder."