Rolling Stone - Issue 1110 (August 5, 2010)

Cover – Leonardo DiCaprio – “Hanging with Leo”

The cover article about Leonardo DiCaprio, by Brian Hyatt, was well put together without necessarily breaking any new ground as journalism. Hyatt manages to outline the daily life of the actor – far from typical or routine – without gushing about his celebrity status. The piece also includes a little background information about DiCaprio’s career, as well as discussing what keeps him relevant in the film industry (mainly, being Martin Scorsese’s new golden boy).

Considering the great pieces they’ve put out so far, I was very disappointed in this issue’s “National Affairs” article. Tim Dickinson’s coverage of the Obama administration’s failure to pass an effective climate control bill felt very forced and hollow, lacking any meaningful detail. It almost read like a piece that had been written earlier, with a few names and dates filled in to fit the occasion.

This is especially evident compared to Jeff Goodell’s article “The Poisoning,” which is much better journalism. Goodell’s article explains how BP, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, chose the cheapest method of breaking up the oil – chemical dispersants. This choice was made regardless of the fact that the dispersants do not actually clean up the oil, but merely break it into separate chemicals which are just as dangerous to the ocean’s ecosystems as the oil itself. The article reveals that although the oil may be disappearing from view, the effects of the oil will be long-term and devastating.

Other articles (this was an especially feature-rich issue, for some reason) included a nice piece on M.I.A.’s career and a background piece on the personal histories of the “people” on MTV’s “Jersey Shore.” (I put “people” in quotations because it was surprising to see how many of them are college educated – one with a degree in business marketing – which makes me suspicious about how much of their personalities are really personas.)

The Reviews section was short and weak, with the new Arcade Fire album “The Suburbs” getting one of the best reviews while Bret Michaels’s “Custom Built” got one of the worst.

Poor People

The heart of William T. Vollmann’s 2007 book on world-wide poverty is a simple question: “Why are you poor?” Yet the simplicity of most of the answers that he received from impoverished people throughout the world allowed him to write this reflection on the nature of poverty. At times powerful and depressing, this book exposes life under the poverty line all over the world and the reality of what it means to live, as Adam Smith declared, not being able to “afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life.”

Vollmann neatly breaks apart this longer philosophical work into several categories into which all of the chapters fit (with each chapter being, essentially, an individual essay or reflection), and so that is how I will break apart my discussion of his work.

In the first section, “Self-Defintions,” Vollmann provides us first with definitions which provide us the ability to discuss poverty, given that poverty itself exists as a somewhat abstract (if, at the same time, completely tangible) idea within the complex social-structure that is humanity. From here, he begins to paint us several portraits of poverty all over the world, from the drunk Sunee in Thailand to two beggar women in Russia (including their clearly disabled families) to two Japanese men who live under a bridge in Kyoto. These portraits are sometimes touching, sometimes disturbing, always interesting. From these sketches, Vollmann clearly reveals that poverty is not the same everywhere for everyone, including how the people came to poverty and even if the people consider themselves poor.

From here, Vollmann moves into his second section, “Phenomena,” in which he describes aspects of poverty evident at different levels in all poor people. These phenomena are invisibility, deformity, unwantedness, dependence, accident-prone-ness, pain, numbness, and estrangement. The most personally striking section is his explanation of how impoverished people everywhere suffer from invisibility, even though their suffering is evident. (Personally, it reminds me of the often deep poverty in which some of my students in Lynwood existed, though my ignorance often blinded me into denial of their circumstances.) Think about it – aren’t there parts of your own town, the poor part of town, that you won’t go? Through not driving through “skid row,” you have rendered those who live there invisible.

The third section, “Choices,” reveals choices which are not truly choices that the truly impoverished must live through in the attempt to escape poverty. He discusses the economic “amoritization” of labor to pay for freedom from poor circumstances, most often through prostitution, but sometimes through darker-than-mafia groups arranging marriages for visas at a massive human cost. Some, such as those in an oil town in Kazahkhstan sacrifice the poisoning of their health for new, nicer roads brought in by the American oil money.

Of course, Vollmann also touches on the “Hopes” that keep those who are in poverty use to keep surviving despite all of the odds being stacked against them. This hope of removal from poverty is most evident in the person of Gary, who gambles nightly on a lottery drawing that he knows is rigged. This hope also exists in the poor community which cleans its own toilet (really, a bowl) without any set outline of responsibility or consequences.

In the last section, “Placeholders,” Vollmann discusses his own personal feelings and experiences with poverty in proximity to his home. Most interesting, to me, was how he compassionately he interacts with the poor who vandalize his property, while, counter intuitively, he fears for the safety of himself and his property. Ultimately, Vollmann leaves us with no single answer or solution, aside from a reference to the pathetic United Nations call for “more aid, better directed.”

Aside from the hollow feeling left by the lack of any sort of positive resolution (and what did I really expect from a book titled “Poor People”), this book is fantastic. It effectively examines and reflects upon poverty through several lenses – statistics, science and psychology, personal experiences, and the visual. The use of photographs of most of those interviewed (except those who feared reprisal from authorities) makes every scene more vivid and powerful. Yet, at no point do Vollmann’s words request guilt or acceptance of blame from the reader. Instead, the book calls the reader to search his or her own soul and to examine his or her own thoughts and feelings about poverty. And, as such a thought provoking book, it is one of the best pieces of non-fiction I’ve ever read.

The Kids Are All Right

Nic and Jules (Annette Benning and Julianne Moore, respectively) are a happy lesbian couple with two beautiful children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson). Without telling their moms, the children reach out to their sperm-donor father Paul (Mark Ruffalo). But, as Paul becomes more involved in their lives, the nuclear family begins to fall apart. Paul unwittingly sets each family member against each other, exposing holes in the family’s framework. With Joni about to move away from home for college, time winds down for the family to work out their problems and come to terms with who they are as individuals as well as with their place within the family.

To begin, all of the actors in this movie were fantastic. But Mark Ruffalo deserves a special mention because his character was so well fleshed out and believable. Ruffalo made us believe that Paul got caught up in his own ego, trying to be the father that he would never actually be. Yet, very subtly, Ruffalo had set us up to realize that Paul lived merely for the moment, with no real thought. And when things fall apart for him by the end, he effectively evokes pity without sympathy – especially with a well-timed quaver in his voice and eyes pleading for help.

This film impressed me because it did not use the lesbian relationship – so central to the story – to overpower the fact that it is ultimately about the meaning of family. The filmmakers could have used that very relevant feature of the story for some heavy-handed shock-and-awe effects. Instead, they chose to simply treat it like any other marriage – dropping the viewers into the middle of it without much exposition, which I believed helped the film overall. The viewers weren’t given an opportunity to develop any opposition to the nature of Jules and Nic’s relationship. Rather, most (though, admittedly, not all) of the strain in their marriage could have been taken out of a heterosexual marriage counseling session, and so the homosexual nature of their marriage was merely an aside or footnote, not the text of the story.

I must say that I loved this movie until the last five minutes or so. In fact, if I put this movie together, I would have ended it with the sequence of the family in the car, with each member looking briefly at the others and then out the window. Instead, the movie ends with a scene that reinforces the theme without adding to it, with one character almost directly stating the moral of the story. I can’t stand it when endings like this are so obviously tacked on to pander to those viewers who can’t wrap their heads around where the characters might be going – those who lack to ability to make informed inferences about what the characters will do beyond the ending based on the actions and dialogue of the characters up to that point. It’s almost as if these people – whoever they are – never grew beyond the fairy tale in which they have to be told that everyone lives “happily ever after.” I personally would have preferred an ending with a little ambiguity because it would have stimulated more discussion. The way it ended, nothing was left unanswered leaving no room for thinking.

Directed by: Lisa Cholodenko

Written by: Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg

The Believer - Seventy-First Issue: Odradek (May 2010)

I’ve got a bit of catching up to do on “The Believer,” both in terms of “reading of” the magazine and “writing about” the magazine. So, let’s get down to brass tacks.

Highlights included:

Stephen Phelan’s “Ninjas I Have Known” discusses how, exactly, one might go about becoming a ninja. Phelan discusses this process despite openly comparing ninjas in Japan to Robin Hood of England – more folk myth than true story. Yet, because there is such a demand for ninja paraphernalia, a rich fake-cultural market for ninjas exists.

“A Glimpse of the Unplumbed Depths” discusses Annie Julia Wyman’s interest in an anachronistic book of literary theory. Perhaps the most charming article in the issue, Wyman’s writing is witty enough to stay light while at the same time discussing complex issues of the depths of knowledge and the potential to ever know all there is to know about a specific subject.

The Believer interview with Daniel Clowes – underground comics legend and creator of “Ghost World” – was thoroughly enjoyable. I was surprised (though I probably shouldn’t have been) at how artistically and intellectually he was able to discuss the comics industry.

Weak points included:

Lev Grossman’s “The Death of a Civil Servant” discusses how Leonard Woolf (eventual husband of modernism pioneer Virginia Woolf) met up in Ceylon with another British man who wrote early fantasy fiction. The article would have been good, despite its massive length, if it didn’t feel so darned long.

In “A Sunburst Above a Receding Road: How I Ruined Lolita for Myself,” Namwali Serpell parallels her repeated readings of the book with the different phases of her love life. Although well-written, the main idea behind it – interpretations of a book changing with life experiences – isn’t terribly original, and so the whole thing rang just a bit hollow by the end.

Other notes:

I was happy that Nick Hornby returned to his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column, but the column itself did not totally live up to my expectations.

Maureen Howard’s conversation with Joanna Scott was completely incomprehensible to me. I literally have no context for either author or the cultural capital to know half of what they were talking about.

The Endless Summer

Despite living in Southern California, surrounded by the surfer dude culture, I’d never managed to see this 1966 documentary until now. The film traces the story of two surfers – Mike Hynson and Robert August – as they chase the summer season around the world searching for the best waves. They start in Hawaii and California, where we the viewers are given a brief tutorial on the techniques and jargon of surfing, until the oceans start getting too cold. They travel off to the eastern coast of Africa, where they introduce surfing to the “natives” (characterized in 1966 in ways that would not be PC now). Eventually they make their way down to South Africa, riding waves on pristine secluded beaches that may never have been surfed before. They are sorely disappointed to find poor surf in Australia and New Zealand, only to surf in Tahiti where they were told the reefs prevented any true waves. Eventually, they make their way back to Hawaii, having seen the world through the lens of surf.

What I love most about this movie is the fact that, behind the haze of the surf culture, it is a true adventure story. The two surfers, although their motivation may have been superficial, take off on a quest of epic proportions. And just like any other odyssey, they face adversity in different forms along their way – from prohibitive gas prices to pushy locals to shark and knife-like coral – only to eventually return home. Although “The Endless Summer” may have lacked the deep mythology of a great quest story, the archetype is the same and strikes at the heart of any young person – the desire to leave home, see the strange and foreign places, face and overcome obstacles and danger, and to return home stronger.

Of course, because the protagonists are obviously overgrown adolescent American men in their heyday of the 1960s, they barely speak or seem capable of doing anything well except surfing. Credit for keeping this film interesting, then, must be given to the film make Bruce Brown who provided the frame for the story and the narration to add structure. Although at times the narration seems a bit corny, and clearly any non-surfing scenes are staged (sometimes with poorly made props added in), it is the narrator who provides simple, comprehensible context for these men riding the waves.

The director’s greatest success may have been his ability to capture the awe-inspiring beauty of the water. Depending on the mood of the scene, the director managed to capture the ocean itself displaying different moods, from the serenity of the isolation at Cape St. Francis in South Africa to the enraged wrath of The Wedge in Newport Beach, California. Despite what must have been relatively primitive film technology (although I wasn’t a film major, so don’t quote me on that), the director managed to clearly and steadily capture the agility of the surfers aplomb.

In the end, all I can say is: a classic!

Written and Directed by Bruce Brown

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Tagline: "No Goats, No Glory."

Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a small-town journalist desperately trying to impress his estranged wife, travels to the Middle East to cover the Iraq War. On his way, he runs into Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), who reveals that he's a psychic soldier on a secret mission. Turns out, as Cassady explains, that in the 1980s the Army trained a whole unit - the New Earth Army - to use new age strategies to fight the wars of the future, led by Bill Django (Jeff Bridges). But, alas, a power struggle ensues with one trooper, Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), fracturing the group. Using his psychic mind and intuition, Cassady leads himself and Wilton to a secret base in the middle of the Iraqi desert. Apparently, after the New Earth Army was dismantled, Hooper founded a Blackwater-style group and is making major money launching psychic warfare. Ultimately, Cassady and Django decide to sabotage Hooper's operation by spiking all the food with LSD and then they go riding off into the sunset, never to be seen again and leaving Wilton to try to report the strange tale.

This movie is good. Not great, but good. But, if it isn't already evident, the movie is hard to explain in conventional terms as well. It isn't quite fiction, but it isn't quite non-fiction either. (The opening title states "More of this is true than you would believe.") For a movie that seems to drag on at points, it is surprisingly short.

The hazy gray middle area that this movie occupies is ultimately what held it back. Cassady is so strange, crazy, and off-the-wall that I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to laugh at his absurdist ideas or to pity him for his disconnection from reality. At times the movie is artistic journalism, self-discovery journey, road trip, social commentary, and comedy. None of these are necessarily exclusive from one another, but too many of them packed into just shy of 90 minutes pulled my mind around too much. There were even just a few too many big-name actors thrown into such a short script. (And, I'm not complaining, but it seems like Jeff Bridges can now only play "the washed-up ________ trying to redeem himself." Insert "hippie" for this movie, "country singer" for "Crazy Heart," and, probably, video game programmer for the new "Tron.")

Despite my final confusion, I can easily say that I enjoyed watching the movie. All of the leads - Clooney, McGregor, Bridges, Spacey - were fantastic, dynamic characters. The rich colors of the sets and scenes gave a sense of being just on the edge of reality, without falling away to fantasy. The best comparison I can think of is that this movie is like a grilled hamburger - good on its own, but a few more spices could have made it much better.

Directed by: Grant Heslov

Written by: Peter Straughan (screenplay) and Jon Ronson (book)

Men at Work

The Craft of Baseball

In “Men at Work,” George Will, the famous newspaper columnist and political commentator (now a weekly guest on ABC’s “This Week”), has written perhaps the most analytical book on the subject of baseball. No base goes untouched – if you don’t mind the pun. He discusses the history of the sport, both in terms of the rules and equipment as well as the business; the physical beauty and the laws of physics which govern the game; players with great careers and players who never met potential. Although his research is as exhaustive as a PhD dissertation, with as much reasoning and explanation as a Supreme Court decision, Will focuses particularly on four contemporary (for 1988-1989, during the writing process).

The book begins with Will’s lens focused on then-Oakland Atheletics manager Tony LaRussa (now with the St. Louis Cardinals). Through LaRussa, Will schools the readers on the finer points of managing a baseball team – from creating a line-up to setting up a hit-and-run to plotting different types of double-steals, including how to defend them if the opposition tries one. In accordance with the title, the book reveals all of the actual work that goes into managing a game, done mostly by scouts and bench coaches, which include pitching charts and batting charts and team tendencies for stealing and other plays. The most interesting section involved signs, how to steal signs, and how to avoid having signs stolen. For example, the book reveals that sometimes LaRussa’s hand motions are meaningless while something subtle another coach is doing is truly revealing the sign. Other times, a sign might even be given prior to the situation even arising so that the batter or runner already knows what to do while the coach appears to give no sign at all.

The second major section, discussing pitchers, uses Orel Hershiser, at the peak of his career, as the case-study. Hershiser enlightens us to how a pitcher thinks before and during a game. Will argues that nearly every major rule change has been to the detriment of pitchers in order to enhance offense. So, whenever batting averages start to sag, the game is adjusted to keep everything balanced and equal – even to the point of moving the pitcher’s mound back (from forty-five feet to its current sixty feet, six inches). What Hershiser shows, though, is the resiliency of pitchers, who simply adapt themselves to try to outsmart the hitters.

The third section looks at Tony Gwynn – the last batter to (almost) hit .400 – to provide insight into how great hitters approach the plate. Although Gwynn is often credited with a preternatural hand-eye coordination, Will shows us that that eye was trained through hundreds of daily batting practice swings – both before and after games. His approach to hitting - power to the gaps, looking to drive pitches away and adjust for contact on the inside – made him a nearly perfect hitter. His strive for perfection and constant practice, as well as his willingness to examine his imperfections and make adjustments, made him the best all-around hitter in the past three decades and the perfect person to dissect for Will’s book.

The last, and markedly weakest section, discusses defense with Cal Ripken Jr. as the case study. Part of the reason this section is so weak, as Will admits and openly discusses, is the inability to make comparisons of defensive ability using concrete statistics. Yet, Will argues – and correctly – that defense is a crucial part of the game and that it is easy to observe how great defense can help a team win and poor defense can lead to the opposition scoring runs. Ripken’s insights, although interesting, are simplistic at best and focus more on the cat-and-mouse of offensive strategies against defense and pitching which, in some cases, giving well-timed misinformation to a runner in order to gain a defensive advantage later.

“Men at Work” is possibly the best book about baseball ever written. It is certainly the best that I have ever read, and I’ve read most of ‘em. Will effectively mixes anecdotes and stories with statistics (and statistical anomalies), topping that off with great philosophical and analytical discussions of the game, how it is played, and its meaning to us as Americans (not to mention he has a sharp, dry wit keenly used). My biggest complain is that many of the pages are physically imposing with long, unbroken blocks of paragraph, which is more a condemnation of my own laziness as a reader than his ability as a writer, but which also means that the book takes a long time to read. Still, I absolutely enjoyed this book and highly recommend it to any baseball fanatic. I would not recommend it as a jumping-on point for someone who has never seen or played the great American pastime, but, if that’s the case, it may be too late for you already and your soul may already be lost to the abyss of modern entertainment.