Classical vs. pop music reviews.

King Corn is a documentary about 2 guys that move to Iowa to grow an acre of corn. With today's agro-tech, the actual farming takes just a few minutes. The bulk of it is their interviews and exploration of the food chain from seed to cobs to cattle to what we get in stores and restaurants. Highlights include some fun stop-motion animated interludes, their really funny interview with a PR flack at a high fructose corn syrup factory (and their attempts to make HFCS at home), and the generally straight-shooting commentary from the local Iowans. Here's the trailer for King Corn, and an Boing Boing interview with Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, the filmmakers.

By now you've probably heard Michael Pollan's seven words of advice from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." In the book he spends 150 pages talking about nutritionism, reductionist food science, and the negative health effects of the Western diet. In the last 50 pages he finally gets around to expanding just a little bit on those opening words.

If I may do my broken record routine, there are some books that are/would be much better as a long article. This is one---Pollan wrote it a year and a half ago in his New York Times Magazine article Unhappy Meals. Or you can get the gist from Pollan's entertaining talk at Google. In making an excellent 12-page article 20 times longer, he retreads a lot of the same ground.

One prime example is this bit of repetition, within the space of 2 pages, when he's writing about farmer's markets and locally grown produce: "What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of their taste and nutritional quality." And one paragraph later: "When you eat from a farmer's market, you automatically eat food that is in season, which is usually when it is most nutritious." And in the very next paragraph: "Local produce is typically picked ripe and is fresher than supermarket produce, and for those reasons it should be tastier and more nutritious."

It kills me.

Not to say he's a bad writer. He isn't. (I did enjoy The Botany of Desire.) This one comes up a bit thin and repetitive. Maybe he wrote it to turn a buck. Maybe just because he's fascinated and loves to write about it. Maybe he did it to have good ideas spread even wider and with a longer lifespan (and these are good ideas). But it's frustrating to read.

On the upside, I like his mention of parking lot science:

"...for a long time cholesterol was the only factor linked to heart disease that we had to the tools to measure. (This is sometimes called parking-lot science, after the legendary fellow who loses his keys in a parking lot and goes looking for them under the streetlight---not because that's where he lost them but because that's where it's easiest to see.)"

And I really liked his suggestion that Wonder Bread "scarcely waits to be chewed before transforming itself into glucose".

George Carlin on living life in reverse. Sounds nice.

Indeed, this is the cutest thing I've seen today.

Rob Giampietro started a collection of imagery from the New Yorker fiction pages, 48 so far. Lots of good stuff there.

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, by Philip K. Dick:

The strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears under the title "science fiction" is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not really been invaded by creatures from another star system, as depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The producers of that film never intended for us to believe it. Or did they?

And, more important, if they did intend to state this, is it actually true? That is the issue: not, Does the author or producer believe it, but—Is it true? Because, quite by accident, in the pursuit of a good yarn, a science fiction author or producer or scriptwriter might stumble onto the truth... and only later on realize it.

I'm joining the group working up to 100 push-ups over the next few weeks. Seems like a fun arbitrary goal. Should be cool. [via Get Fit Slowly]

I wanted this to be better. It starts off well, introduced by Nick Hornby. With a few exceptions, most of the other 40-something essays in the book didn't do much for me.

Rodney Rothman's piece---"I Still Like Jessica"---is probably my favorite. It's a transcript of an interview with an old sweetheart (hear the interview and see an animated version of "I Still Like Jessica"!). Perhaps I liked it because it's the most real and clumsy, and makes the fewest overt, Sedarian attempts at being funny, and is therefore actually funny. (Disclaimer: my struggles with humorous writing are well-documented.)

I really liked one of David Rees' lessons about life and love in "Get Dumped Before It Matters":

1. The fact that you mope around your "home office," sighing and scratching the five o'clock shadow spilling down your neck, while you "work on your screenplay in your mind," wearing sweatpants on a Wednesday afternoon, does not mean you are a tortured creative genius. It means you are a LOSER. If you're old enough to drive, you may no longer wear pants with drawstrings---even if they are your "dressy sweatpants." Look respectable for your woman, even while she's at work. It will comfort her to know you are wearing a belt.

Dan Vebber's "Sex Is the Most Stressful Thing in the History of the Universe" is good, as is Andy Richter's "Girls Don't Make Passes at Boys with Fat Asses." The context isn't that relevant, but I can relate to Richter here:

There were moments in my childhood where a preternatural maturity rose up in me, where the Future Me would seem to pop through to the surface and say, "Hold on, wait a minute, what's going on here is fucked up."

Tom Shillue ponders the benefits of the ambiguous relationship in "Eggs Must Be Broken..."

Happy Fake Marriage -> Callous Behavior -> Half Apology -> D?©tente

And Paul Simms' "I'm Easy" is a funny and all-too-familiar look at crushing at first sight. And how it elevates and and destroys your hopes and dreams over and over again.

Marcellus Hall's "The Sorrows of Young Walter, or The Lessons of a Cyclical Heart" is also good:

I've picked the best parts of the book for you. Skip the rest.

Josh Brolin on working with the skimpy dialogue in No Country for Old Men:

You have to figure out different ways to convey ideas. You don’t want to over-compensate because the fear is that you’re going to be boring if nothing’s going on. You start doing this and this and taking off your hat and putting it on again or some bullshit that doesn’t need to be there.

Llewelyn, I dont even want the money. I just want us to be back like we was. We will be. No we wont. I've thought about it. It's a false god. Yeah. But it's real money.

I don't have much to say about No Country for Old Men other than that it's every bit as good as the excellent movie it inspired. The movie is more intense and more suspenseful. The landscape plays a larger role along with the Anton Chigurh character. In the book, I think Chigurh is one of the least interesting people. The book is more explicit in following the stories of Sheriff Bell and Llewelyn Moss, heavier on the Western philosophy (as in earthy wisdom and reminiscing, not as in Kant and Heidegger) and the struggle of knowing when to give up, or at least knowing when it's over. And it's about the mysteries of Death and Life and Love and everything else that is worthy. Wonderful storytelling.

I also like these lines:

You sign on for the ride you probably think you got at least the notion of where the ride's goin. But you might not. Or you might of been lied to. Probably nobody would blame you then. If you quit. But if it's just that it turned out to be a little roughern what you had in mind. Well. That's something else.

MagCloud is a new print-on-demand service just for magazines. I'm surprised this didn't exist already.

I'll call an end to the Stevens binge with this one. It's been fun, especially for something that I took up on impulse. Sometimes it's best to just pick something and start it and see where it leads.

There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other "territorial markers" not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express rage -- by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behavior.

The last time I was in Texas I was maybe 1 or 2 or 3 years old. It's going to be an awesome weekend with friends, without computers.

Going to a wedding this weekend.

The night knows nothing of the chants of night. It is what it is as I am what I am: And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange Each in the other what each has to give. Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone, So much alone, so deeply by ourselves, So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves, Supremely true each to its separate self, In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

---Wallace Stevens

Selections from a couple dozen pages of Googling...

• Thirteen Ways of Looking at Super Mario Bros.
• Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A. I linked this a while back (almost 2 years ago!). Very good essay.
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ingmar Bergman
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetry Manuscript, some tips before you submit yours for publication.
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at 1/2, a game on the PBS Kids website that will help you learn fractions and spatial thinking.
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Hedgehog
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at Yom Kippur
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Tortilla
• Thirteen Ways of Reacting to an Election (November, 2004: "I bet if I keep clicking 'refresh' on CNN.com it's gonna load the real poll results.")
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at Dialogue
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at Clapotis

I haven't shared any of Wallace Stevens' longer works that I like because it doesn't seem like a good context for it. But I can't overlook this one. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was the focus of one of my research papers back in college. I remember finding it when class was looking at another poem in the book, Peter Quince at the Clavier, and I got bored and flipped around to find something more interesting. I looked at the musical side of "Thirteen Ways," aided by listening to Lukas Foss' composition of the same name that set the text of the poem for vocals and chamber ensemble. I got to blend my love of music and my love of making my schoolwork easier---I even managed to cite, in one fell swoop, nearly 100 pages of a music history textbook I was using that semester: "(Grout 676-764)". Ha!

I like the individual moments here. One analogy I had going in the paper was that many poems are like melodies, they develop over time as the words flow by and develop and interact. These stanzas work more like a series of chords, frozen moments with each their own mood and texture. I made the deadline, anyway.

---

I Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.

II I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.

III The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.

V I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

VI Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause.

VII O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?

VIII I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

IX When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles.

X At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

XI He rode over Connecticut In a glass coach. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds.

XII The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

XIII It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.

Wallace Stevens reads The Snow Man. Jay Keyser reads it on NPR (less dreary, more enthusiasm) and praises it highly before dissecting a little bit. Keyser also has this crazy idea of writing the poem out on notecards and making a hanging mobile out of it a la Alexander Calder.

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Joshua Heineman has a cool little project going where he takes old photos and makes them wiggle* so they look 3D. [*this is the preferred technical term]