Sandwiches

If there's one thing I love more than vaguely obtuse economics talk and French theory, it's sandwiches! I've experimented with sundry ingredients such as kimchee, English muffins, and sriracha sauce. This article describes 7 interesting culinary stacks available in New York.

The "Sandwich Marguez au Harrisa": "Mr. Atif’s time at the Cordon Bleu served him well, but eventually his cooking circled back to the spicy, paprika-reddened merguez sausages he said he learned to make from the Jewish butchers of Casablanca. The merguez are made daily at the cafe, cooked to order and stuffed into crusty, grilled “petit pain” — “little bread” in Casablanca, a.k.a. Italian rolls in Queens — with cubes of cucumber and tomato, chopped green olives and a hot-pink, spicy, garlicky harissa, also made in-house. “I mastered it through many kitchens,” he said. Wine vinegar and extra oil emulsify Mr. Atif’s harissa into a tangy sandwich spread that takes a bow toward mayonnaise."

I think I'm more exited to try that sandwich than to see anything else in New York, and I'm pretty interested in seeing New York.

French Theory in America = Freedom Theory?

Mr. Fish has been on a roll lately. I've enjoyed his two recent columns decrying the recent guilt by association nonsense in the political press. And on top of that there's his two part discussion of French Literary Theory, another hobby horse of mine. The basic idea of French Theory is that we can't know the capitol T Truth because language affects our understanding of the world. This strikes me as somewhat common-sensical, but maybe that's because I've watched the Matrix too many times. Fish's point (or the point of the book Fish is discussing because Fish doesn't say things, he only says things about things *wink*wink*) is that French theory is accurate, but that it doesn't matter. This was the conclusion that Little Earl and I came to 5 years ago in our undergrad English program. Maybe Stan wouldn't be such a bad guy to have over for some arugula after all.

Any Econ Fans Out There?

Reading about economics is a hobby of mine, and I particularly enjoyed this speech by Jamie Galbraith, "The Collapse of Monetarism and the Irrelevance of the New Monetary Consensus". Galbraith critiques Milton Friedman's, and by extension Greenspan's and Bernanke's, approach to monetary policy. He believes that the current crisis demonstrates that government should concern itself with regulation of banking and speculative investment instead of focusing solely on the money supply.

Jamie Galbraith is the son of famous liberal economist, John Kenneth Galbraith. Wikipedia provides the following summary of his book The Affluent Society: "Galbraith's main argument is that as society becomes relatively more affluent, so private business must "create" consumer wants through advertising, and while this generates artificial affluence through the production of commercial goods and services, the public sector becomes neglected as a result." A lot of populist economics is drivel, but I agree with that criticism of America. I could do without the extra few inches on TV's and different flavors of corn chips in exchange for better mass transit and schools. I think I'll add it to my summer reading list, after Bleak House and Against the Day.

I Laugh At Torture

So as I was reading this charming little piece in the New Yorker detailing the history behind the notorious photos from Abu Ghraib (found by way of the Slate review of Errol Morris' new documentary Standard Operating Procedure), I couldn't help but laugh. Yeah, fine, torture is no laughing matter, yadda yadda yadda. But it's just that the whole enterprise reminds me so much of something out of a bad week at scout camp. I mean, sure, when I first heard about it, I was like, "How could this have happened?" But the situation, as presented in the article, is so basic, so common-place, really, I feel like I could have just as easily done the same thing. It's just the age-old problem of the people in charge not bothering to tell the underlings where to draw the line. Besides, once we decided to go to war like we did, what was the point of acknowledging any sort of moral rules at all? It's like, "Well, we can invade any country we want, but once we're there, remember not to abuse any of the prisoners!" Uh, don't think so. It's war. What did people expect? Some choice bits:

“I’m like, ‘Hey, Sarge, why is everyone naked?’ You know—‘Hey, that’s the M.I. That’s what the M.I. does. That’s the M.I. thing. I don’t know.’ ‘Why do these guys have on women’s panties?’ Like—‘It’s to break them.’ Guys handcuffed in stress positions, in cells, no lights, no windows. Open the door, turn the light on—‘Oh my God, Allah.’ Click, turn the light off, close the door. It’s like, Whoa, what is that?"

The M.P.s on the M.I. cellblock never learned the prisoners’ names. Officially, they referred to their wards by their five-digit prison numbers, but the numbering system was confusing, and the numbers told you nothing about a person, which made them hard to remember. So the soldiers gave the prisoners nicknames based on their looks and their behavior. A prisoner who made a shank and tried to stab someone was Shank, and a prisoner who got hold of a razor blade and cut himself was called Slash. A prisoner who kept spraying himself and his cell with water and was always asking for a broom was Mr. Clean. A prisoner who repeatedly soaked his mattress with water was Swamp Thing. There was a man they called Smiley, and a man they called Froggy, and a man they called Piggy. There was a man with no fingers on one hand, only a thumb, who was called Thumby—not to be confused with the enormous man called the Claw or Dr. Claw, because one of his hands was frozen in a half-clenched curl.

Harman said that she began photographing what she saw because she found it hard to believe. “If I come up to you and I’m like, ‘Hey this is going on,’ you probably wouldn’t believe me unless I had something to show you,” she said. “So if I say, ‘Hey this is going on. Look, I have proof,’ you can’t deny it, I guess.”

“I guess we weren’t really thinking, Hey, this guy has family, or, Hey, this guy was just murdered,” Harman said. “It was just—Hey, it’s a dead guy, it’d be cool to get a photo next to a dead person. I know it looks bad. I mean, even when I look at them, I go, ‘Oh Jesus, that does look pretty bad.’ But when we were in that situation it wasn’t as bad as it looks coming out on the media, I guess, because people have photos of all kinds of things."

Adventures In Rap #2: The Sugar Hill Records Story

To truly gain a comprehensive picture of rap's early days, I decided to give the 5-disc Sugar Hill Records Story a listen. And oh, the oddities I found.

The Sugar Hill Records box set takes a scholarly approach towards music that was never in one hundred million years intended to be viewed in a scholarly light. Think of it as the first set of The Complete Motown Singles series...without the following nine. Here we find rap as some sort of mutant bastard child of disco. Indeed, it is not clear from the music gathered here that rap would have been headed toward any sort of meaningful artistic future.

With the surprise success of "Rapper's Delight," Sugar Hill Records, one can assume, decided to milk that fluke for all it was worth. And so we have the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Reprise (JAM-JAM)" (chorus: "Jam jam a jibbie a jam jibbie jibbie jam jam jam on"), Wayne & Charlie (The Rapping Dummy)'s "Check It Out," and The Moments' "Baby Let's Rap Now (Dance A Little Later)," which is actually a straight-up soul ballad containing nary a whiff of rapping. Sadly the world would never hear from Super-Wolf again, although his introductory anthem "Super-Wolf Can Do It" suggests otherwise:

I'm the people's choice in this Rolls Royce
The ladies freak when they hear my voice
Every rich girls' dream and every poor girl's supreme
Often known as a sex machine
I'm the ladies' pimp and the men's threat
If you're looking for better they ain't made it yet
I know I'm tough, I've got the soul
When they made the Wolf, they broke the mold
I'm the Super-Wolf from Cherry Hill
I never work and I never will
My daddy was a player, my grandpa too
I don't know nothing else to do
So when you hear this beat and you hear my howl
You know the Wolf is on the prowl

And let's not forget West Street Mob's "Ooh Baby," in which a sexy chorus of disembodied disco divas chant "We - want - you...to have a funky par-tay/But - make - sure...that you don't hurt nobody," to which a male vocoder voice replies "Ooooooh baby, I want to see you dance/Ooooooh lady, I want to touch your pants." Or Kevie Kev (Waterbed Kev)'s "All Night Long (Waterbed), which begins with the exhortation "Kev touch himself to prove that he's a freak!" The track that takes the cake in the strangeness department, however, has to be Chilly Kids' "At The Ice Arcade," which I am convinced appeared on Sugar Hill due to a mix up at the plant involving a shipment of Disney records, because otherwise I have no reasonable explanation for how it ended up here:

My homework's gotta wait, you know I'll do it later
But we rocked the Ice Arcade playing - Space Invaders!
I flunked my test, the teacher's annoyed
But we rocked the Ice Arcade playing- Asteroids!

But mostly the tracks are just standard generic disco/funk with the occasional curveball thrown in. It's interesting to note that at this stage in the game, the backing still consisted of live performance from Sugar Hill's house band rather than from sampling or DJ production, which is a major reason why Sugar Hill rap does not sound particularly far removed from that polyester-bespangled genre. The lone exception is Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel," which cuts between samples of "Good Times," Blondie's "Rapture" and Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust," and which, so I'm told, can lay claim to featuring the first recorded appearance of scratching.

Another aspect of early rap that feels like spillover from the disco era is the rather extended song length. Very quickly, rap songs became a good deal shorter, eventually nearing an average of roughly four to five minutes per song. Why do you suppose that is? Is it because rappers began taking the emphasis off dancing in order to stress emotional urgency?

It couldn't have been a bad move, because at this embryonic stage, it seems as though rappers didn't really know what to rap about. Take "Freedom," the debut single from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, for example:

Melle Mel is right on time
And Taurus the bull is my zodiac sign
And I'm Mr. Ness and I'm ready to go
And I go by the sign of Scorpio
My name is Raheem, I don't like to fuss
My Zodiac sign is Aquarius
Kid Creole is the name of mine
And Pisces is my Zodiac sign
I'm Cowboy and I'm running this show
My zodiac sign is a-Virgo
And Grandmaster Flash cuts so odd
His zodiac sign is Capricorn

Apparently rap needed a little more time before it realized that suitable topics extended beyond a) sexual prowess, b) video games, and c) astrological signs.

What I want to know is: who was the target audience for this music? What did early rap offer that standard disco did not? Was it really worth one's hard-earned money to hear second-rate Barry White wannabes rhyme about waterbeds? Then again, only a select few of these tracks were genuine "hits," so perhaps we have our answer right there.

Fortunately, rap would quickly find its own voice with the 1982 release of Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five's "The Message."

Add Another Blogger

Hello all.

A select few of you might recognize me from my various comments on this here blog, and some of you might even know me in person (luckyyy). I have accepted an invitation to offer up my point of view on subjects first hand as opposed to simply leaving a couple of poignantly scathing tidbits in the comment section.

I hope to bring a little more variety to the blog, and a little different viewpoint since it is blaringly obvious that I am a smidge more conservative than pretty much everyone posting or reading this blog. But forget all that; I don’t intend to blab primarily about political issues (regardless of the upcoming election), but instead to throw something different and fun your way.

Here's to fun.

Gaffe Me With A Spoon

It takes quite the brouhaha to rile up a Little Earl, but I couldn't help but cringe in disbelief at some of the comments I saw floating around, particularly on Slate, regarding Obama's supposed "flap" toward working-class Pennsylvanians. Now call me crazy, but when I first read these words:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns, or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

I actually had to twist my neck and squint my eyes and hop up and down on one foot to find the "gaffe." To me, a serious gaffe would be a comment more along the lines of "You know, in a way, the United States deserved 9/11." That is the kind of comment that could actually kill a candidate's campaign. But this "bitter" comment is so ambigious and so nuanced that its gaffe potential seems murky at best. Which is why Hillary Clinton's attempt to milk the "flap" for all it's worth comes off as awkward, transparent, desperate, and unintentionally humorous. It's like she had to mold and shape the comment in order to turn it into a soundbite; as it is it's not very punchy.

But Hillary's feigned outrage is no surprise. Slate's apoplectic fatalism is. According to the pundits in The XX Factor, McCain might as well prepare his inauguration speech, because with his "bitter" comment, Obama has just rendered himself unelectable. Melinda Henneberger calls it "The worst thing I've heard Obama say." She writes: "Poor wording was not the problem; on the contrary, it was his precision that was so unfortunate, and his ability to pack half a dozen unintended insults into a single sentence uncanny. And in San Francisco, no less? Roger Ailes couldn't have planned it better, unless he'd maybe followed up the event with some impromptu windsurfing in the bay." Emily Bazelon seconds that emotion, calling the comments "bonbons for the GOP" and adding "Part of what's prompting the wincing and deep doubts, I think, is that Obama sounded like an anthropologist talking about objects of study to an audience that he assumed has the same disassociated point of view." Hannah Rosin piles on, noting that "This 'cling' flap just keeps getting worse," fretting, "He either recognizes that he insulted wide swaths of people and feels badly about it, or he doesn't even see it yet, in which case we're in real trouble," and finally concluding that it's a "bad moment to be a Democrat."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Had I read the same quote? I mean, if this is the kind of comment that is going to convince a person who would otherwise vote for Obama to suddenly not vote for Obama, then I am more out of touch with the American public than I already thought I was. Melinda Henneberger writes:

Here's how a high-school teacher in Fairfield, Ill., put it: "I used to be a Democrat, and I'm still very much independent. I voted for Clinton [in '92 and '96]. I'm religious but not a fanatic; I see a lot of gray. My mother has Alzheimer's, so I'm for stem-cell research, and I'm not against people's right to an abortion.'' But Kerry "just struck me as arrogant,'' while Bush inspired "the feeling that this was a more open person who would not be "I'm important and you're not.' ''

I don't think this high school teacher and I are even on the same planet. If, for working-class whites, Bush v. Kerry boiled down to that, then I really don't know what to say. If Americans want to treat the presidential race as some kind of intuitive "relatability contest," then don't expect me to have much sympathy when the country goes down the shitter. I mean, I've got news for you, Working-class Joe: There are so many more issues at stake in the world than your own personal pride. Get over yourself. Please.

But now we have liberals on Slate scared stiff because Obama actually said something honest, which means he'll lose the election, right? Well I've got news for you too, Slate columnists: one presidential candidate will not a liberal America make. It's not like, "Oh, well if we can just fool working-class people into voting for a Democrat, by making the candidate come off as folksy or down-home or whatever the hell we need to do, then we'll be set." The American people need to commit, one by one, to serious change. Otherwise we'll simply have an empty figurehead who'll be replaced by a conservative every four to eight years, and no one will be much the wiser.

Not that I care too much about the fate of America anyway, of course. But it hurts to be witness to such confusion.

Brouhaha

I saw the headlines, "Barrack Comment Offends Rednecks," "Obama Hates Real Americans," and "Infant Faints After Hearing Obama on Evening News." I expected to find some charged racial remark or perhaps something about free trade. Nope, what I got was:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

My immediate reaction? That statement is TRUE!

Sure, he could have picked something nicer than "cling" to be political, but don't we have enough political nonsense in this campaign already? Hearing Barrack say something 1) true, 2) important, and 3) that needs to be said makes me think more of him, not less. But then maybe that's because I'm an evil big city Californian (the worst of the worst). Even though I'm not from the city. Even though all the elitist rich farmers and real estate developers (increasingly the same thing now that small farmers have disappeared) in my home town vote Republican and my Democrat father taught me to shoot a gun and my Democrat grandmother reads the bible while my atheist Republican grandfather rants about the evils of religion. Frustration is leading to run on sentences so I'll stop soon.

One thing I'd like to note - us California suburbanites make fun of rural and urban folks equally. We make fun of militia nuts in Reading and spoiled faux-idealists in San Francisco. Everyone makes fun of LA, and LA makes fun of everyone else. "Real" Americans are no more likely to know how to take care of a farm than they are to get a BMW for their 16th birthday. Jefferson's ideal died 100 years ago - big business, by way of "the free market," killed it.

Ratatouille (Bird)

Rave reviews for a Pixar film induce more and more yawns from me with each successive release. I understand why their films are so highly praised. Pixar movies, given their built-in audience of younger persons with not-so-discriminating taste, could afford to be so much worse than they really are. Let's face it: as long as a movie has bright colors and talking animals, a child will watch it. The critic, given these low expectations, is then simply blown away that such a big-budget marketing apparatus is also so thoughtful, so intelligent, so witty.

If only I were so easily satisfied.

You see, many times I have come away at the end of a well-crafted Pixar film, and thought to myself, "Wow, that's going to be a classic." But then a little time passes, my initial impression begins to change and I develop the hunch that for whatever reason, although the film seemed to have all the elements of a perfect family feature, it would not become a classic in the sense that Snow White and Pinocchio have become classic. Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo - immensely enjoyable, all. And yet they have not stayed with me, the way that even some of the lesser animated Disney films have stayed with me. Perhaps it is because I am no longer a child. Or perhaps it is because the Pixar movies are not as good. As an adult I have returned to almost all of the Disney films and they strike me as better - as an adult. So I take that as a sign.

Speculate for hours on this topic as you wish. Are the Pixar films too cute? Too calculated? Too snarky? Too hegemony-reinforcing? Valid points, all. But for me, what's really lacking in the Pixar movies is a sense of risk. Cheesemeister he may have been, it nevertheless could not be said of Walt Disney, in his first few years at least, that he was a man who played it particularly safe. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was roundly predicted to be an embarrassing flop. "Who's going to sit in a movie theater and watch a cartoon for 80 minutes?," they all proclaimed (Oh, but he had the last laugh, my friends). Fantasia? Walt did not sit around and preview Fantasia for focus groups. He just freakin' made it. In fact, Disney did not achieve financial security until the opening of Disneyland in 1955. The point is, sure, Walt was a master of marketing, but he took chances, God damn it. Whereas Pixar's attitude seems to be more like, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." And that is why I have ceased becoming too excited about any of their films.

I have also tired of the CGI look. It may be the world's most labor-intensive process, but at this point it no longer feels that way to me. Disney animators literally spent years drawing every ripple in a pond in Bambi or Pinocchio, and it shows. Also, Disney altered its look from film to film (at least until the cheap-o years of 101 Dalmations and The Aristocats, that is). In "making-of" documentaries, Pixar animators will gush about all the "new techniques" and "state-of-the-art" technologies" they use, but I'm sorry, it's all starting to look the same to me. And in the end, at least 50% of a movie is its look, and if I don't like the look, then I'm lukewarm on the movie, no matter how gripping the storyline may happen to be.

So with a fortress of skepticism standing there to greet it, how did Ratatouille fare? Little could I have anticipated that the very subject of Ratatouille happened to be the struggle of the artist in a hostile world and the skepticism of the snobby critic. So by gummit, I'd say it fared well. The storyline, slave to such a well-oiled marketing apparatus as it needed to be, was rather esoteric and unconventional given the circunstances. I mean, if Little Earl starred in a Pixar film, he would have starred in Ratatouille. I don't know how many kids are really be able to grasp the plight of the creative mind and the longing that is buried in the heart of the icy intellectual. I thought the whole business with the rat controlling the young chef's body by tugging on his hair was contrived. But the final scenes, in particular, I found surprisingly moving. Hell, like Anton Ego, I was ready to come at this flick with all my might, and in the end it won me over.

But by how much, really? As with all the others, it seemed terrific at the closing credits, but the day after I barely even gave it any thought. So what gives? Do I just have it out for Pixar because I'm a rat bastard? Grant me a sliver of humanity at least. No, ultimately Ratatouille did not resonate with me on quite the level I wanted it to because I did not feel the connection between the beautiful sentiments of the story and the sentiments, and the experience, of the filmmakers who tried to imbue it with life. Ratatouille is an extremely individualistic story shaped by committee. Brad Bird may be the legitimate auteur of Ratatouille, but it does not show. More likely, the story was sliced and diced by a million different hands until every target demographic was included, every focus group appeased. No, Walt himself did not lovingly hand-paint every frame of Pinocchio, but those movies smacked of his personal vision. And until Pixar can learn to match a personal story with a personal approach, I'm sticking to my guns.

"Film critic" rating: ****
"Little Earl" rating: ***

Satire Is Just As Good (Or Bad) As It's Always Been

In his Slate piece "The Satire Recession: How Political Satire Got So Flabby," Troy Patterson seems to suggest that at one point or another there existed a "golden age" of political satire. But I would wager that 90% of political humor over the course of the eons has largely been disposable, and only the cream of the crop lingers in the memory. So most political jokes "rarely transcend the level of pure ad hominem mockery"? Welcome to the story of the human race. That being said, I like the distinction he draws between the intellectually lazier late night humor of Leno, Letterman, and Conan and the sharper barbs of Stewart and Colbert:

"Senator John Kerry is in trouble for making a joke about soldiers being uneducated," said Conan. "As a result, Kerry promised to stop making jokes and stick to boring people." Peterson would class that harmless jape—John Kerry? Dull? No?!—as "pseudo-satire," which is cynical and shallow and treats politics "like an infection" and stands in contrast to the real satire that, for instance, Jon Stewart offered on the subject of the botched joke and the way it was spun: "After an election in which the GOP has been beaten up by, let's say, reality, the party has rediscovered a winning issue: the has-been's faux pas." Where O'Brien's pseudo-satrical joke trivializes the political process, Stewart's engages it by laughing at that very trivialization. The distinction isn't simply a matter of what's funny; well-constructed pseudo-satire often deserves more laughs than preachy satirical jokes. It's about the fact that comedy can perform a watchdog role and seems more ready to shirk it than Judith Miller. "By avoiding issues in favor of personalities," writes Peterson, "and by 'balancing' these shallow criticisms between conservatives and liberals, late-night comics are playing it safe but endangering democracy."

Also, Conan's joke is mostly just mean. It's like, "Wow, John Kerry is so boring. God, aren't you glad you're not as boring as John Kerry?" There's not really anything of value to take away from that. Stewart's joke is more valuable because when you hear it you laugh in mutual recognition along with Stewart on the timeless nature of political desperation. The joke is like a weapon against manipulation (and what's more valuable than that?).

Speaking of humor as a weapon used to alleviate emotional pain, Bruce Reed's rant on the nearly 15-year futility of the Pittsburgh Pirates fulfills that function admirably:

Seven years ago, in a desperate bid to revive the Pirates' fortunes, the city built PNC Park, a gorgeous field with the most spectacular view in baseball. From behind home plate, you can look out on the entire expanse of American economic history—from the Allegheny River to 1920s-era steel suspension bridges to gleaming glass skyscrapers. The result? As Pittsburgh writer Don Spagnolo noted last year in "79 Reasons Why It's Hard To Be a Pirates Fan," Pittsburgh now has "the best stadium in the country, soiled by the worst team." (The Onion once suggested, "PNC Park Threatens To Leave Pittsburgh Unless Better Team Is Built.") Spagnolo notes that the city already set some kind of record by hosting baseball's All-Star game in 1994 and 2006 without a single winning season in between.