Thursday, June 11, 2009 - Posts
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Two artists get their revenge on sticky notes by turning them into short films:
Where will the next office-supply masterpiece come from? I've got my money on binder clips.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 11 a.m.)
No. 9: "Prickly Shark." The prickly shark is an extremely rare shark with dual dorsal fins, and on Tuesday, scientists in Monterey, Calif., captured and displayed one for only the second time ever. A tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium was the shark's home for 15 hours before it flipped over in a "hypnotic trance," according to the Monterey Herald. This signaled to scientists that it was time to return it to the sea.
No. 21: "David Letterman Sarah Palin." Last night, Letterman responded on-air to complaints from Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that he had made "sexually perverted" jokes about "raping" her 14-year-old daughter on his show Tuesday night. (The jokes were a little perverted but they were definitely not about rape.) Letterman's unapologetic rebuttal was a brilliant judo move: "I can't really defend these: They're just jokes." Whether it satisfied Palin remains to be seen, but the controversy has been good for ratings: Letterman has been beating Conan in the numbers since Tuesday.
No. 35: "Amanda Knox pictures." Tomorrow, 21-year-old Amanda Knox takes the stand in Italy to defend herself against charges she killed her British roommate in 2007 while on an exchange program there. Since Knox was charged five months ago, the case—and its attendant sexy details—has captivated Italy. But Timothy Egan in the New York Times notes that the case against Knox "has so many holes in it ... that any fair-minded jury would have thrown it out months ago." The fact that "pictures" is appended to Knox's name suggests many Googlers are subjecting her to their own judgment—namely, whether she's worthy of the nickname bestowed upon her by the foreign press: "Foxy Knoxy."
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"The true democracy ... where all journey down the open road. Where a soul is known at once in its going. Not by its clothes or appearance. Not by its family name. Not even by its reputation. Not by works at all. The soul passing unenhanced, passing on foot, and being no more than itself."
—D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman
On this week’s Culture Gabfest we talked about the death of GM. There are two competing narratives when it comes to America’s supposed romance with the car. The first picks up on the longing that Lawrence, the class-bound Englishman, experiences when he thinks of Whitman, the barbaric yawper on the open road, carrying with him nothing more than his own soul, unenhanced. (A similar note is sounded here, in Scotsman Andrew O’Hagan’s impossibly smart elegy to the car: “If you read the novels of Joan Didion, you will see there can come a time in anybody’s life, women’s as much as men’s, when they climb into their car and feel that they are driving away from an entire kingdom of dependency.”) The first narrative is: We are in our absolute essence a car culture, and we have the icons to prove it: Whitman avant la lettre, Kerouac, Springsteen. Cars express our mobility, our individuality, our optimism, our unembarrassed embrace of the large and the far; once, they expressed our economic dominance.
Alongside this runs another, darker narrative. The Eisenhower highway bill irreparably scarred the countryside and made us dependent on oil; Robert Moses destroyed our cities and turned us into a nation of road enraged, isolated suburbanites, enslaved to the epic commute. As our bogus freedom expanded, our public spaces degraded. This narrative, too, has its icons: Welles' movie The Magnificent Ambersons or The Power Broker, Caro’s biography of Moses. I would put exactly between myths No. 1 and No. 2 the magnificent Frank Bascombe books by Richard Ford.
So which is it? My wife took the kids to the in-laws two years ago, and no sooner had the door swung shut, I jumped in the car. I drove down to the Maryland shore, listening to a Mets game on the radio, then The Queen Is Dead and Guided by Voices, as I rocketed south to Charlottesville, Va., to gawp at waitresses and wander through Mr. Jefferson’s serpentine walls. The campus was deserted; the buildings were being locked up at the end of the day. I ran into an old English professor I never expected to see again, himself a deep reader of Whitman. I’d love to say there is some organic connection between driving along at dusk, listening to baseball—if not exactly a soul unenhanced, a haggard new father untethered from the world of dependency—and the magic hour encounter with Mark. And yet my memory of speaking as a somewhat integrated adult with someone who had always discomposed me as an adolescent, is inseparable from the fact that we had passed each other on foot.
We should at least hesitate before we claim Whitman for narrative No. 1; he may even belong more comfortably in narrative No. 2. Maybe the true romance has always been with the American road, not the American car, whatever the advertisers say. It preceded the automobile, and it will, god willing, survive it.
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