Mysteries Abysmal

Snickers

I like Jon Stewart a lot and think The Daily Show is one of the smartest political half hours on television, but I've never found that sensibility to be as funny as I'd like it to be. It is funny, don't get me wrong, but not funny in a Bill Maher-just-said-what-I-was-too-scared-to-vocalize kind of way. Villain to both the hard left and the religious right, Christopher Hitchens has, in my opinion, accurately identified the Stewart-and-minions phenomenon. Which is to say one that is largely self-congratulatory (Maher falls into this camp as well, but he revels in it instead of masking it. That latter is a far worse offense.) I remember a funny Chicago Reader movie capsule on Driving Miss Daisy, written by a very outspoken leftist who tapped into this Comedy Central brand of back-patting. He wrote, "Aided by a lachrymose Hans Zimmer score, it fairly drips with the kind of nostalgic liberal platitudes that make its upscale target audience applaud at the end--they're actually applauding themselves." 20 years later, Hitchens writes, "This [Comedy Central humor] works well with audiences who laugh not because they find something to be funny, but to confirm that they are--and who can doubt it?--cool enough to "get" the joke." This isn't across-the-board true, of course, but he may be onto something here. 

Not so corny

Readers of this blog know that I like to prop up Iowa when I can. (See the subtle inclusion of the "Bix" video below).  Today they/we are the first Midwestern state to legalize gay marriage.  A remarkable advancement for civil rights in this country any way you dice it.  Time Out's gay writer Jason Heidemann eloquently captures  the moment: 

I’m rejoicing. As a former Iowan (during my college years), I’ve long wondered why Iowa is always the butt of so many jokes. The state has an excellent education system and is pretty as hell (in some places). Plus I’ve long maintained that Midwesterners as a whole are a fair-minded people. I for one can’t wait to pose, American Gothic style, for my wedding photo. I’m kidding. What I actually can’t wait to do is head to Iowa in 2010 when right wingers in the Hawkeye state no doubt try to get a ballot measure in the hands of voters (like in California). Hopefully, thousands of Chicagoans will cross state lines to join the fight when and if it comes.  Happy times!

New morning

MLK/Obama tribute concert Chicago Sun-Times, Jan 20, 2009. 

Mouse clicks

With Minnesota's largest newspaper recently filing for Chapter 11 and the Boston Globe removing  50 jobs from its newsroom, the future of print news media continues to look worse than it did only yesterday. Obviously I can't fully weigh the ramifications of each proposed business model, but this reader comment on Michael Miner's blog sounds as feasible as I've heard to date.  With the presupposition that print is already a dead dog, there might be hope for the individual news companies if we begin to think in collective terms.  Says "Roberto,":

As a former newspaper reporter at STNG, I've put too much thought into this while sitting on the deck waiting for the Titanic to sink. The future of the business is mouse clicks. I think all papers should collaborate under one host Web site where readers enter a credit card number that gains access to any newspaper/magazine in the country/world. Every time a reader clicks a story, they pay a penny or maybe a fraction of a penny, most of which goes to the paper with a slight cut going to the collaboration. Every month the reader gets billed. Online ads sold by the publisher are just a cherry on top of their revenues. The readers only pay for what they read (about 5 to 10 cents a day for most and 25 to 30 cents a day for news junkies). The reader will save money, and the publishers will make more money because they won’t have to produce and distribute a paper product. Throw in inventions like the Kindle and Wi-Fi, that will give commuters and couch surfers easy access, and newspapers will be back in business.

Flood damage

There's an article in the NYTimes today about the recent tragedies that have befallen Iowa City and the University of Iowa--a community where I was a student/resident in 2001. Chief among them the sad tale of a standout oboe professor who recently killed himself after what must have been a humiliating sexual harassment suit with one of his TAs. (Another professor at Iowa had committed suicide in August who had "offered to give higher grades to female students who would show him their breasts or let him fondle them.")

Evidently Mark Weiger, the oboist, had no family and lived alone.  He was educated at the New England Conservatory and Juilliard, and while I know little else of the man, I like to pretend that the heartland was new territory for him when he accepted the job. You see a photo of his big deserted house in the article, which looks like it might sit next to a soul-sucking office park, surrounded by other subdivision homes busily occupied with families. You start to wonder what it was like to come home from work to that kind of empty environment. Probably tenured and with less to prove these days, he may have had more leisure time than he wanted. Academic faculty social circles, I would guess, are probably not as "social" as we like to think.  And how much female contact does a bachelor professor have that isn't the student body? (pun intended)

I don't know where I'm going with this, but, despite how despicable it was he couldn't leave that poor girl alone, you do wonder what his whole story was. It seems to me that being a single music professor in a small Big Ten town would be isolating, suffocating and ultimately toxic. I think it was Greta Garbo who said she preferred NYC because it was the only place where she could be alone. I'm not so sure. City life can foster a warm sense of community, even if it is just an illusion. 

While not entirely appropriate to Weiger's case but relevant to my general mood at the moment, George Sand once wrote,

"Man was not made to live with the trees, the stones, the clear sky, the azure sea, the flowers, and the mountains, but with his fellow creatures. In the tempestuous days of youth, we imagine that solitude is the great refuge against peril, and a great remedy for the wounds in the battle of life. This is a grave error..." --A Winter in Majorca

Volunteerism

Main Street. Elkhart, Indiana.  (pop. 52,000)

Avant/Chi loads flyers, annoyingly sets McCafe on my car.

Religion and pacifism still coexist in some corners of this country. 

Northern Indiana promotes diversity.

Barack Obama pumpkin: A for effort?

Total miles logged: 301
Doors knocked on: ~80
Volatile McCain supporters: 0

Electoral votes at stake: 11

Louis

When Studs Terkel died yesterday, Chicago lost one of its greatest ambassadors.  As one friend said last night, it's horrible to think that "all that being and experience" is now gone forever.  But he's left us with libraries full of writings and reels of interviews to mine in the years ahead.  Studs' utter lack of pretension is what drew me in like a magnet.

What makes you tick?

ST: Curiosity, how do people think. What makes them do certain things. I want to find out what happened way back in the past; how it affects us in the present.

(WTTW is currently airing a TV interview he gave last year; WFMT is broadcasting some of his old radio interviews etc...)  In his memoirs, he talks about an old jazz column he wrote for the Sun-Times and admits how embarrassed he was to go back and read it ("pretty awful," he said.) Is anyone this modest anymore? There's an excellent interview with The Jewish Journal that perfectly encapsulates the kind of person Mr. Terkel was. Always was. 

Any other advice?

ST: Let the guy finish his sentence. You've got to listen more. Let there be pauses, silence and then more comes out. Let it ride.

Studs was 96. 

(photo: Terkel, right, Andrew Patner, left.  Credit: University of Chicago)

Hitchens comes around

"I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke."

RTWTH

Country foist

BBC, or brilliantly biased coverage

I do love the Beeb despite the fact that they're about as subtly anti-American as Harold Pinter or Lars von Trier.  They've recently sent a young British fellow to travel across the US for election season and to blog about it.  He'll chat with the people of our land and find out where they want the country to go.  The problem is that most of the traveling will be done in the deep conservative south, and I'm sure you can see where this is going.  When Ed from Oxford, MS speaks with a funny drawl about his unfailing patriotism, it'll be a Borat style mock-fest all over again. If the 'magic bus' doesn't stop at the Creation museum, then I shall give due props.