Funny truth

Found this in the comments at Crooked Timber:

"I remember as a college student being really puzzled by politics, and wondering how people could make such passionate, detailed arguments saying exactly opposite things, until I realized that (in politics, anyway, unlike boxing maybe) there is no such thing as objective truth. So I decided to go to law school instead of grad school, and now I believe whatever I get paid to believe."

Swan

Salon has an article about Fox's latest abomination, The Swan. My wife and I watched it last night - I don't know why. In this one, Fox teaches women that if you're average-looking, you should be desperate for lipo, plastic surgery and therapy, because beauty is a contest and if you're not prettier than the girl standing next to you, you won't go on to the Big Pageant; you'll be a loser.

Giant Pans

The iPod is feeling frisky (or maybe I'm simply trying hard to put intent and meaning behind what are actually random events; maybe i should take up a religion). Anyway, just now, the iPod came up with a particularly jagged sequence of songs: from a long dirgy Sunny Day Real Estate song to a balls-out Archers of Loaf song, to a peaceful 20 second Adrian Belew guitar synth soundscape, to the reason I'm writing this, Coletrane's blistering Giant Steps.

Hearing the latter in headphones is strange: the sax and piano are panned hard-left while the drums are nearly hard-right (except for a little high-end stuff that bleeds through) and the bass is hard-right. So basically you have the two lead melodic instruments frantically fighting it out on one side of your head and the rhythm section chugging along on the other. It's the aural perspective of someone standing in a doorway between two reflection-free (no echo) rooms with half the band in each room. It's a very unnatural sound, and a bit unpleasant, frankly. There's no reverb on the intruments (none that my iPod could reveal anyway), so I assume the intention was to get a live and uncolored sound. But, why then pan the instruments to create a sonic situation that would probably never happen in real life? Still, a great song and performance, just strange mixing.

Then it played They Might Be Giants' goofy little 27-second "Theme From Flood".

Fortress of Solitude

TBOGG writes about Jonathan Lethem:

I had the opportunity to start reading Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude (graciously purchased for me from my Amazon wish list..thank yew) and it's really good. Beauifully written. I read his Gun, With Occasional Music (which was okay) several years ago, and I never would have thought he was capable of this. In fact, I passed on Motherless Brooklyn because of Gun.

Gun, With Occasional Music was the first Lethem book I read (on reading a little 1/4 page review in the back of a Time magazine when it came out in the early 90's). I loved it, and I've read everything he's written since then. Most of it has been worth reading, and some has been very good indeed. But, Fortress of Solitude almost ended up in the Started But Never Finished pile because it really bored me. I only finished it because the book was a gift from my darling wife. I thought the writing was far too clever and the story too slow and pointless. Maybe that's because I was expecting something else?

All of Lethem's other books are all fairly small, with clearly-defined plots and there's often a sprinkle or more of sci-fi thrown in to keep the ol' imagination working. But this one was a long flashback of his own childhood (not exactly an autobiography, just inspired by his childhood in the 70's, according to an NPR interview i read). And while there were interesting topics like, the music of the time, the tagging and drug cultures, the troubles of a white kid in a black neighborhood, etc., there just wasn't a whole lot of plot to grab onto. About halfway through I started thinking, "OK, where is he going with all this? He's introduced a half-dozen different things that could be a plot if he pushed one of them a little, but none are grabbing me, and he's not making any one of them really stand out." Instead, he just wanders through 10 years or so of his childhood and describes all the stuff that happens to him and the people around him. All the people around him fall apart, or worse, and he ends up basically the same person he always was - alone. Was that the point?

Request

If we ever work together, you and I, and you are sick, stay the fuck home!!! Really, don't come to work!!! Your contributions are not so valuable that you need to risk infecting everyone else.