A Slight Delay

Since John McCain has apparently backed off his pledge to run a high-minded campaign (actually, he didn’t back off, so much as dive), and since the Obama-Hilton-Spears ad seems to point an awkward way forward for his campaign, I can’t wait to see the first Presidential debates. Issues? Who needs ‘em? I’d pay good money to see McCain play the dozens versus Obama on national television (my money, incidentally, is on the Senator from Illinois).

I mean, really now. Tell me you wouldn’t love to tune in CNN to see something like this:

ANDERSON COOPER: One of the members of our viewing audience sent this to us today by email, for John McCain. And I quote: “Senator, your mother is so ugly that…”

Stay tuned.

One explanation that I hear given for Barack Obama’s success is that a lot of white people somehow hope that voting for him will, in effect, let them off the hook for the long and complicated history of race relations in this country. While I think that hypothesis is too simplistic by half, I think there may at least be a little something to it.

There’s a tendency, I think, to want some kind of skeleton key or Rosetta stone that will decipher what it is to experience life through someone else’s eyes, or in their skin. We look for that “Eureka!” moment, when it all makes sense and we attain a Zen-like clarity, as though you could say, “Well, now I’ve read Shadow and Act/seen Malcolm X/listened to What’s Going On and Songs in the Key of Life/eaten collard greens/watched Roots/observed Dr. King’s birthday/learned the principles of Kwanzaa. Now I understand!”

Uh, no. (more…)

If there’s any justice in the music industry–no, wait a minute, if people have any taste whatsoever–no, that doesn’t quite work, either… Okay. Here’s the deal. The first album by Res, 2001’s How I Do, was as catchy and listenable as it was impossible to fit into some little box. As is so often the case with music that’s written for its own sake rather than for a target demographic, one gets the feeling that MCA hoped the album would just go away. The singles–aside from the club hit “They-Say Vision”–were poorly chosen, and the album under-promoted.

And it’s a shame that it was. Parts of the album had touches of the kind of quirky soul that Nellie Furtado rode to the top of the charts, only done better. “They-Say” and “Golden Boys” were propulsive and funky, with a sorta sneaky rock heartbeat, while “Sittin’ Back” sounded like a streetwise cousin to William DeVaughn’s “Be Thankful for What You’ve Got.” “Say It Anyway” (the obligatory hidden track) is, meantime, an unabashed, fun rocker. So it may have been that Res was too black for white radio, and too white for black radio.

Now, seven years later, she’s back, and screw the sophomore slump. (more…)

The average “Mexican” restaurant is to Mexican food what Olive Garden is to Italian, offering up bastardized and Americanized versions of the real thing. Your neighborhood Chili’s (and what neighborhood doesn’t have a Chili’s, usually nestled between two Starbucks), usually has an interior that looks like Applebees with piñatas, and features food the likes of which Donald Barthelme once compared to Italian with jalapeño peppers.

So imagine the simple pleasure of a Mexican restaurant that actually serves Mexican food. Or come to Fiesta Hut, in East Rutherford. You won’t find machine-made tortillas, ugly masses of 50’s sci-fi refried beans atop more beans atop rice, or frozen, manufactured food passed off as fresh. You also won’t find Tex-Mex. Just a handful of simple, authentic Mexican dishes, made with fresh ingredients. (more…)

Sometimes I get the feeling that someone, somewhere, has decided it’s just not art if it can’t be given a label or title. So imagine the difficulty posed by the works of Michael Sowa.

Sure, you can peg him as a Surrealist (the most common label slapped on his work), but it’s not the kind of Surrealism that you find in artists like DeChirico, Dali, or Ernst. Indeed, the closest affinity in a lot of Sowa’s art would seem to be with Edward Hopper, if you could picture Hopper’s world populated with Autobahn pigs, driving pickles, and bunnies on trains. In the wrong hands this could be a recipe for disaster, as though Thomas Kincaid tried his hand at The Far Side. It’s the attention to technique that keeps Sowa’s art from veering either into sentimental kitsch at one extreme, or cheap sight gags on the other.

Robert Hughes once wrote of Hopper that there was a certain ambiguity about the painter’s works; you could never be quite sure if they were about solitude or loneliness. Similarly, Sowa’s art defies easy categorization. The scenes have a nearly voyeuristic quality about them, as if we’ve wandered into someone else’s daydream, or another reality that hovers just at the edge of perception. It’s appropriate, in a way, that Sowa’s visuals played a part in the film Amelie. As with the film, Sowa’s art displays a sweetly off-kilter sense of humor that’s tinged with a sepia-toned melancholy.

Postscript: These images, and others, are available in Sowa’s Ark, a collection of the artist’s work that’s finally back in print.

So says Cicero: Extreme justice is extreme injustice. In his blog Confessions of a Small Church Pastor, Chuck Warnock writes about the recent execution of Christopher Scott Emmett:

While I realize there is a lot of disagreement on the issue of capital punishment, it seems to me that followers of Christ would oppose capital punishment on the grounds that Jesus himself was an innocent victim of the Roman Empire’s capital punishment system. When we think of Jesus’ death, not as a theological doctrine, but as capital punishment gone wrong, it casts a different light on the subject. […] I can’t help thinking of Jesus’ short stay on death row. Is this the best solution we have to society’s problems? What do you think?

Not wanting to clog Pastor Chuck’s comment section, I’ll reply here.

The litany of problems with capital punishment seems endless and ever-growing. It disproportionately targets those with less money, less education, and more melanin. Its value as a deterrent has always been questionable, at best. And, as has been documented on countless occasions, the innocent are as likely to go to their graves as the guilty. Any of these issues, taken by themselves, would be disturbing enough; taken in tandem, they serve as an indictment of an idea and attendant practice that need sorely to be rethought, if not disassembled altogether. (more…)

It’s eighty-odd degrees out, sticky and humid. Don’t ask me why, in God’s name, I’m thinking of baking. I haven’t baked in a while, come to think of it, aside from a batch of brownies over the winter, and I don’t even remember the last thing I baked before that. Probably more brownies (you can’t go wrong baking brownies). That’s not counting the couple of tubes of Nestle Toll House cookies I picked up at the Stop and Shop last time I had a lot of company ’cause there’s no such thing as too much dessert when you have company; I don’t count them because I didn’t make them from scratch.

Anyway. I started poking through my cookbook, and I came across this long-forgotten favorite that I probably haven’t made in about twenty years (oy!). What I like about it is that it’s an adult dessert. That’s not to say it’s shaped like anything particularly naughty, just that your teeth won’t fall out after two bites, plus it’s quick, simple, and tasty. As soon as this infernal heat breaks, I think I’ll dust off the mixing bowls…

I don’t remember where the recipe came from. Hope you like it, either way. What you’ll need:

1 can unsweetened apples
2 eggs
2 cups of flour
1 teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoons of baking soda
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
1 cup of chopped nuts
2 cups of sugar
1/2 cup of oil
1 tsp. vanilla

Combine the apples and eggs in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, combine flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon and nuts. Add to apple mixture and stir. Add remaining ingredients. Bake in 9×13 pan at 350 for 30 minutes, testing with a toothpick when done.

The dishwasher is the bane of creativity. Just my personal opinion, mind you, but one based on years of evidence. Seeing neatly regimented rows of mugs, bowls, dinner plates and silverware represents lost opportunities; for me, there’s no better time for thinking than when you’re elbows-deep in suds. You could say that dishpan hands and creativity go together like peanut butter and jelly.

It’s not that there’s an insane amount of concentration going on; it’s rather the opposite. It doesn’t take all that much concentration to do dishes, so your mind is generally letting something else brew while you’re getting those caked-on bits of oatmeal off your bowls. I won’t say that every dishwashing experience has produced Isaac Newton-quality stuff, but what I have gotten over the years has been useful, sometimes even startling, and usually better than what I come up with when I sit there straining over it.

Now, for you it could be something different. Some people have their a-ha moments in the shower (singing “Take On Me” doesn’t count, by the way), while gardening, or in the course of doing any number of usefully mindless things. They’re a good way to overcome mental blocks, whether it’s a creative block or a problem that stubbornly resists solving no matter how hard you’ve tried. And, lest this sound like some kind of new-agey crap, there’s actually scientific evidence to back it up. (more…)

One of my favorite things: stuff that happens only once, completely at random. Those snippets of found sounds, overheard dialog, or improbable phrasing are a sort of assemblage by accident. Reason and design get lost in the kind of haze that seems to be exactly why the word “ephemeral” was coined in the first place. These things only happen, it seems, when they can’t be captured, whether at the edge of hearing, from the corner of the eye, or in those fleeting moments between waking and dreaming.

And when you try to capture something like this, it ends up losing something in translation. By trying to give it form, make it last, you somehow rob it of its spirit or essence; you end up stripping it of its immediacy, and a large part of what made it special in the first place. (more…)

When is a music book not about music? It’s a valid question to ask if you stop to consider Nick Hornby’s Songbook, and Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape. Both are ostensibly about music, and the role it plays in our lives. But if you’re serious–in a passionate sort of way, not a pipe-smoking, suede-patch-wearing sort of way–about music, you get on some instinctive level what it means to say that music is the soundtrack of our lives, something that provides not just background noise but also meaning and context. It’s in that context that both of these works fit.

This isn’t either writer’s first go-round with music. Hornby first came to wide attention with High Fidelity, whose protagonist and his friends are a handful of music-addicted arrested development cases, and drew further acclaim with the book About a Boy, over which the ghosts of pop and Kurt Cobain loom large. Sheffield, on the other hand, has contributed some great music writing to the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, turning in his first book with Mix Tape. That both books are about music would seem to be one of the few things they have in common, save for a biting sense of humor. (more…)