remains of the day 17 jan

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Illness last week means that I have quite a few links that I’ve been sitting on:

  • A pretty heartbreaking piece by Daniel Wakin in the New York Times Magazine about the process of selling expensive instruments when the virtuosi who play them decide that it’s time to let them go. It delves into the heady emotion of making that decision, as well as the intricate interplay between the current owners, the desire to pass them onto musicians of high caliber, and the market forces that push these instruments outside the means of the musicians that would most be able to make use of them.
  • Oliver Sava tried to write a piece for the A.V. Club about what makes a good all-ages comic book, but ended up writing an article defining all good all-ages media. It took me right back to those children’s books that have persisted in my memory, those that still give me pleasure today, and also took me back to a more uncritical time where I took so much pleasure out of just keeping my head in a book.
  • Arizona is crazy fucking racist.
  • One part of the origin story of Olivier Messiaen’s transcendent Quartet for the End of Time is that it was written while the composer was imprisoned in a Nazi detention camp. On An Overgrown Path takes a look at that story and finds that it’s a little more complicated than that. I was struck by what a fine line it is here between truth-telling and mud slinging. After all, what really is worse: incorrectly labeling Messiaen as a Vichy collaborator, or holding him up as a symbol of artistic resistance against Nazi oppression while he was a (by all accounts, low key) collaborator?
  • Constant affirmation vs. earning praise. Good job in trying to change the status quo, but it’s stupid that this is an argument.
  • The Atlantic has a slideshow and interview with one of the graphic designers that created posters for ACT UP to promote awareness of the AIDS crisis, which is where the header image comes from. I wasn’t that familiar with the posters, and I was shocked and refreshed by how honest and direct some of the messages. Gay activism has become less confrontational since then, I feel, and I just can’t imagine a major campaign with the text “One in every sixty-one babies is born [HIV positive.] So why is the media telling us heterosexuals aren’t at risk? Because these babies are black. Because these babies are hispanic.” In the realm of public health, it seems like we could use a similar campaign to outline the general population health benefits of things like the HPV vaccine.
  • Alexis Madrigal has a piece up about how Radiolab is/has changed the sound/approach of radio broadcasters. First off, nothing that he says doesn’t also apply better to This American Life, a show that I think has more directly influenced the way that NPR news edits their segments, the subjects they cover, and the way they conduct their man-on-the-street interviews. Second, I really hope not. I don’t think the show dumbs down their science that much, and I appreciate their editing and sound design, but it drives me batshit crazy the ways that Krulwich and Abumrad play dumb when they’re interviewing their subjects and summing up information. It’s not that I disagree with the approach, I just think they need to be better at their jobs. It strikes me as patronizing, transparently false, and deeply annoying. /minirant
  • For some reason, Caitlyn Flanagan is in my mental “treat with caution” file for writers, but she has written an absolutely brilliant piece on Joan Didion for The Atlantic. I may have more to say on this later, it’s quite good. For what it’s worth, I’ve always appreciated Didion for the way she writes about California.
  • One of my friends, artist Lucy Bellwood, is offering two issues of one of her titles, Baggywrinkles, available for free on her website. Go check it out.

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EDIT: This American Life has retracted the episode after Mike Daisey was found to have fabricated some of the information he presented in the episode. Links to clarifying information and my take here.

If anybody didn’t catch last week’s episode of This American Life, “Mr. Daisey and the Factory,” you should listen to it right away. The episode is an hourlong excerpt of Mike Daisey’s one man show, The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs, a timely monologue about Steve Jobs and the working conditions in the factories in China that make most of the world’s electronics, from iPhones to Xboxes.

One thing that I was thinking about while I was listening to the episode was what it means, in this day and age, to be a prophet. Because Mike Daisey sounds like a prophet. I think we have a confused concept of what a prophet is, because the word is so close to prophecy. Clearly, the word comes from what a prophet does, but I think there is a big difference between prophecy and the message that the prophet delivers. I was reminded of the passage from the 2nd book of Ezekiel, where God comissions Ezekiel to deliver a message to the Israelites:

And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet, that I heard him that spake unto me. And he said unto me, Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me: they and their fathers have transgressed against me, [even] unto this very day. For [they are] impudent children and stiffhearted. I do send thee unto them; and thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD. And they, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, (for they [are] a rebellious house,) yet shall they know that there hath been a prophet among them.

Our concept of prophecy has everything to do with visions of the future, reducing the prophet to a divine fortuneteller, but I think it’s clear that the role of this prophet has very little to do with warning about the future, and everything to do with recontextualizing today. Prophets are there as a destabilizing force; they demand that you consider the possibility that what you consider everyday life is actually the perpetration of a great evil. And because these prophets make us really look at the way that we live our lives–and because they see with long sight–it is in their nature to be hated by the power structure that feeds on the status quo, despised by the masses that have become used to the inertia that prevents change, and beloved by the generations that come after them.

I cannot say where Mike Daisey’s story leads, or what the end of the struggle that he is a part of is. Just as there have always been prophets, there have been false prophets, but I don’t think he’s a false prophet. I do know that I never would have sought out his monologue, or the information he uncovered if it hadn’t appeared on TAL. When his monologue first began attracting attention, I saw the title of the show, rolled my eyes, and closed the tab. I believed in the economic (now) conventional wisdom that as much as modern offshore manufacturing may pair 16th century beliefs about individual worth with 21st century labor management technology, the only thing worse than sweatshops for poor countries is no sweatshops. And I may still believe in that empirical argument. But Mike Daisey does force you to confront the fact that every cheap computer that you buy, every Xbox, every Apple device, is subsidized–made cheaper–by wear and tear on real people’s bodies. There’s a staggering quotation from his Chinese interpreter that Daisey uses to great effect, a quotation so perfect that I winced when I heard it, “You hear stories, but you never think it will be so much.”

Indeed. Listen to it.

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Today marks the one year anniversary of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

The Giffords shooting is one of those news events where I have a crystal clear memory of where I was when I heard the news and what exactly I was doing. I was at my high school’s Alumni Weekend. These weekends are heavily attended by the classes that graduated the two years before, with declining attendance thereafter as people become constrained by the larger tides of their lives. Usually the biggest pool of attendees comes from those with families in the area, or those who are attending school in the greater Los Angeles region.

I was in our school’s Commons, hiding out in the area where there was plentiful tables and chairs and internet access. There were two types of people there, a handful in all: social media junkies, like me, people for whom a couple of hours without access to Facebook and Twitter is an insurmountable burden; and type-A executive types for whom checking email and messages frequently is part of their job description. It was a pretty random group of people. There wasn’t anyone else from my class, the ties of the school the only thing we had in common.

And once I saw the story, I remember turning to the woman next to me, and asking her if she had heard the news about the congresswoman from Arizona. In that moment, it felt like one of those events for which I could invade another person’s solace. And I saw the look in her eye, like she had been thinking about the same things that I had. Thinking about whether this was the beginning of a long period in which people with guns could destabilize an entire nation, the beginning of the period in which law and order and the democratic vision would crumble under the power of a single madman. We had no knowledge of the shooter, only the knowledge that this was a time when things could go bad.

 

 

remains of the day jan 7 2012

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

1.7.2011. A beautiful day in the Northwest. Springwater Corridor Trail, Portland, Oregon.

  • A typically glum and jaded former Seattleite bitches about Portlandia. Full disclaimer, I love June Thomas.
  • re: that autism story I linked to a couple of days ago, the story behind the best NYT correction ever.
  • My congressman (and I use the term loosely), Elton Gallegly of CA-24, is retiring. Great news. Maybe my majority-Latino district can finally get representation that doesn’t hate us. Hopefully SOPA will be the last in a long line of legislative defeats for the spineless, ambitionless backbencher.
  • Still hung up on Nina: