In Praise of Pepperoni Pizza

Photo from Flickr!

Quick – finish this sentence: As American as ____

You said apple pie, right? But what if I said you couldn’t say apple. Try again:

As American as ____

Did you say pepperoni pizza? Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. But here’s the point: if you did say “pepperoni pizza”, no one would bat an eye. Because along with baseball and Coca-Cola, apple pie and cheeseburgers, few things are as – dare I say it – authentically American as pepperoni pizza.

But when it comes to the traditions of invented nostalgia and conspicuous scarcity that characterize the growing, and increasingly odious, food-tailoring movement known as “artisanal”, the unpretentiously popular pepperoni pizza is disturbingly mass-market.

The fun thing about the foodie craze is watching the inexorable ratchet of obnoxiousness. A decade ago, the organic folks were relatively harmless hippies and granola munchers who would natter at parties about pesticide use. Then five years ago the locavores arrived and turned the distance their salad traveled to their plate into a painfully earnest moral crusade. And now the artisanal movement is busy turning the every day act of feeding oneself into parody of performative gamesmanship that Stephen Potter would have loved.

Naively, I thought they would have left our pizza alone. But nooo. As the NYT reports today, “atisanal pizza joints are opening across the United States”. And if the idea of an artisanal pizza joint makes about as much sense as, I dunno,  “Heritage Doctor Pepper”, think again:

In these rarefied, wood-fired precincts, pizzas are draped with hot soppressata and salami piccante, and spicy pizza alla diavola is popular. At Boot and Shoe Service in Oakland, Calif., there is local-leek-and-potato pizza. At Paulie Gee’s in Brooklyn, dried cherry and orange blossom honey pizza. At Motorino in the East Village, brussels sprouts and pancetta.

But pepperoni pizza? No way. After all, pepperoni isn’t Italian, it’s American. And as Michael Ruhlman, an “expert in meat curing” (and, it transpires, total douchebag) puts it, pepperoni pizza is “a distorted reflection of a wholesome tradition”. Distorted how? By the act of selling it to someone other than smarmy stockbrokers and over-botoxed ladies who lunch, of course:

“Bread, cheese and salami is a good idea,” he said. “But America has a way of taking a good idea, mass-producing it to the point of profound mediocrity, then losing our sense of where the idea comes from.” He prefers lardo or a fine-grained salami, very thinly sliced, then laid over pizza as it comes out of the oven rather than cooked in the oven.

You know what I prefer? Normal, mediocre, pepperoni pizza. The kind you grab for $1.99 a slice at some hole in the wall on the street as you walk by on the way to meet a friend for a movie. Or that you jam into your mouth at 2:30am after a night of drinking, trying to get enough fat and carbs into your system that you don't collapse. I don't care if it's thick crust or thin crust. I don't care if the cheese is on top of the pepperoni or below it. I don't care if the pepperoni curls or lies flat. I really don't care about any of that, because eating pepperoni pizza isn't an experience, it is something you do that enables other experiences, like sitting around watching the NHL playoffs with some friends or fueling up for a late night of work or study. This is food as function, at its most prosaically and harmlessly moral.

The search for authenticity, especially when it comes at the intersection of food and nationalism, is beset by all manner of absurdities. At worst, the latent xenophobia and intolerance embedded in the very idea of “authentic culture” becomes explicit, as in the case of the Hamilton Farmers’ Market.  But more often, those tendencies reveal themselves through pretension and elitism disguised as a progressive respect for folk tradition and anti-consumerism.

There’s probably not much to be done about it, given human nature and the deep, self-hating anti-consumerist strain in Western culture.

But I really thought they’d leave our pizza alone.

In praise of hydrobeef

It’s getting increasingly hard to find anything good to say about meat. It is expensive, sucking up lots of land, grain, and other resources. It has a large carbon footprint. Finally, industrial meat production is hard on the animals, even before they’re slaughtered.

But what if there was a technology that eliminated all three of these drawbacks, while giving us a large supply of low cost, custom-designed meat products. That is, what if we could grow meat in a vat? At this point, would there be any reasonable objection to eating meat?

It’s still a hypothetical question, but it won’t be for long. As Reuters reports today, a handful of researchers are working away at  “cultured” meat grown in-vitro out of stem cells. One of these scientists is Medical University of South Carolina, researcher Vladimir Mironov, who envisions “football field-sized buildings filled with large bioreactors, or bioreactors the size of a coffee machine in grocery stores” to produce this meat.

Even better:

"It will be functional, natural, designed food," Mironov said. "How do you want it to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design exactly what you want. We can design texture.

It is telling that while the US government won’t fund his research, PETA will. Because PETA understands that the goal is not to micro-manage consumer preferences, it is to prevent harm to animals. And if that is taken out of the equation, there’s not a lot to object to. There is of course the “Ick” factor, but I suspect that would disappear quite quickly once the product hit the market.

A few more thoughts:

1. Any “ick” objections (or “ick” objections disguises as moral objections) could be handled by a serious and mandatory labeling regime.

2. The idea of custom-designed meat products opens up a whole new realm for interesting (and relatively harmless) competition. You can imagine celebrity chefs designing their own special lines of meat textures and tastes; a well-designed “blend” could be sold for meatballs, or stews, or meatpies, etc. Imagine a steak that was a mixture of lamb and venison?

3. At the same time, in-vitro meat will suffer from all the drawbacks of everything else that is produced cheaply and for mass consumption – it will be “inauthentic”. And so it will also open up a more pernicious form of authenticity-mongering amongst people who only eat meat grown “on the hoof”. At the extreme, you can imagine private or inviation-only restaurants and supper-clubs opening up where certified on-the-hoof meat is provided to the privileged elite.

4. But even that might not be such a bad thing; at the very least, it is hard to see how it would be net loss to the planet, to the animals, or consumers.

5. The upshot is that it is hard to see the downside to in-vitro meat. Am I missing something?



Technology and Revolution

From Bruce Sterling's famous 1993 report from Prague for Wired Magazine:

On the subject of modems and phone lines, Martin and his '89er friends still talk about "the Japanese guy." Back in '89, Czech students were trying to coordinate the uprising across the nation, and the technical students, including Martin, were running the telecom angle. They used a 300-baud device with the size, shape, and heat of a kitchen toaster. The Czech secret police were far too stupid and primitive to keep up with digital telecommunications, so the student-radical modem network was relatively secure from bugging and taps. Fidonet BBSes were springing up surreptitiously on campuses whenever an activist could sneak a modem past the border guards. Modems were, of course, illegal. Most of the Czech cops, however, had no idea what modems were.

The police were engaged in the hopeless task of beating the population into submission with billy clubs, without the backup of Soviet heavy armor. Martin's independent student movement was smarting from street-beatings and sensed that '89 was '68 upside down. They had a list of seven demands. They were pretty radical demands: three of them were never met. Everyone knew the situation was about to blow. But getting the word out was very difficult.

And then, without any warning or fanfare, some quiet Japanese guy arrived at the university with a valise full of brand-new and unmarked 2400-baud Taiwanese modems. The astounded Czech physics and engineering students never did quite get this gentleman's name. He just deposited the modems with them free of charge, smiled cryptically, and walked off diagonally into the winter smog of Prague, presumably in the direction of the covert-operations wing of the Japanese embassy. They never saw him again.

To Live and Skate in Kabul

Comic Sans; or Why I Love the French

This is how it starts:

Trouble is brewing at OuBaPo, France's experimental-comic-book movement. After years of infighting over artistic direction, at least four of the nine founding members have quit, and the two highest-profile artists aren't speaking to each other.

And this is how it ends:

The 46-year-old Mr. Trondheim is also preparing a tell-all comic detailing various fallings out with Mr. Menu.

Found in Translation, or, Why I Love Italians

Italy is a foreign country, they do things differently there. And what they do more differently than just about anything is sex scandals. The world was shocked -- shocked! -- last week when it was revealed that Sylvio Berlusconi was prancing around with a harem of 14 women, and might have had sex with one of them when she was only seventeen.

As the Independent clucked in the deck to its story on the issue, "Italy's Prime Minister has bounced back from countless scandals, but the latest allegations may prove disastrous." Ha! Right.  Writing in the Daily Mail, Mary Ellen Synon sets everyone straight:

What you have to understand before you read coverage by any Anglo-Saxon reporter about the women seen at Berlusconi's parties is that many Italian women, and Roman women in particular, dress like hookers

As she goes on to point out, Italian men seem to like things this way. 

 Run a survey in Britain on where the British would most like to live and at least half the men have dreams of a new life in Spain, France or Australia; run the same survey in Italy and you will come up with 99 of 100 men who cannot imagine living anywhere but in Italy. 

The whole episode makes me wistful for the only trip I ever made to Italy three years ago. I landed in Milan and had to make my way to Lake Como. This is how the trip began:

***

 “Ahh, MOH-ni-ca BeLLU-ci  Si ” My driver pushed his arms out in front of him, cupping his hands inward in the universal sign for “large breasts.” I was about to mention Sophia Loren, but I held off. The alfa romeo was a bit cramped, and I was worried that any mention of la bella Loren might cause him to shove his hands through the windscreen.

We were about twenty minutes out of Malpensa airport (“the worst airport in Europe,” according to the guide book. Agreed.), and conversation had been rather limited. I’d been hoping to catch a bus from Milan to Menaggio, but the bus schedule outside the airport had me totally stumped. It looked like it had been designed by a disgraced Enron accountant, columns of numbers that looked like hours and minutes, but which seemed to indicate, if I was reading the names of towns in the rows properly, that the bus actually took you back in time. As I stood there trying to figure out if a bus might actually arrive in the next week or so, I was approached by a skinny little man in mirror shades and a tight F1 t-shirt.

“Menaggio?” he said. I nodded. “Too late ” he said. He bent over and pointed at the schedule, holding up three fingers. “Three buses. 8, 1, 7:30. Too late ”

He was right. I’d missed the afternoon bus, and didn’t feel like hanging around for five or six hours. After a brief negotiation, he got his price and I got my ride. He led me to a small blue alfa romeo, pointed to the front passenger seat, and off we went.

Turns out I had hitched a ride with Roberto Benigni’s more handsome relative. As we pulled onto the highway toward Como, he started talking in rapid fire Italian, pointing and gesturing and declaiming at what I understood to be the glory of Lombardy. I tried to answer, mostly by using my restaurant Spanish or by talking English with an Italian accent. That didn’t get us anywhere, so he finally pushed in a cassette of Elvis live at Vegas, started humming along to Suspicious Minds, and floored it.

I was a bit nervous at first, since his driving style consisted of heading at top speed at whoever was in his lane, and then sitting an inch off their bumper until they moved over. The sort of road-rage behaviour, that is, that would get you yelled at in Canada and maybe shot in part of the US. Except my driver didn’t have road rage, he had the exact opposite, a sort of road-pleasure. When we’d pass the cars that he’d been following like a maniac, he’d look over and laugh, a man who couldn’t believe his luck. As we throttled past one particularly slow car, I ventured some conversation: “Stupido?” I said, angling a thumb at the fellow in the next lane.

 My driver loved that. He did the pointing and gesturing thing again, which I understood to mean that all of Lombardy was stupido. We went on like this for a while – Elvis, road-pleasure, gesturing – until I hit on a conversational gambit: “AC Milan?”

 The local heroes had just won the Champions League, the most prestigious soccer trophy in Europe, and brother Benigni picked this up and ran with it. “AC Milan numero uno ” he said, and proceeded to list every player on the team, counting them off on his fingers. When he finished, he moved on to the national team, the reigning world cup champions. “Grosso, Cannavaro, Materazzi…” he began, starting with the defenders. Then on to the midfield, the names rolling on like soft, distant artillery fire: “De Rossi, Gattuso, Totti…” he paused a few names later, stuck. “Buffon?” I said, naming the goalkeeper. “Ahh, Buffon ” he cried, smacking me on the shoulder.

It was conversation, of a sort. Done with soccer, I switched to women. Monica Belluci? That went exceedingly well. After almost throwing his hands through the steering wheel, my driver proceeded to name a dozen or so major Italian babes, most of whom (I gathered) were girlfriends of the soccer players just listed. This was getting fun. I tried consumer goods, and pointing at his sunglasses I said “Gucci.”

 “Si, si  Gucci ” he yelled. On the names came, Prada, Versace, Armani, Fendi… then we turned to cars, and I heard all about Porsche, Lamborghini, Ferrari, Maserati, Fiat… And so the conversation turned, mile after mile. I was in absolute heaven. I’d name a brand or celebrity, and he’d play word-association in his cannonball Italian. Who needs Esperanto when we have globalization?

Soon we neared Cernobbio, a small town past Como where he was to drop me off. When he realised I was being picked up by my girlfriend, he decided I needed a lesson in Italian relationship ethics. Pointing at his wedding ring, he held his hands to his eyes like binoculars. “Looklooklooklooklook” he stuttered, while moving his head from side to side like a sub commander scanning the surface for destroyers. Then he turned and gave me a stare, and held an index fingers to his lips: “Sssshhhh.”
I nodded. To make sure, he did it again: Looklooklooklooklook. Sssshhhh. Capisce?

I think I did. We pulled over, I hopped out and handed him a fistful of euros. He dropped my suitcase by the side of the road, slapped me on the shoulder and looked at me. “Ssshhh ” he said. Then he laughed, hopped in the car, and drove off with a wave.

Interview: Birgitta Jónsdóttir (Part Two)

This is the second part of my interview with Birgitta Jónsdóttir. We got to talking in a bit more detail about her views on freedom of information, transparency, WikiLeaks, and the evolution of media and the internet. She was in town last week to speak to Samara, and shortly before she arrived she received word that she was the target of a US government subpoena, which was trying to get Twitter to provide information about her account.

Q: What is the connection between your general sense that the “system” is broken, and your more specific interest in freedom of information, transparency, and so on? Is the “transparency agenda” that you are interested in a way of fixing government, or is it just something that you think needs to be done because it is in the broader public interest?

A: The latter.

I don’t think that you can “fix government,” you need to fix the entire system. On the bigger scale, when it comes to transparency issues, what I am calling for more than anything is for a dialogue on what should be transparent, what should not be transparent, why should it not, be transparent, or why should it be transparent.

Q: So you don’t consider yourself a transparency absolutist?

A: No. Because it is not my role. But I really feel, and one area where I am an absolutist, is that government should never, ever, decide what to filter out for me, or for you.

Q: So you are an absolutist to the extent that a government should not have secrets?

A: No, that’s not what I am saying. I am talking about lists that governments make of websites that should not be accessible. I am asolutely against that. When it comes to government and secrets, this is interesting because I have participated in sensitive projects like negotiations over IMMI. And if we leaked or published online the drafts, it would have defied the purpose of transparency, because the unfinished draft might have created a lot of fear or misunderstanding and undercut the process.

But once the file is complete, it should be public. And if the question is why it should not be public, there should be a debate over why we need this type of document to be secret.  I want to be able to go to a KKK website and know what they think. It’s not going to go away if we take it away from the Internet.

As a lawmaker, I find it crazy to think “I don’t like this thing, it’s really disturbing, I’m going to make a law so no one can see it.” I try to analyze what is it, in Iceland, that should be absolutely secret. And I’m thinking, and thinking, and thinking… and I can’t think of anything! Because all of it is already available somewhere, and the way we have used the Internet since the early days, the earliest webpages, there has been this culture of cultivating fear of information.

Q: What is your general view, with WikiLeaks and now IMMI, of the function of media in a democratic society? Is it part of holding the government to account? Is WikiLeaks a new media outlet? Traditional investigative journalism has had, ideally, some sense of responsibility to the broader nation that it serves. But in the WikiLeaks era, you have information about all governments put out to everyone, so the connection between responsible government and responsible journalism has been severed. Do you see this as a problem?


Q: I see WikiLeaks as originally a sort of add-on, like a plugin that makes your web browser work better. What has confused people is that WikiLeaks has morphed. It began as a sort of button that would lead you to leaks or raw material to work with. And now it is more of an editor, deciding what cables will go out at what times. So it is less of an add-on to journalism and now it is like a cheap editor for a lot of media in a lot of countries.

So it has morphed, and I haven’t been a part of that process. Being a big fan of horizontalism and spread-out responsibilities, I want to turn the information pyramid on its head. I want to support the sites that are popping up that are more like the original WikiLeaks.

I’m not trying to downplay what WikiLeaks is doing with the big leaks, and there could be speculation for a hundred years as to what is the right way to do it. But I would like to see much, much more media with access to the cables, to put it into perspective. Because you have, say, a diplomat in China talking about, say Burma, and someone in the West writing on the same story. And if you only get the story about the cables from one place, you don’t get the three-dimensional picture.  I think the countries that can’t afford to be part of the WikiLeaks process right now should be given more access, the more poor countries the better. But I don’t know how they [WikiLeaks] are going to do it, I’ve been trying to encourage them…

I think we are in the middle of a massive change when it comes to journalism. The consumption of traditional media is getting less and less everyday, and they haven’t figured out how to make money off the internet. So I see the media as in a really fragile state.

In the early days of the internet, it felt like the wild west. You were sort of finding new territory, shaping it, and now it is the second big wave, with the internet getting industrialized and corporatized. At the same time, there are a lot of fantastic qualities about globalization, and one of these is the internet. I would not be who I am if I had not stumbled on the internet in 1995, and it has shaped my life in incredible ways, especially as a poet.

When I started my adventures on the internet, I was giving up on being a poet. I was a political “peoples poet,” and that was very uncool at the time. I was being ignored everywhere and it felt very lonely. But I got online, started my website, and suddenly I was part of an international community of like-minded people, who were doing experiments with teleparties, where poets would have events in many different place.

What I want to emphasize is that we have to do everything we can to preserve the freedom of information online. We have to have a dialogue about this, and that is why I am happy the US government is going after my information, because it allows us to have a chance to talk about it.

Interview: Birgitta Jonsdottir (Part One)

Last week I had the chance to interview Birgitta Jónsdóttir. She is an Icelandic parliamentarian, a member of the political anti-party called The Movement, and a former spokesperson for Wikileaks. She came to Toronto at the invitation of Samara and talked about her work for the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), a push to make Iceland  a haven for freedom of information.

I intended to ask Birgitta about Wikileaks and other such topical issues, but we got to talking about more abstract questions. Here's part one:

Q:  I was struck by your remark, at the beginning of your talk, when you mentioned that you were inspired to enter politics after reading Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine. Was that because of her general thesis, or was it because you had specific worries that Iceland was going to get “shock-doctrined” in the wake of the economic crisis?

A.  I had been on the forefront of fighting against the aluminum business in Iceland -- Alcoa and these other companies. Alcoa got to build a massive facility and was getting energy from the Iceland government four times cheaper than it was in Brazil. So I was concerned where Iceland was heading long before the economic collapse; I was concerned, and it was so annoying to be in the role of Cassandra.

I’d been reading books, including The Shock Doctrine, and I was very concerned when I heard the IMF was coming to Iceland. And I was concerned how the regulations were being chipped away when the banks were privatized…in 2007 we were ranked the most developed nation in the world. Where are we now? Third largest collapse in the world. 

It draws this incredible parallel, even if not as extreme, with what happened in Argentina. We have a complicated situation in Iceland with political extremism: the neo-conism from before the collapse, and the new extremism saying the only solution is to join the EU.  I am a member of the foreign affairs committee that has oversight over the application to the EU. I say we should tighten up our garden before trying to join another garden. 

Because we are such a young democracy, and so few in number, when I look at former colonies in Africa, the parallels between their independence and ours is striking. There was a guy who contacted me many years ago: I git this email in 1997 or so, and at the time I had one of the only personal web pages from Iceland.

There’s a strong belief in Iceland about the “hidden people” – these mythical creatures who live in the hills amongst the rocks. I talked about them on my website, and this guy contacts me and asks if I believe in them, and I say yes, and he sends me this remarkable letter. And he says he has been appointed to be the “spear” to lobby for American corporations to enter Iceland.

I couldn’t tell if this guy was real, but it turns out he had a high ranking authority in the California government, and he says that he had been visited by hidden persons, and they gave him a message saying he should stop doing what he was doing, and he was worried we would be exploited if American corporations discovered how vulnerable we are.

We are very vulnerable, we need help from the international community. Members of the environmental activist community were the first to see this in 2005, when we organized the first protests against the aluminum industry. That’s the first time I was classified as an environmental terrorist; the worst thing we did was to padlock some machinery, and someone climbed up a crane.

But we pushed the barriers a bit. Which is basically what WikiLeaks does; they are an activist organization that pushes the barriers of the norm, and others feel empowered to go further, in sort of an evolutionary process.

Q: As a parliamentarian, you clearly feel you can make a difference by working within the system. Is that because you think Iceland is small enough and has a flexible enough political culture that working within the system can make a difference?

A: Well, I wanted do an experiment which is why we founded this party that was defined as neither left nor right. We made a checklist of things we needed to achieve. If it is foreseeable that we can’t achieve these goals, we have to dissolve the party. We have max eight years. One of the things on the checklist is to sever the ties between then corporate and the political.

Q: Meaning, no corporate donations to political parties?

A: To have a severe limit to it, no large corporate donations. Some of them obviously try to go around it...

We, for example, would never accept large corporate donations. We are actually having difficulties raising money because we don’t want to have any members – nobody could be a member of The Movement. It makes it hard though, to organize volunteers. People wanted to pay to become members of the Movement, so we are looking into ways to solve that. So our idea is that if you want to be a member, you can also be a member of any other party as well. Because we don’t want to define ourselves as a party.

I wasn’t sure if it would make a difference, but the reason why we haven’t become like the others, and it has been successful, is that we have two fundamentally different aspects. First, you cannot run for us if you have been a politician, because we want to build a bridge between power and the people.

Second: We are very horizontal (inspired by Horizontalism, a book from Argentina). So we rotate leadership roles, only because you have to have an appointed party group chairman. If we have to do leadership stuff we throw dice… the key is, we don’t take it seriously, so we don’t become like them. We take the pledge to be the annoying fly in the tent, and don’t let anyone feel comfortable around us. We have a jar we have to pay money into if we sound like a politician.

The same with the media. The media hates us, because they love to have the leader of the party for interviews, and they are used to the same structure of power. … It is so critical to understand that there is nothing worthy to sacrifice for power.  So as long as we can keep those things integrated…

I was trying to figure out, everything’s still fucked up, what can the people ask for? They don’t want another government because it’s just the same parties. We have got little attention so people haven’t understood what we are about yet. Many voted for us as part of a protest, because they don’t trust the system.

What I realized is the system is the problem. We have this whole breed of people, most countries have been taken over by this breed called bureaucratic lawyers. They control everything; they work directly with lobbyists. Some of the law that has come up since the financial collapse was written by people from the banking sector. The ministries are filled with people who have got their job not because they are qualified, but because they have the right connections. Meanwhile you have qualified bureaucrats that never get any authority within the civil service.

I used to think I lived in a democracy, and I never thought that it would be so blatantly obvious to me that the system is basically controlled by lawyers. (laughs). And I thought, that’s no good.

The problem is that systems tend to defend their mistakes – as the US is doing right now with WikiLeaks. They look to every possible way to say they didn’t make a mistake. And so we need to do like the Argentinians did, and protest the model of the system. I’ve talked to people from all over the world and there is the same level of distrust in the system, and that we don’t have the tools to change it.

That’s why I think it is important in Iceland, the development of national referendums. If people can call for a referendum, with passion, that they should have the right to have a referendum on issues that are important to the entire nation, then being an active citizen becomes more of the norm, and people will have to educate themselves about the issues.

Catching Up

This blog took a longer-than-expected post-holiday break, but I've been doing a fair amount of writing in other places.

1. For Maclean's, I wrote about the hyper-local fiasco at the Hamilton Farmers' Market. The story continues to evolve, and I hope to have a longer update on the situation soon.

2. For Mediaite, I wrote a piece calling Jon Stewart a reactionary, which cost me mondo twitter followers.

3. Here is my take on the Arizona shootings; includes video of me talking about the column. Not recommended.

4. Speaking of video: last Friday, I joined five other white guys in talking about the past, present, and future of Canadian nationalism on The Agenda.

5. I started a tumblr! Not sure why yet.

6. Oh, and I spoke with the lovely (and lovely-named) Marie-Soleil Desautels about authentic travel for La Presse.

True Grit **Spoilers**

True Grit is a Western that invites a confrontation with some of the heaviest themes going: love and loss, friendship, vengeance, justice, the passage of time… the whole shooting match. But while the movie is almost always entertaining and frequently hilarious, it is also one of those films that becomes increasingly less satisfying as it marinates in your working memory. Coming out of the theatre last week I was convinced it was brilliant; now, I’m sure that it is an almost complete failure.

The story, in brief:  Jeff Bridges plays Rooster Cogburn, and he’s basically doing The Dude Wearing a Hat. Matt Damon plays the Texas Ranger, Mr. Labeouf, and he seems to have decided to play his character by doing his Matthew McConaughey impression. Together, they help a precocious and stubborn 14 year old girl track down the man who killed her father.  This is a great setup, opening up any number of sidetracks and detours for exploration, but the Coens play it as flat and straight as the dusty prairie.

Is Rooster Cogburn a lawman, or just a hired killer? Is the girl a grieving daughter, or an emotionally crippled cipher? Is it a film about the evolving friendship between a cynical old man and an innocent young girl, sort of like The Road set in the 1870s? Is it about the emotional transference of a girl looking for a father figure, as in The Professional?  There’s three of them, why not make it a Freudian fable of the id (Cogburn) the ego (the girl) and the superego (Matt Damon’s Ranger, Mr. Laboeuf)?  

Any of this was available, and the Coens decline every option. Even the most obvious tension – the young girl being on the cusp of womanhood and all the problems that might lead to – is almost completely ignored.

The ongoing problem with Coen brothers movies is that they have absolutely no interest in character development. Their films are essentially cartoons, where every character arrives fully formed, with no concern for motivation. This isn’t a huge problem in the three existential works – Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski – because in those cases, the structure is what defines the contours of each film’s internal morality.

In True Grit, this is a problem. How did Mattie Ross get so wise and cynical at age 14? Why is Rooster Cogburn so lonely? What is driving Labeouf to the ends of the earth in search of Chaney? Why did Tom Chaney kill Mattie Ross’s father? Does he even deserve to die for what happened?

The Coens are simply not interested in these sorts of questions. In a film where a fourteen year old girl hunts down and ultimately shoots her father’s murderer, this comes across as a form of moral blindness, or – worse -- indifference.

RIP Denis Dutton, philosopher, aesthete, aggregator

Denis Dutton has died. An American philosopher working in New Zealand, Dutton is probably best known as the found of the Arts and Letters Daily, one of the best of the early Web 1.0 aggregators. The ALDaily has always been a great read, but my feelings about Dutton himself are somewhat ambivalent.

When I was teaching philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, we invited Dutton to give the annual Ryle Lectures, a series that brings a distinguished philosopher to the university for lectures and informal meetings with students, staff and the public. Dutton's lectures were not very good. They consisted mostly of slide shows and amounted to little more than a version of "what I did on my summer vacation" wrapped in a weakly-argued anti-Gombrichian thesis about evolution and objective aesthetic value. Nor did Dutton do much to ingratiate himself to his hosts: his preference for lunchtime conversation appeared to be based in either red-baiting or feminist-baiting. All told, his visit was a disappointment.

But he did do some valuable work in philosophy and art. His essay "Authenticity in Art", written for the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, is excellent. This piece was a big influence on the arguments in chapters 3 and 7 of AH, especially his riff on the importance of a critical audience in maintaining a living artistic tradition. Indeed, every fan of contemporary jazz should pay attention to his argument about the death of opera. I also helped myself to a great anecdote from this essay:

A Pacific Island dancer was once asked about his native culture. “Culture?” he responded. “That’s what we do for the tourists.”

He will be missed.

"Artisanal cheeses. For sale. In our streets."

I probably could not have written The Authenticity Hoax without the New York Times. Week after week for years now, that paper has been obsessively tracking the leading edge of authenticity-seeking, from no-flush toilets in urban lofts to the very latest in ethnotourism. And it was, of course, the editorial pages of the Times that led the campaign against Walmart's decision to carry a full range of organic produce on the grounds that it violated the spirit of organic -- a trumpet blast that historians will remember as the moment the lovavore movement went mainstream.

As goes the culture so goes the Times, and with the cult of authenticity spiralling ever closer to shoving its head its own ass, the Grey Lady of Manhattan has spent the past year obsessing about what's been going on across the river in Brooklyn. A feat that NBC anchor Brian Williams has called "the media story of 2010". This is genius:

Once a day, there’s a story about all the riches offered in that borough. There are young men and women wearing ironic glass frames on the streets. There are open air markets, like trading posts in the early Chippewa tribe, where you can make beads at home and then trade them for someone to come over and start a small fire in your apartment that you share with nine others. Artisinal cheeses. For sale, on the streets of an entire American borough.

Watch the entire video:

HIghways for Hitler

I just came across this great passage in Richard Evans' The Third Reich in Power -- highways as a modernist conduit to German pastoral authenticity:

For Fritz Todt, the man whom Hitler appointed to oversee the building of the motorways, they even fulfilled a racial purpose, linking the motor-borne German soul to the authentic woods, mountains, and fields of its native land, and expressing the Nordic race's delight in the adventure, speed, and excitement provided by modern technology.



The King's Speech and the British Constitution

Notwithstanding the obvious proximity bias, The King’s Speech is one of the best films I have seen this year. The two leads, Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth, are both incredible, with Firth in particular disappearing into the role of the stuttering (and slightly lisping) Prince Albert/King George VI. It’s essentially a film about trust and friendship, and the climactic scene, when Logue is literally conducting the King through his first wartime address, is simply gorgeous. 

But the main topic of consideration here is trust of a different sort. It is in many ways a film about the British constitution, and the fact that it rests on a total con. On the one hand, the country officially a monarchy, with all the anachronism and pompousness that entails. But at the same time, it is a monarchy that survives only because the public allows it to. And so some of the most telling moments in the film play off this basic tension, between the King who has tremendous responsibility, but very little real power.

So we get the wastrel King Edward VIII, complaining that everyone else gets to marry for love, why shouldn’t he get to marry Wallis Simpson? He is checked by the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, who says that in such circumstances, the government would be compelled to resign.  Then there’s a fantastic scene where King George VI orders Lionel Logue out of his chair. By what right, asks Logue? By divine right, the King answers, choking on its preposterousness even as he says it.

Brokered over the past thousand years, the British constitution is one of the most remarkable political institutions the world has ever seen. The amount of trust involved in making it work is phenomenal, and it requires a healthy understanding on all sides of the place of tradition, convention, and habit. Ever since Queen Victoria died, the overriding function of the British monarch has been to maintain that trust. Had he tried to remain king, Edward VIII might well have destroyed the monarchy. As it turns out, George VI saved it, and his daughter, Elizabeth II, has done more than anyone might have expected on that score.

In this sense, The King’s Speech is a thematic prequel to the 2006 film The Queen. That film takes place during the early days of the Blair regime in 1997, mostly in the week between Diana’s death and her over-the-top funeral. The narrative, such as it is, arcs over the Royals’ initial low-key reaction, the public outrage over the Queen’s refusal to show any emotion, and the final decision by Liz and Phil to do a walkabout outside the Palace, put the flag at half-staff, and have the Queen make a public statement about how important Diana was, &c.

The central figure of course is the Queen. Her job is to serve as the living embodiment of those centuries-old traditions. But it requires a tricky bit of balancing: Adhere too much to tradition and you look irrelevant and out of date; pander too much to fashion or public opinion and you might as well become a republic.

The Queen dramatizes the moment when Her Majesty realized she had lost touch with the British people. Not only did she not approve of the gross displays of sentimentality that followed Diana’s death, she felt that her job was to temper it, not indulge it. Believing in the essential good sense and sobriety of her subjects, she felt that if she led, they would follow. She was wrong.

Walter Bagehot famously enumerated the three remaining rights and powers of the English Crown: The right to be consulted, the right to advise, and the right to warn. She reminds Blair of these rights at their first meaning, giving him a fairly direct warning about constitutional adventurism [which, events have shown, he failed to heed]. But by the end of the film it is Blair who is doing the advising and the warning, to a sovereign whose position has become quite precarious.

In retrospect, the parallels with the abdication crisis are stronger than I would have thought.

For scofflaws and gentlemen, a solution to saggy pants

Spend any amount of time in the more urban precincts of the United States and you'll notice that a large number of young men like to wear their trousers rather loose, perhaps out of a desire to look like they've been to prison and had their belts confiscated.

Over the past few years, this has led to public awareness campaigns asking young men to "stop the sag", with some municipalities passing bylaws cracking down on saggy pants ostensibly in the name of public decency. But inevitably, these laws end up being used as an excuse to harrass black youth. I've written two columns for Maclean's magazine about this.

But now it appears that a solution is at hand. A Harlem inventor named Andrew Lewis has created a device  called the "Subs" that that is half garter belt, half suspenders, and which allows you to regulate the exact height at which your pants will sag. (Canadian men will recognize this device as basically the garter belt used to hold up hockey socks, except attached to clips on the inside of your pants).

According to street vendor Kendu Howze, "This is actually a good idea. You would be able to maintain the swag appearance without constant readjustment." It will also prevent cases like the time man suspected of stealing discs from a video store was tripped up by his baggy pants, falling twice before police captured him.

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UPDATE: Sarah Barmak sees the obvious problem with this:

@sarahbarmak: Wouldn't a pair of fussy suspenders defeat the purpose of saggy pants, which is looking like you don't give a @#*& ?