The Monkey Cage

I’m a split-personality technophile-Luddite. I seem to buy just about every new technotoy as soon as it hits the market and love it until the next new technotoy comes along, at which point I set the old one aside and have a fling with the new one, and the cycle spins and spins and spins. Increasingly I rely on younger colleagues — the younger, the better — to help me solve the manifold mysteries that these widgets hold out for someone who grew up in a pre-television world. At the same time, while I’m reading magazines and even books online, I’m carping about how much I hate to see amazon.com and Google and JSTOR and their ilk displacing bookstores and libraries and good old-fashioned browsing, about how much I enjoy reading a real, i.e., paper copy of the morning paper, about how much better the literary quality of our professional journals was back in the old days before the spell-check and grammar-check routines that are built into word processors made it easy to scribble something down and send it off without worrying about the subtler niceties of style. So yes, I want it both ways. Nothing wrong with that.

Some of my ambivalence is nicely expressed in the following excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s essay in the current issue of The Atlantic, provocatively titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”:

Continue reading "A Lamentation of Google et al." »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rice, in Sweden for a conference on Iraq, ended up in the Sheraton hotel where the band Kiss was staying the night before a concert. Negotiations between State Department aides and Kiss’s manager resulted in a rendezvous between the two.

During the gathering, Kiss leaders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley tried to recruit Rice, a talented classical pianist, to join the band.

“I don’t rock,” she told them.

“I’m sure you can rock,” Simmons replied.

[From the Washingtonian magazine. See also here, which has a picture. I could have used it, but who wants to see Kiss without their make-up on?]

[P.S. Detroit Rock City.]

Posted by John Sides at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This photo is the document most requested from the National Archives, topping requests for copies of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. And rightly so, of course.

Following up on my earlier post that featured this photo, reader John Shelton Lawrence has kindly forwarded this link to the correspondence between The King and All the President’s Men, from both before the historic December 21, 1970 meeting and after Elvis had left the building. Included are Elvis’s handwritten note requesting a get-together, several internal White House memos, and numerous photos memorializing the occasion..

Teaser: In a memo to the guardian of Nixon’s door, H.R. Haldeman, recommending that Presley’s request for a meeting be granted, White House aide Dwight Chapin writes:

…if the President wants to meet with some bright young people outside the government, Presley might be a perfect one to start with.

Haldeman’s scrawled response:

You must be kidding.

And here, for your reading pleasure, is White House aide Egil “Bud” Krogh’s hilarious first-hand account of the meeting. You just couldn’t make this stuff up.

And now you know … the rest of the story.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The old “stirrup theory” of history held that the introduction of the stirrup, by enabling armed forces to mount attacks from horseback, fundamentally shaped the course of human history — an idea that always struck me as interesting but perhaps a bit overblown — sort of like the bird that flaps its wings in Brazil and sets in motion global forces.

Anyway, it’s now being argued that the bicycle was to women’s liberation as the stirrup was to warfare. I tend to take bikes more seriously than stirrups. Read about it here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In the spring of 1928, George Gershwin, the creator of Rhapsody in Blue, toured Europe and met the leading composers of the day. In Vienna, he called at the home of Alban Berg, whose blood-soaked, dissonant, sublimely dark opera Wozzeck had had its premiere in Berlin three years earlier. To welcome his American visitor, Berg arranged for a string quartet to perform his Lyric Suite, in which Viennese lyricism was refined into something like a dangerous narcotic.

Gershwin then went to the piano to play some of his songs. He hesitated. Berg’s work had left him awestruck. Were his own pieces worthy of these murky, opulent surroundings? Berg looked at him sternly and said, “Mr. Gershwin, music is music.”

That is the opening of The Rest Is Noise, a fascinating history of modernism in music by Alex Ross, classical music critic of the New Yorker. (The book’s website, including a blog, is here; buy the book here.) It nicely links the musical trends and movements to political events, particularly in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. (Lenin on music: “I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things, and strike the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.”)

Somehow, Ross seemed never to repeat himself in describing musical works in shorthand. I wanted to listen to every work he described.

Below are some quotes from composers of the period. You can test yourself by matching the person to the quote. Answers are below the fold.

1. If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.
2. I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise.
3. The symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing.
4. All music turns out to be ethnic music.
5. Repetition is a form of change.

a) Steven Reich
b) Schoenberg
c) Brian Eno
d) Gershwin
e) Mahler

Continue reading "Great Quotes from Modern Composers" »

Posted by John Sides at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Did you like that little ditty? Well, it’s become a cause celebre in France. Turns out that it’s that nation’s entry in this year’s Eurovision song contest. But — zut alors! — its lyrics are … are you ready for this? is the whole world about to come crashing down upon our heads? … in English. This, of course, is a crime against humanity and cannot be tolerated.

For the rest of the story, click here.

[Hat tip to Zsuzsa Csergo]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a study (abstract here) that appears in a recent issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Michael Cobb and William Boettcher begin by noting that:

Past research has found that exposure to rap music promotes racial stereotyping. Whites who watch violent rap videos, for example, generate more negative dispositional attributions of anonymous Black males’ behaviors. Critics say rap music is harmful, however, not only because it promotes racial stereotyping, but also because it encourages males’ anger and aggression toward women. The genre of ‘gangsta rap’ in particular is blamed for normalizing misogynistic attitudes by celebrating the physical abuse of women. Consequently, one explosive if unsubstantiated objection to rap is that ‘rap and rap just go together a little too well.’

The question, then, is whether exposure to misogynistic rap music does indeed result increased sexism among its listeners. To find out, Cobb and Boettcher conducted an experiment in which “Kill You,” a misogynistic rap song by Eminem and “Sabotage,” a nonmisogynistic rap song by the Beastie Boys, served as the stimulus materials. Unsurprisingly, the male participants in the experiment had higher sexism scores than did the female participants. Much more interestingly, males recorded consistently higher sexism scores after exposure to both kinds of rap. For females, the results were more complex: their scores increased only for “benevolent” as opposed to “hostile” sexism and only following exposure to the nonmisogynistic rap song.

Cobb and Boettcher interpret these results as “a partial victory for popular critics of misogynistic rap music, [which] …primes more sexist attitudes in males {and] … also primes more defensive attitudes in females. In a press release on the study, Cobb concludes that:

Sexism is imbedded in the culture we live in, and hearing rap music can spontaneously activate pre-existing awareness of sexist beliefs. …It’s unlikely that hearing lyrics in a song creates attitudes that did not previously exist. Instead, rap music, fairly or unfairly, has become associated with misogyny, and even minimal exposure to it can automatically activate these mental associations and increase their application, at least temporarily.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

That’s an Andy Warhol poster from 1972. It’s a sneaky one — a “dirty trick,” in the parlance of 1972.

It’s from a piece by Steven Heller in Saturday’s New York Times, the point of which is that this year’s “socialist realist” Obama poster is really nothing out of the ordinary — a judgment not intended as a slam at the Obama poster, but rather as a compliment to alternative graphics approaches in posters from past campaigns, some of which (including the Obama poster) are pictured in the Times story, here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I suspect that this viral video is going to get a lot of pick-up … (via Chris Hayes)

Posted by Henry at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of my current favorite musicians is D’Gary, who is a guitarist from Madagascar. A bio is here. The Wikipedia entry on music in Madagascar is here, although he is not mentioned. His music is available at iTunes, Amazon, and National Geographic.

Below is a recent video. The music starts at the 0:40 mark.

(Hard link to video.)

Posted by John Sides at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m a lover of bookstores. I’ve never been a fan of the big chain bookstores — Borders and Barnes & Noble. (I’m not sure whether the first word of the preceding sentence should have been “But” or “So,” so I just went ahead without either.) Give me a choice and I’ll take Politics and Prose, a great store that’s close to where I live in DC, or Olsson’s, a local chain, but only in desperation am I likely to enter one of the big box stores.

Anyway, that was my frame of mind when I recently “discovered” Brooke Allen’s article “Two — Make That Three — Cheers for the Chain Bookstores” online here. The article was published several years ago, but it was new to me and it still seems quite timely.

As the title of the article indicates, Allen is a defender of the chains, and I must say that I find some of her points pretty convincing, though perhaps overstated.

Read the article and make up your own mind, or, if you’d like a quick overview of some of the high points, keep reading.

Continue reading "Don't Worry, Be Happy: A Defense of the Big Chain Bookstores" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Some tidbits from Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading” (here, gated) in the February Harper’s :

In 2004 a National Endowment for the Arts survey revealed that 43 percent of Americans polled hadn’t read a book all year …

I … want to question the assumption … that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

For most of human history, most people could not read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless; it was power itself.

…Writing-and-reading very gradually filtered downward, becoming less sacred as it became less secret, less directly potent as it became more popular. …In Europe, one can perceive through the Middle Ages a slow broadening of the light of the written word, which brightens into the Renaissance and shines out with Gutenberg. then, before you know it, slaves are reading, and revolutions are made with pieces of paper called Declarations of this and that, and schoolmarms replace gunslilngers all across the Wild West …

I see a high point of reading in the United States from around 1850 to about 1950 — call it the century of the book — the high point from which the doomsayers see us declining.

To look at schoolbooks from 1890 or 1910 can be scary; the level of literacy and general cultural knowledge expected of a ten-year-old is rather awesome. Such texts, and lists of the novels kids were expected to read in high school up to the 1960s, lead one to believe that Americans really wanted and expected their children not only to be able to read but to do it, and not to fall asleep doing it.

Even during what I hae called the ‘century of the book,’ when it was taken for granted that many people read and enjoyed fiction and poetry, how many people in fact had or could make much time for reading once they were out of school? During those years Americans worked hard and worked long hours. Weren’t there always many who never read a book at all, and never very many who read a lot of books? We don’t know how many, because we didn’t have polls to worry us about it. …Lamenting over percentage counts induces a moralizing tone: It is bad that we don’t read; we should read more; we must read more. …Were [the hedonists who read because they want to] ever in the majority?

By the way, that same issue of Harper’s has two other articles that are well worth reading. One of them is David Gargills “Not What It Takes: Running for President on Less than $2,000 a Day,” which focuses on the hopeless long-shot presidential candidacy of Chicago businessman John Cox. The other — which is not for the squeamish — is Frederick Kaufman’s “Wasteland: A Journey Through the American Cloaca,” on issues related to the disposal of five billions of human waste per day in the U.S. alone.

[John posted a brief item on reading a while back; click here.]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Here’s another campaign video that’s quite a departure from anything we’ve seen in previous presidential campaigns — presumably targeted at young people and African Americans.

Click here to watch the video.

Pretty slick, eh? But who are all those celebrities? A bunch of them must be B-listers — but Kareem will always be on my All-Star team.

[Hat tip to Colin Danby, in a comment on a posting at Crooked Timber]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

THIS IS A DEMOCRACY. Which means: the people make the laws. And if you want to make the laws, you go to the people who makes the laws, and what do you do? YOU BRIBE THEM. To trade this for that separates us from the lower life forms, like the, uh, uh, large apes, or the Scandinavians.

That is President Charles H.P. Smith, in David Mamet’s new satire “November.” Smith is played by Nathan Lane. One positive review is here. A less positive review is here.

What are the best political plays?

Posted by John Sides at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Just when I think I’ve gotten caught up, along comes something new.

Or, in this case, something derivative and not nearly as good as the original. But something inevitable. We should have seen it coming.

Click here to find out for yourself.

Could “McCain Mama” be next? Nope, not next — it’s already been done.

And here, as a Hit Parade Extra, is yet another “Obama Girl” wanna-be video, this one (“You’re So Lame”) focusing on George W. Bush.

[Hat tip to Paul Gronke for Hillary Boy; I found the others by myself, though I’m not sure why I bothered]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Virgil Griffith, a graduate student in Computation and Neural Systems at Caltech, comes this really cool graphic.

The graph plots the mean college entrance score of the schools at which a given book is on the “Top Ten” list. Hence the light-hearted title, “Books that make you dumb,” which reverses the presumed causal flow from “smartness” to reading better books.

To construct this figure, Griffith followed these steps:

1. Download from Facebook the ten most popular books at every college. These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.

2. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.

3. Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few entries to have a reliable average.

Read from left to right to see the mean SAT/ACT score for each book; the width of an entry indicates the standard deviation. (The vertical dimension doesn’t mean anything.)

For more information and other visualizations of these data, click here.

Forthcoming from Griffith is this graph’s musical counterpart, titled, inevitably, “Music that makes you dumb.” Stay tuned for that.

[Via Scott McLemee at my favorite (except, of course, for “The Monkey Cage”) blog, Crooked Timber]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by John Sides at 04:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The #1-selling CD of 2007 was Josh Groban’s Christmas album.

Bonus factoid: The Eagles’s new CD finished third even though it was available only at WalMart.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

John’s compilation of “year-end” songs (immediately below) is, of course, doubly wrong. In the first place there’s his execrable taste in music. Just listen to his picks and, at least if you’re over 30, you’ll be on my side of the argument. (Although I’m sorry to hear myself sounding like my parents did when I was growing up in the early days of rock ‘n roll.) Second, most of his picks aren’t year-end songs at all; they’re just songs that he chose at the end of the year.

So here, to set things straight, is my own mini-compilation of year-end songs, all in the spirit of the season. From our house to your house, have a happy one of whatever you celebrate, or not, this time of the year.

A poignant retelling of a family Christmas gathering

Lamentations of Christmas tragedy

And for those who’ll be eating Chinese on Christmas…

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every year about this time I make a mix of songs and send it to a few friends. It is not a “best of the year” compilation, or a holiday-oriented compilation, or a themed compilation in general. It just includes songs I like. Here they are:

Christmas Is — Run-DMC
1 Thing — Amerie
The Underdog — Spoon
Freaks! Freaks! — Pigeon John
Sonido Total — The Pinker Tones
Digital Love — Daft Punk
Maybe You Can Owe Me — Architecture in Helsinki (no good clips on Youtube)
Brother — Annuals
Hot Soft Light — The Hold Steady
Napoleon Says — Phoenix
Keep the Car Running — Arcade Fire
Fake Empire — The National
Liza — Wrinkle Neck Mules (link is to an mp3)
The Opposite of Hallelujah — Jens Lekman
The National Side — Romantica
So Long, So Lonesome — Explosions in the Sky
Bird Never Flies — Ari Hest
Dopo la Vittoria — Arvo Pärt (translation here)

Posted by John Sides at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The fully orchestrated version on the album is also excellent. More on Jens Lekman here and here. An album review is here.

Posted by John Sides at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)