Not tonight!

Me: Thank you for having me over for dinner.

Them: Of course.

Me: I brought wine.

Them: Thank you. How thoughtful of you.

Me: It’s the least I could do. So, what are we eating? It smells delicious.

Them: We’re having Indian Curry Chicken Tikka.

Me: Wow. That sounds amazing. I love chicken.

Them: It’s a recipe we heard about on  _____ Chef.

Me: Great. I’ve never really watched too many of those cooking shows. I’m not much of a chef myself. I could ruin cereal, you know? (laughs)

Them: On the show, the announcer said that this dish was first served at the court of Hindu Rajput King Maha Rana Pratap of Mewar in the 14th century.

Me: That is amazing. Well, this wine was once served out of a paper bag and sipped through a straw by King Charlemagne, so … (laughs)

Them: The chicken is seasoned with garlic, ginger, cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, cardamom pods, cloves, and hot pepper flakes.

Me: Sounds good to me. This is a great house. How long have you guys lived here?

Them: We are also having balsamic roasted vegetables – zucchini, yellow squash, bell peppers, onions, and eggplant. The zucchini is from a local community garden. The key to a good roasted zucchini is to pick it just before it’s ripe and then to leave it in a marinade for three days or so. That way it doesn’t require too much roasting, but is rather braised, to preserve its natural flavor while getting rid of some of the peatiness.

Me: Well, I look forward to eating it. Did you guys see what Obama said today about unemployment, about how he wants to pass another stimulus package with government money for bridge-building and tax breaks for small businesses? He’s claiming that …

Them: Here’s a sampling of fresh, soft ripened, wash rind, semi-soft, firm and hard cheeses to enjoy as an appetizer. We went with some friends to a cheese-tasting party last week. We tried Bergenost, Colby, Lieserkranz, Provel, Herve, Limberger, Maredsous, Passendale, Rochfort, this Bulgarian cheese called Sirene, three different cheeses from Denmark called Tilsit, Esrom, and Danso, and then of course some Weislacher and Hirtenkase and Tilsit. And we topped the afternoon off with a little White Stilton and Winsleydale for dessert. These are just some simple Dorset Blue Vinneys, but we kind of planned this dinner at the last minute.

Me: That’s fine.

Them: Mmm, these vegetables are going to be perfect. Here, taste the eggplant; it’s just at that peak of succulence before it gets too ripe or too overcooked and takes on a sort of meaty, peaty, gamy texture around the edges.

Me: Mmm. No, it’s very good. You know, I went to a restaurant last week called ____. Have you been there? I really enjoyed their steak. It was delicious. Very juicy.

Them: The chef there puts the most amazing Bernaise sauce on his cauliflower – the flavor lingers just so on the back left-hand corner of your tongue. But their broccoli – I couldn’t quite put my finger on it; it was like it had been lightly dipped in caper butter and left out to dry in the summer sun just two or three days longer than was necessary and everything got infused with a saffron tartness.

Me: Really? I didn’t try that, I guess.

Them: Of course, the most important thing to remember when you’re honey-glazing a thinly-sliced bouillabaisse, especially when the eggs come from grass-fed chickens, is to go easy on the sour cream at first, because that tempers the natural oakey flavor of the venison. What we do is take a pinch of aniseed myrtle and mix it with just a shake of Cumin and a dollop of Lesser Galangol (or at least Indonesian Bay Leaf), and we put it all in the freezer over night. That way the lamb is singed, not calcified, the morel reduction is more like a pâté than diced parsley, and the portobellos are allowed to breathe, which is the key to a good bacon yogurt.

Me: Ahhh, bacon.

Exeuent Omnes

If only Fatty were alive today

This past Sunday, Michael Richards and Larry David illustrated just how far the world of modern celebrity is from the one the rest of us are living in. On the latest episode of David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Richards, playing himself, is about to use the n-word in public when he realizes he’s surrounded by onlookers with video phones. This is, of course, a reference to Richards’ much-YouTubed 2006 on-stage rant that led to the total collapse of the previously beloved cultural icon.

Now, if you or I had done what Richards did, our only hope for expiation would have been something along the lines of a 12-step racism-expungement program — which, for the record, Richards did have to go through (let’s not forget Letterman, and those three years spent wondering in the outer darkness of industry indifference), but that’s where the similarities end. Richards also has the option to go on HBO, turn his sins into a performance piece, and move on, burden removed. Which is to say that the rise of self-referential comedies combined with the continued (and ever-deepening) obsession with celebrity gossip now allows for this kind of paid, (sort of) scripted absolution. After all, why apologize on Letterman when you can go on Extras or SNL and get yourself some laughs for playing the guy you should be apologizing for being in the first place?

This kind of ironic performative mea-culpa is both new (Fatty Arbuckle never made any one-reelers about sodomizing women to death) and available only to celebrities (if you get caught cheating on your wife, you don’t have the luxury of being able to extricate yourself from the situation by performing a one-act about a guy who cheats on his wife), and it raises an interesting issue: Are there still crimes so heinous that not even this approach will make up for them? Or, to put it into more self-reflective terms: Are we willing to let a celebrity off the hook for anything, provided he or she is clever enough to make us laugh about it?

What, for example, would Chris Brown have to do on camera to get us to forgive him for abusing Rihanna? Would it be enough for him to go on Saturday Night Live and play a kooky R&B singer who beats up any woman who makes him angry — a back-up dancer who misses a step, a back-up singer who misses a note, a waitress who brings him his eggs scrambled rather than fried, Sonia Santomayor, Hilary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Mother Earth, his mother, your mother, and so on and so on, ad infinitum, SNL-style,  until the stage is covered in female cast members? Would we forgive him then?

Or how ’bout Michael Vick? What if he went on Conan and electrocuted Triumph the Insult Comic Dog until the puppet was ready to take a chunk out of Andy Richter? Might that be enough to get the former star quarterback a fresh multimillion dollar contact? And could Roman Polanski find redemption for both himself and Woody Allen by playing a lecherous old film director in Allen’s latest, most personal, film? If Allen could make Polanski funny, in other words, would it be enough to wipe away his sins?

Sure, art needs to imitate life — otherwise David, Richards, and everyone else connected with Seinfeld would still be working the stand-up circuit — but when art is employed as a purgative for egregious personal missteps, it forces the offendees (namely, society as a whole) into the role of unwilling, if amused, accomplices. And who needs that from television?

Ida Maria photo by kristiecat via Flickr

The first time I ever heard Norwegian singer/songwriter Ida Maria Sivertsen – better known as just Ida Maria – was on the late night TV garbage dump of a show known as Last Call with Carson Daly.  I was a little bit drunk and only half-paying attention when she came on the screen; she was performing the song “Keep Me Warm,” a ballad where she professes her love for and emotional dependence on cigarettes and coffee.  My ears perked up a little bit, thinking it was a lot more unusual than your typical 1am television fare, but in the end I didn’t then give it much thought.

A few weeks later my wife told me she’d heard a song called “Oh My God” by Ida Maria that she liked a lot.  I thought, “Oh, that’s the weird Norwegian girl I saw on Carson Daly” and again failed to think about it beyond that passing recognition.

Not long after that, we were in the car and heard the song “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” on 101X, the local horrible alterna-rock radio station here in Austin, Tx.  My eyes widened and my jaw dropped at what seemed a cheap gimmicky stab at creating an ephemeral “hit” single.  Then I heard “Oh My God” again, as background music on the cringe-worthy teen drama Gossip Girl.  If context is crucial for understanding and interpreting art, then Ida Maria’s context (a hopeless late night talk show, an awful radio station, and a  bad teen drama) seemed to place her in the middle of some kind of musical Hiroshima.  It’s no surprise then that I had completely written Ida Maria off as being nothing more than another tick on the very long list of hopeless bands that perpetually populate the revolving door of the major label music industry.

But then something surprising happened.  As my wife continued to insist that Mme. Maria was redeemable, and the number of times that I had involuntarily run into the thing on TV and radio steadily increased, I realized that “Oh My God” was not just a good song, but, steeped though it is in corporate music industry production values and promotional schemes, it’s a shockingly fantastic burst of raw energy and emotion that qualifies as something approaching genius. And though it took some amount of mental separation, when I managed to remove myself from the unappealing contexts in which I kept hearing the song, what was left approaches moving and memorable: confessional songwriting with an emotional bareness that is incredibly hard to achieve without sounding phony or facile.

The single naturally led me to Fortress Round My Heart, an album jam packed with excellent songs from start to finish that cover the full range of human emotion without ever indulging in self-loathing or sentimentality.  Here, Maria’s incredibly strong singing voice is almost painfully honest as it soars, cracks, groans, and laughs over the perfectly succinct ten song, 31 minute spread.  It is, quite simply, an excellent album that’s found its way into heavy personal rotation and has yet to bore me.

Despite my discovery that Sivertsen was, in fact, not a vacuous wannabe pop star, there is still an inherent problem with the way her music is presented and perceived. Trapped as she is by her major label contract, her situation is indicative of a problem that has forever plagued the corporate music industry: It has been documented that nine out of ten major label albums fail to turn a profit, making the record industry the most successful business in history to have a 90% failure rate.  Major labels are historically concerned with commerce rather than artistic value, employing A&R men who are completely out of touch with what makes a quality artist.  The continuing integration of independent labels (run by music lovers rather than businessmen) into the public consciousness has sent the major label business model into a tailspin as they no longer have a stranglehold on what music the public receives.  Normally, the commercial failure of so many artists is not worth a mention but every so often the industry stumbles upon something that’s actually good; such is the case with Ida Maria. And it’s here that that the real tragedy of the major label model is revealed.

Somehow Sivertsen landed a major label contract very early in her “career” and has since lost a huge amount of control over how she presents herself and the types of events she plays.  Her intense live shows are often the subject of praise, but beyond that it seems that every level of her creative output is steeped in some awful record label employee’s bad idea.  It’s a holistic corporate failure. For starters, Fortress’ cover screams “bad major label release” (comparable to “Silver Lake” by Vic Chesnutt, another incredibly talented songwriter plagued by the bad taste of corporate music business), and the audio production on the thing is so clean and slick that it takes away from the music’s appealing rough edges. Add to that the facts that (deep breath here), in two years, her still-only album has been repackaged and re-released three separate times (along with several singles and FOUR different elaborate music videos), her Web site showcases banner advertisements for other musicians, she’s been sent on tour after awful tour (the worst offender being a Perez Hilton-sanctioned tour earlier this fall), she has played tons of big outdoor festivals where it always seems she’s performing in the middle of the afternoon, she has appeared on Carson Daly’s show at least three times in less than a year, and what is clearly the stand out track on her album (“Oh My God”) was recently completely ruined by a confounding mindfuck of a guest vocal spot by Iggy Pop (with an accompanying FIFTH music video), who clearly has never once been in the same room as Ida Maria.

It boils down to this: Someone is throwing a lot of money at Ida Maria but the decision-making behind it is so poor that it’s depriving her of her natural  audience – the folks who are turned off by such brash, tasteless commercialism.

So please, whoever it is that’s in charge of Ida Maria’s destiny, let her out of her contract.  Just let her go.  She is an interesting, unusually captivating musician who doesn’t deserve to suffer through an Iggy Pop collaboration, those Mariah Carey ads on her Web site, or any kind of association at all with the cultural nightmare that is Perez Hilton.

In an apology note written to explain her eventual  leaving of the Perez Hilton tour she says, “I am just completely exhausted … The new music is in forefront of my mind.”  So come on, Island/Def Jam, give Ida Maria the control she needs of her songs and allow us to hear the new music, free from all ill associations borne from committee thinking and the terminal breaths of a dying system.

Photo by Bartek G via Flickr

At the end of every year I make a mix CD and mail it out to a growing list of people. (Yeah, I still actually bother to burn the songs to a disc; an online mp3 mix seems so impersonal, and most people still don’t have iPod jacks in their car stereos.) I have two rules, and they’ve got very little to do with Nick Hornby. Rule 1: Though they don’t have to be in my personal top 20 for the year in question, the songs have to have been released at some point during the previous 12 months. Rule 2, which has become increasingly rigid in recent years: I alternate hip-hop tracks with non-hip-hop tracks. There’s no socio-political or artistic reason for rule No. 2; it’s a gimmick, pure and simple. But it forces some interesting compromises and allows for some unusual transitions. (Nas into Neko Case, the Walkmen into Mobb Deep, KRS-One into Glen Campbell, Joe Budden into Alkaline Trio — that kind of thing. I aim for surprises.)

Problem is, I have a hard time finding enough rock tracks that fit. It’s not that I don’t listen to enough of it; anecdotally, I’d say 55 to 60 percent of my annual music consumption would qualify as rock. But my rock tastes generally trend toward the snob/nerd sector — semi-obscure shit and indie shit, genres that end in -core, low-fi masterpieces, that kind of thing — and when it comes time to sequence that stuff among a bunch of lovingly produced, bottom-heavy hip-hop tracks, the rock tends to sound kind of weak. True-blue punk and garage rock can be too tinny. The more experimental acts make songs that are either too long, too tricky, or too meandering — at least for mixtape usage. And the heavy stuff to which I gravitate — Napalm Death, Mastodon, Pig Destroyer — simply chews a hole in the flow. The result? I’m usually left with a pile dominated by Pitchfork-loved and Paste-favored hits.

Some years are more adventurous than others. In 2008, I found a home for Jay Reatard and No Age, and a Torche song slid right in. In 2007, I mostly stuck to the yuppie-indie faves — Arctic Monkeys, Spoon, The National, Radiohead, Les Savy Fav, and so on. In 2006, I easily inserted the Pink Razors, the Thermals, and Comets on Fire, while a Be Your Own Pet song stood up mightily when surrounded with T.I. and Clipse. Still, most of those choices felt like compromises.

If one rocker hits the sweet spot consistently, it’s Jack White, whose songs tend to have the perfect combination of muscle, melody, and grit. I’ve put his White Stripes songs up against the deep stoner churn of Cannibal Ox and the West Coast funk of Lyics Born, and they’ve delivered. (I’ll confess that I didn’t use a Raconteurs song in 2006 or 2008. Maybe I thought it would be too obvious.)

In the process of thinking about this year’s mix, I’ve realized that nothing from White hits that sweet spot harder than his latest project, The Dead Weather (with The Kills’ Alison Mosshart, the Raconteurs’ Jack Lawrence, and Queens of the Stone Age’s Dean Fertita). Considering White’s comments about hip-hop over the years — he’s an eternal skeptic — I’m not going to argue that the band’s debut, Horehound, is a response or a reaction to the overall sonic primacy of hip-hop. (White doesn’t pick culture battles; he just makes records.) Nonetheless, Horehound is a reminder of hard rock’s status as one of the ancient building blocks of hip-hop. White forgoes his guitar to play drums and produce the songs — and his models, for the most part, are the boom of Black Sabbath and the bap of Led Zeppelin. It’s ruggedly funky stuff, with full-footed bass-pedal work and deliberate snare hits. And it sounds absolutely great on my iPod next to this year’s Raekwon, MF Doom, Mos Def, and Diamond District albums, or whatever hip-hop single might pop up.

Listen to the big beats and choppy, a-melodic vocals of “Treat Me Like Your Mother” or “I Cut Like A Buffalo” — and it’s not outlandish to think of Run-DMC or Lil’ Jon at full throttle. Those are grooves built for talkin’ shit, stompin’ on the sidewalk, and callin’ out suckers. In fact, I might just build my entire 2009 mix around Horehound. It’s a weird, loud, crowd-pleaser, and that’s usually what I’m shooting for, anyway.

Photo from Saul.Davis via Flickr

Yesterday, while in the process of defending U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) from criticism that he hadn’t brought enough new money into the state, Edwin Merwin Jr. and Jim Ulmer committed a … social faux pas that may cost them their respective roles as officials in the Orangeburg County Republican party. “There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves,” wrote Merwin and Ulmer in the (Orangeburg) Times and Democrat. “By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.” Cue. The. Outrage.

And, before we do our Unfit thing, we’d like to make it clear that we agree with the sentiments of the Executive Director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matthew Brooks, who reminded the New York Times that the picture of the Jewish miser “dates back to the centuries of anti-Jewish persecution in Europe, when Jews were forbidden to own land or conduct any business other than money-lending, which was closed to Christians by Church law.” Still, what sticks in our craw isn’t so much the intent of Merwin and Ulmer’s slur — it’s clear that these doofuses actually felt like they were paying compliments to both the Jewish people and DeMint — but rather what it was that convinced the pair that such phrasing might be a good idea. For this, we are at a loss.

So, to better understand the motivations of Merwin, Ulmer, and other artists of the back-handed compliment, we here at Unfit have decided to, for the moment, play along — to argue that the banking Jew is, yes, a figure born of anti-Semitism and rigid social and political power structures but that, now, in the end-times of a post-holocaust glow, the thing has been reconstructed as a sort of badge of honor. In other words, if we believe the idea that Merwin and Ulmer were really aiming for a positive here, Shylock’s pound of flesh becomes a noble extraction carried out in the name of now-righteous self-interest. This jibes with the anti-federal actions that have found the Republican party — and U.S. conservatives — arguing against (to use an extreme example) government death panels and for limited government. To these folks, the common good needs to take a back seat to the individual goal, self-interest is self-preservation, and Shylock was well within his rights.

Is this how the (now-no-longer-hook-nosed) miser shows up as a model character in a political play? And, more to the point, should we M.O.T.s, perhaps freshly empowered by our money-counting acceptance, be reaching out to reclaim him? If Merwin, who told the Times that he has “always abhorred in the past, and shall continue to do so in the future, anti-Semitism in any form whatsoever” is to be believed (through all that bad grammar) and, as Brooks said, “[they] apparently believed that the image of the Jew as penny-pincher was a praise of Jewish frugality,” it would certainly seem like an affirmative answer to the first question.

But, if we are to believe that Merwin and Ulmer are sincere in their admiration of the Jewish people, and, by a logical political extension, that they think free-spending Democrats could, say, learn a lot through a closer reading of The Merchant of Venice, then we also must believe that Jews everywhere should embrace their inner financial wizard. Or something. The problem, of course, is that the image that Merwin and Ulmer seem to have is nothing more than a weird twist on a historically incomplete vision, and, as such, it makes any reclamation effort, by definition,  kind of impossible.

What do we get from all of this? Well, we’re still kind of confused. But we’re pretty sure that you’ll forgive us if we don’t run out and buy ourselves a ledger, a pair of glasses, and a Brooklyn accent.

Roman Polanski

A reasonable person might argue that Nazi filmmaker Leni Reifenstahl deserved to be dropped down the world’s deepest, darkest hole and loathed forever. But that same reasonable person, after watching the director’s sublime Olympia, might have to fight the urge to throw a rope down into that hole and pull her back out again.

You have to make a distinction between the artist and the woman, right? For example, I love the overture from Wagner’s Ring Cycle, I recognize that D.W. Griffith pretty much invented the movies despite being a frothing racist, and I have no problem with Roman Polanski winning an Oscar for The Pianist, despite his being an admitted child rapist. But that doesn’t mean Wagner doesn’t deserve to be loathed, Griffith doesn’t deserve to be scorned, and Polanski doesn’t belong in jail.

The problem is that if we demanded rectitude from our favorite authors, composers, filmmakers, painters, dancers, and actors, we wouldn’t have any favorite authors, composers, filmmakers, painters, dancers, or actors. Not Sean Connery, who beats his wife; not William S. Burroughs, who killed his wife; not Caravaggio, who beat one of his friends to death in the street; not Arthur Rimbaud, who traded slaves; not Ghostface Killah, who was jailed for attempted robbery; not C.K. Chesterton, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ezra Pound, Voltaire, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, William Shakespeare, or T.S. Eliot, who were all anti-Semites; and not Paul Gaugin or Jerry Lee Lewis, who were sleeping with 13-year-old girls long before Polanski had the idea.

So the best society can do is tolerate the degenerate tendencies of its artistic class and punish those tendencies when they spill over into felony.

Then again, according to a Free Roman Polanski petition currently making its way around Europe and Hollywood (and signed by more than 100 of the world’s greatest filmmakers, including Woody Allen, Jeanne Moreau, Martin Scorsese, Wong Kar Wai, Michael Mann, David Lynch, Tilda Swinton, Barbet Schroeder, and Steven Soderbergh), felonies aren’t really felonies if they’re perpetrated by a genius, a “renown (sic) and international artist … one of the great contemporary filmmakers,” especially if he was “on his way to a film festival where he was due to receive an award” when the police picked him up.

Because “[b]y their extraterritorial nature,” the petition continues, “film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely … in a neutral country … without hindrance,” even if a certain filmmaker may have once, a long, long time ago, gotten himself entangled in a “case of morals.”

Maybe they’re right. Maybe it should be left to filmmakers to decide what’s right and wrong when it comes to one of their own, what the statutes of limitations should be, what the guidelines for extradition should entail. After all, by snatching up Polanski while he was on his way to a film festival, the authorities were, technically, on the filmmakers’ turf. And cultural events are sacred things, with rules and laws and borders and systems of government all their own. Surely no cinema genius on his way to a film festival should have to worry about being held accountable for acts of pedophilia he performed 30 years ago off festival grounds – not, especially, on the occasion of his receiving an award. An award, don’t you see? A film award. What kind of fascists arrest a man when he’s on his way to pick up a trophy?

So Phil Spector sits in his cell, hearing all about Roman Polanski and his 100 influential friends and followers in the movie industry working to get him free, and he must be asking himself, “What about me? Where are all those artists I influenced? How come Brian Wilson and Brian Eno and the Jesus & Mary Chain and Timbaland and Animal Collective aren’t writing petitions on my behalf?” The answer is that Phil Spector hasn’t had a hit record in decades. If he were smart, he would have produced a Justin Timberlake song before shooting Lana Clarkson, just as Polanski made sure to win an Oscar … just in case. Had he done that, he might be free right now. For what is the law without the approbation of our artists? Nothing but words on a piece of paper.

The terror of the American consumer

October is fast approaching and fear is in the air. But the fear I’m thinking of isn’t just a nod to the season. No, I’m talking about the fear that “things” (the world) are “different” (worse) than the way we thought they were …  like how at the end of The Sixth Sense or The Others you realize that all the beloved heroes and heroines aren’t actually humans but the mother-flipping haunts themselves. That kind of fear.

Take the battered horse that is the current state of our economy.  We like to think it’s all Wall Street’s or Washington’s fault, but who can argue that a portion of the blame shouldn’t be doled out to so many of us consumerist zombies who insisted on living beyond our means? Come on … we all bought those things we didn’t need in order to keep up with a consumer culture that can only lead to financial ruin – cars, boats, plastic surgery, or for the lower-income among us, perhaps a spoiler or a laptop or a sound system. Let’s face it: Being an American is hard. And yet so many of us genuinely had no idea what we were getting into, or the price we’d pay just to stay there.

And no one’s above it. Look at Annie Leibovitz, for example — PBS showed that documentary on her every weekend for like three months a few years ago and we all became experts: The legendary Rolling Stone photographer was the ultimate contemporary American, a symbol of art, luck, and edginess who needed nothing but a camera and a good face to live her life well. Now, on the eve of her 60^th birthday, the Art Capital Group has called in the photographer’s $24-million debt. And though that sounds terrifying, it also means Miss Leibovitz is still the ultimate contemporary American — in debt up to her skewed camera lens and forced to pay off “living-well” liabilities by liquidating long-accrued assets. Just like the rest of us.

Even I have been a willing participant in the credit craze. I used to scoff at those borrowers of sub-prime mortgages — I mean, really, didn’t they read the terms of their agreement? But then last week I smugly checked the status of my awesome credit card transfer – 2.9% fixed for the life of the balance – and saw that the minimum balance, normally $200 a month, had jumped to $675. “You gotta be kidding me!” I told the awful credit representative, “I can’t afford that!” To which he responded, “I’m sorry, ma’am. Chase decided to cancel that offer across the bored. Your new APR is now 21%. Didn’t you read the notice?”

No. I didn’t read the notice and no, I didn’t see the fine print, because all things Chase quickly go in the trash.  (Unless, of course, I’m looking for more of those transfer-balance checks. And for the past 10 years, I’d transferred every major purchase onto that card: my car, my laptop, plane tickets, even my ex-boyfriend’s debt because, at the time, I thought we’d be together forever – but that’s another story in stupidity.) How was I supposed to know about the fine print and the terror it could cause?

So here’s the point: I’m not above this financial quagmire we’re in … and neither are you. And as much as we all bitch about it, it turns out that if we don’t keep savings or have generous family members who do, Big Bankers, or your insurance company, or even your employer will soon have you facing an economic crisis so big, no Hollywood or Halloween demon could ever hope to scare you again.

Is this really the best part of waking up?

The other morning I was hanging out at a friend’s apartment drinking a mug of Folgers coffee when I suddenly remembered a commercial I saw some 17 years before, in which a dancer wakes up in bed, yawns, stretches her long dancer’s arms, brews a nice steaming cup of Folgers coffee, and proceeds to twirl spastically around her apartment to the tune of “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.” I had such a warm feeling in my stomach as I remembered that commercial; the pleasant gooiness of nostalgia settled in my brain; I felt what could only be described as joy – and in that moment I realized something: My idea of coffee, the notion that I need it every morning to “wake up,” that it is a source of pure pleasure, more than likely came from that commercial.

Art & Copy, the new documentary by Doug Pray (Hype!, Scratch, Surfwise), is about advertising. But it’s not about the evils of the industry; it’s about that remarkable practice of creating and selling lifestyles in the form of a catchy jingle or a two-word slogan. It doesn’t delve into why, psychologically, advertising works but simply celebrates the fact that it does.

We’re a culture of storytellers, of information-disseminators, and advertisers are our modern-day scribes, selling us a particular version of our history. But over the past few decades, we have begun to see advertising in America as a demonic industry that does nothing more than employ devious methods to tap into people’s insecurities and bad habits in an effort to sell products. But in Art & Copy Pray explores a different version of modern advertising history. He focuses on the “good” in advertising, or at least the exciting and enlightening. For him, advertisers are artists; they’re writers; they’re thinkers. And their art isn’t merely about planting inconsequential ideas in people’s heads but using subtlety and creativity to make people believe that they need a custom or a habit, and that these customs and habits are what make us social beings. Their end goal, of course, is to advert – to turn the mind or attention to, or, more frankly, to sell a product or a brand – but it’s the means to this end that fascinate Pray.

For example, Liz Dolan, former vice president and director of global marketing at Nike, explains in the film how Nike brought recreational jogging to America. Apparently, Bill Bowerman, Nike’s co-founder, was a track and field coach who took the popular New Zealand concept of nonprofessional athletes jogging for exercise and brought it to the U.S. in the early 1960s. Bowerman wrote a book and helped set up jogging programs across the country to get folks interested. Now all Nike needed was the right shoes to fit these new “casual” athletes’ feet and the proper slogan to sell them.

Enter advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy. As W+K co-founder Dan Wieden explains, he and his partner, David Kennedy, were shopping around for a good sporty slogan for Nike’s new jogging shoe when they came across an old newspaper clipping from 1977 concerning the execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore in Salt Lake City, Utah. Before facing the firing squad, Gilmore reportedly said, “Let’s do it.” One man’s famous last words became one famous shoe company’s meal ticket. Just like that: Just Do It.

So though it may be true that Nike taught Americans how to jog, it was Nike’s advertising agency that introduced Americans to a new spirit of getting things done. As Just Do It ads flew off the presses and over the airwaves, a strange thing began happening, one that, as Wieden notes, had nothing to do with exercise and everything to do with inspiration and motivation. Just Do It. People took that seriously. Some quit smoking. Others lost weight. Self-declared losers finally asked out that waitress. Wieden recalls the piles of letters that came in from women claiming they had been inspired by the ads to divorce their abusive husbands.

What Art & Copy drives home is this notion that advertising is not a one-way street. It doesn’t aim to sell just a product but a lifestyle, something people can identify with so they will continue to buy said product time and time again throughout their lives. It’s all about the bigger picture: Give people a powerful slogan and they will claim it as a motto … and keep buying your crap.

History has proven that people love having slogans to live by; they’re an abstract of something to aspire to. “Live free or die,” “Don’t drink and drive,” “Keep America beautiful,” “The milk chocolate melts in your mouth – not in your hand.” Repeat something enough times and it becomes true. It becomes a way of life, one you’ll need the appropriate (and newest) tools to continue being a part of.

At one point in Art & Copy Liz Dolan says, “[Advertising is] like air and water. It’s around you. It’s gonna happen to you.” That’s the whole issue. Advertising is ubiquitous because, in order to be effective, it has to be as natural and comforting to people as air and water. It’s why, according to one of the movie’s many filler statistics, there are 450,000 billboards in the U.S. When I see a billboard of a tasty-looking hamburger, I’m instantly hungry – despite the fact that I may have just eaten, despite the fact that I’m a vegetarian. I suppose the efficacy of advertising lies partly in its focus on suggestion rather than command. The hamburger is not outright telling me to eat it, in the way that a used-car salesman might yell at me to buy his Ford Pinto. The burger’s simply there on that board, posing in all its meaty, sandwichy glory, suggesting I might like it. The object being advertised isn’t directly in your face; it’s just waiting for you to realize you want it.

Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative officer of TBWA\Chiat\Day and the man behind the breakthrough “1984” ad that introduced Apple’s Macintosh personal computer during that year’s Super Bowl, best sums up this need to be told to and sold to: “[People] can’t do shit unless we make ads for them.”

Is this fair? Would Americans read more books (more non-Oprah-endorsed books, anyway) if even a smidge of those 450,000 billboards advertised them? Would Americans eat more eggplant if there were some great slogan or jingle to push the fruit (yeah, it’s one of those: a fruit masquerading as a vegetable)? These questions remain unanswered, as there isn’t much of a market these days for paperbacks or veggie-like fruits. But there is evidence to back the brazen claims of the advertising kings and queens profiled in this film: that they can sell anything to anyone at anytime, and that creativity can solve any problem.

Wells Rich Greene’s leading founder Mary Wells taught Americans how enjoyable and fun it is to fly in airplanes (the travel industry could probably stand to revisit that ad campaign). The late ad man Hal Riney, of BBDO and later Hal Riney & Partners, helped re-elect Ronald Reagan in 1984 with the tearjerker “It’s Morning Again in America.” And who knew it was always all about us? Phyllis K. Robinson did. Doyle Dane Bernbach’s first copy chief coined the slogan “It lets me be me” for Clairol (ironic for a product designed to change ladies’ hair color), which led to Generation Me and, with it, millions of selfish ingrates.

It’s a bit unsettling to think that all our hopes, dreams, desires, and needs might be nothing more than ideas conjured up during a brainstorming session around a conference table – we like to believe we create our culture and our identities ourselves. But things become really unsettling once you realize that identifying with products and labels is the root of our culture. We’re Ford people and Cubs fans and Mac users. We’re runners and coffee drinkers.

And whether I realize I’m being tricked or think I’m in control of my own choices, I’m sure I will continue to be influenced by the art and copy around me. But I will never be duped into drinking Folgers again.

Jonathon Swift once said, “It was a brave man who first ate an oyster.”  A brave man who should have won the goddamn Nobel Prize, he failed to add.  Despite (or, perhaps, because of) the raw oyster’s reputation as an aphrodisiac and possessing the taste and consistency of oral sex, they are one of nature’s most perfect foods.  If a fine brandy melting down the back of your throat or going down on a supermodel aren’t for you, then neither are oysters.  For me, when fresh, they do more for a waterfront vacation than the subtext of an entire Jimmy Buffett box set.  In many coastal states, oysters are to local culture what Islam is to the Middle East.

But Snackbar’s success in Oxford has nothing to do with Mississippi’s being a coastal state. In fact, Mississippi is a coastal state in much the same way miniature golf is golf: It doesn’t eat like a coastal state, and it thinks like one only when someone’s handing out Katrina money. And, despite a lighthouse being the most prominent feature of the Mississippi license plate, it has more Sonic Fast Food joints than it does coastal miles.  Besides, those coastal miles are at Mississippi’s southern-most reaches, and if Oxford were any more north-Mississippi, it’d be Tennessee. Which is to say that, in this land-locked town, seafood used to begin and end with deep-fried catfish, a tasteless, ugly son of a bitch plucked from the bottom of a pond.

So what happened? Is it because of Oxford’s progressive nature? Its reckless abandon in attitude toward new things?  Well, that’s complicated:  Short answer, no.  Long answer, also no.  If you want progressive, don’t set foot on the University of Mississippi’s campus in Oxford, where the Trent Lott Leadership Institute is a proud institution.  Or the town square (known as the Square), where you’ll see a statue of a Confederate soldier standing atop a mighty Doric phallus with the lines The sons of veterans unite in this justification of their fathers’ faith inscribed on the shaft. The courthouse that it was, uh, erected in front of is painted so white — so ridiculously and achingly white — that when the sun hits it in just the right way, you can see through the walls and at the black people being denied justice inside.

Okay, Okay: those are all cheap shots at Oxford’s old guard.  And that old guard is old. Snackbar wasn’t and isn’t for these people.  These people voted for George W. Bush.  Twice.  Three times, if you count ballots cast for the former governor of Alaska and that creepy old guy who kept standing next to her. When they’re hungry, these Oxonians prefer the old-fashioned simplicity of gorging themselves on a singular and oversized plate overloaded with fried and gravied everything. What they don’t want they take home to feed the dogs.  In the 1980s this was called trickle-down economics: the few eating themselves to death while the many starved.

Snackbar feeds the face of a new kind if southerner.  A face so new it does not yet recognize itself but does recognize that we are currently experiencing one of those stretches of world history people are going to remember, to study, to write books about and teach courses on.  This is not going to be one of those gray, useless decades that disappears in retrospect, like a mediocre employee in a vast conglomerate.  The new-look southerner is self-aware and it is a self-awareness that is not defined exclusively by the past but by how tomorrow will define today.  “Don’t blame us,” the new South says at this crossroads.  “Our state’s on the wrong side of history, but look: We’re eating weird food off tiny plates.”

I admire this attitude even though it smacks of self-congratulatory liberalism.  In fact, 82% of liberalism is, in and of itself, self-congratulatory.  And I’ll take an Oxford liberal over a Seattle liberal any day of the week.  One finds a reason to drink Rumplemintz on a Tuesday while the other won’t burn me the new Wilco album because “I dunno, man.  I just can’t justify putting another CD out into the ether that’s just going to wind up in some landfill somewhere.”  Oxford liberals support the cause; they just don’t attend the meetings.  Seattle liberals assume every moment of their lives is the meeting.

Mississippi is both the fattest and the poorest state in the nation.  It eats too much and it starves.  Here, where the vivid contrast between wealth  (a lavish antebellum spread) and poverty (a real shotgun home) seems more tangible than anywhere else in the United States, Snackbar sits somewhere in between (inside the world’s most unassuming strip mall).  I found myself at the bar one evening asking the bartender what he’d learned about the human condition while serving Oxonians raw seafood.  We were downing Oyster Shooters (The Oyster Shooter:  Cocktail sauce.  One jigger of vodka.  One oyster.  One shot glass.), not Rumplemintz.  Though it may have been a Tuesday.

He told me about how people had been going crazy for oysters — men and women on dates, large parties, rebels, yankees — but, for whatever reason, many were going uneaten.  People would order a second dozen after openly not finishing their first.  My new bartender friend threw back an Oyster Shooter and banged the shot glass down onto the bar top.  Then he leaned towards me, secretively, and said how one of the perks of his job was that he got to finish all of the oysters that were otherwise dumpster-bound.

I generally don’t eat garbage, but something about that made sense to me. I realized then what oysters represented at this particular moment, in this particular restaurant, in this particular corner of old-money Mississippi.

Such is the advance of food socialism.

Really: Just as the Marxist insists in the beauty of a classless society, everything about Snackbar’s philosophy and architecture wants you to share your dining experience with those around you.  A long, large table runs parallel to, and spans the length of, the bar.  Next to this table, lining the wall, is a series of roomy booths that could easily seat eight if they had to, and often do have to.  On any given night, new and old couples pack the long table and, together, look more like a casual dinner party than a bunch of sardined strangers.  Groups of six, seven, eight jam the booths, their faces ruddy with laughter, elbows knocking as hands reach for the ice-chilled Joeys, Washingtons, Apalachicolas, the steamed jumbo gulf shrimp, and the marinated blue crab claws that cover the tabletop and belong to everyone.  Even the solitary diners aren’t solitary.  They sit at the bar, side by side with others who take their food as seriously as they do, preferring to appreciate it with a holy reverence, like a congregation worshiping at the altar of food, their mouths moving not so much to chew but in silent prayer.

This is food socialism.  A lot of people these days think this is a better way to eat.   They also seem to think it’s a better way to live.

Shared food, after all, isn’t new everywhere.  Many an Al Gore voter (or would-be voter, had they voted) went on a gloomy, conciliatory bender in or just down the street from their favorite tapas bar on Tuesday night, September November 7, 2000 — a night on which Currence would have been insane to seriously contemplate opening a small-plate raw bar in Oxford.

Still, despite the then-leader of the free world, things were changing down South.  Currence understood this thanks to the years he’d spent building menus from the ground up, based not on what Oxford has always been hungry for, but on what it’s going to be hungry for next.  Which led him to Snackbar, the reactive inversion to the plank-floored catfish house, just as Barack Obama represents, in many ways, the reactive inversion to the past eight years.

By this I’m not saying Currence is a genius or a madman (though he might be).  What I am saying is that if there is a connection between what a community is eating and what a community is thinking, then Currence is a socio-cultural barometer.  It’s also not that he’s ahead of the curve (which, again, he might be).  It’s that he just really knows where Oxford’s curve happens to be at any given moment.  It probably went something like this: On Election Day ’08, the dial tuned to CNN, Currence saw John King break down the results, county by county, on his magic view screen, and, when even the reddest of red republican strongholds turned blue, thought, it’s time, and immediately started shucking.

Is it a coincidence that raw bars and tapas restaurants — the bellweathers of the food socialist movement — are doing so well right now?

The thing of it is, personally, I’m a huge fan of capitalism  and the protestant work ethic that teams up with it so well on this side of the pond. But a part of that image is the reality that many of those solitary American dreamers, despite their better mousetraps and their calloused hands, fail miserably.  And that just flat-out sucks Then-candidate Barack Obama took time to talk about how much that just flat-out sucks when he accepted his nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver:

“For over two decades, [John McCain’s] subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy — give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.  In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is — you’re on your own.  Out of work?  Tough luck.  No health care?  The market will fix it.  Born into poverty?  Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps — even if you don’t have boots.  You’re on your own.”

And he was saying this to the America that was ready to give a shit about the person standing next to them.  When the rest of America listens to Glenn Beck and then use the word socialism like a cudgel, what they’re trying to do is turn empathy into a dirty word.  And empathy is exactly what we’re talking about here.  It’s a mentality that half the country was ready to buy into and was already manifesting itself, in microcosm form, in restaurants all over the country.  Barack Obama became the single most powerful man on the planet because he was able to tap into this need in us to satiate our malnourished senses of empathy.  What men like Currence are doing with restaurants like Snackbar is satisfying a physical manifestation of that same psychological and emotional want.

Today, Snackbar’s patrons are going home happy and the help is going home full on the leftovers.  It’s important not to forget that a raw bar in Oxford is as precarious an experiment as liberalism in Oxford.  It’s new.  Uncertain.  Unpredictable.  Oxford likes the idea of the shared-food experience as enjoyed from a raw bar, but the reality of what they’re putting into their bodies sometimes makes them wriggle.  Just as these people liked voting for Barack Obama in ’08, knowing full well that their state was going to go very, very red and wouldn’t have to feel as though they themselves actually contributed to his victory.  What they did not know — and what is still unknowable—is how they’re going to feel if, after four years, they’re convinced that all they’ve done all this time was feed the help.

But they’re giving shared food a try in Oxford, Mississippi.  That’s something.  That’s quite a bit, actually.  And what’s going to come of it is hard to say.  When the time comes, I suppose I’ll ask John Currence.  He probably already knows.

Philip Roth

Once not so long ago, it was understood among those who thought about such things that writing was a dying art form, a relic from an era when things like time, opportunity, and audiences were available and things like authority, expertise, and artistry mattered. Scholars and critics and other old sticks in the mud mourned the death of the written (and read) word in American culture like other old sticks in the mud in other times mourned the death of gas-powered lamps or the art of conversation or the silent movie. Writers no less important than Philip Roth, who felt his influence waning along with everyone else who made a living behind a typewriter, once told David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker – another relic with waning influence – that the evidence “is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end.” And stodgy pundits and cultural critics like John Humphrys and John Sutherland attacked texting as “bleak, bald, sad shorthand which masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness” and texters as the linguistic heirs to Genghis Kahn. Even this author may have said a thing or two about the dangers of our “tweeting” culture – all 140 characters of it – in a moment of pre-middle-aged grumbling.

This was the sad reality of the situation. But as disheartening as circumstances were for these defenders of the word, at the very least they all knew that their point about the less-than-slow death of written language was indisputable, that they were unheeded prophets in a decadent age. And they found comfort in their sanctimony.

But then Clive Thompson – a writer himself – came along with a shocking bit of news: It turns out, according to a study by Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, that college students’ writing isn’t getting worse as a result of all that texting, tweeting, and Facebook-updating; it’s getting better. According to Thompson, “[f]or Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.”

Just look at all the writing these “young people” are doing, Lunsford argued: more than any generation before. “That’s because so much socializing takes place online,” Thompson wrote, “and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it.” Like the fella said, you add 140 to 140 to 140 to 140 and pretty soon it starts adding up to something.

Turns out these kids weren’t putting the written word to bed with all their grammatically indifferent updates about the emotional state of their goldfish or their preference for pizza over hot dogs as it relates to an upcoming lunch break; rather, they were rivaling the ancient Greeks with their mastery of the rhetorical art of kairos – “assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across” – and creating a new golden age of literacy in the process. Sure, it seemed to many that they were squeezing all the life-blood out of the language – leaving trifles like beauty, subtlety, ambiguity, and syntax dying on the floor in the name of quasi-confessional narcissism – but actually they were mastering a new kind of prose, one based on “haiku-like concision” that was designed with its audience (of one or millions) in mind. In interviews, this new generation of Bashos declared that the best prose was the prose that had the greatest effect on the world, whether that effect meant convincing a friend to see this movie rather than that or letting the world know that, indeed, you are bored at work and, yes, you are looking forward to the weekend, and, quite right, you plan on spending the weekend  making tiramisu.

And with that all the grumbling stopped. Suddenly the Roths and the Remnicks and the Humphrys and the Sutherlands of the world were satisfied. They too picked up their iPhones and started grousing about the weather and Brad Pitt’s new hair-do to their friends all over the world. All of a sudden, they ceased to see the point in flaying themselves for months, even years, at a time, in some garret somewhere, trying to map some hidden corner of the human tragedy, when they could let the world know what they were feeling right then and there and still have time to make it home to watch the season finale of Mad Men. They came to the realization that we aren’t living in an artistic age but an age of access, where aesthetic notions like “good” and “bad” and “beautiful” and “meaningful” seem almost comically geriatric and the only thing that matters is availability. They realized, like the Catholics did thousands of years ago, that confession is good for the soul, and so they traded their lonely writer’s rooms for the warmth and comfort of the modern electronic confessional booth that is the Internet, and they were happier for it. And the written word lived to fight another day.