Lately, I seem to consume pop culture at the same rate as the French consume root beer, and much has left me behind. I do keep up with trends, I just don't read or watch the objects that define those trends. It is a little like the way I used to read movie reviews for every movie that appeared at the multiplex. I wouldn't watch the movies, just enjoy the conversation about them.
But still, I can't help but enjoy a little pop culture here and there, and here are my mini-reviews for your passing pleasure. And if you decide to consume any of these things yourself, I would call myself successful.
Books:
Straight Man, Richard Russo: My guess is that anyone working in an English Department finds this book exceptionally funny, but especially for those in a small liberal arts college's English Department. I find Russo's wit to be unparalleled, and I enjoyed his Nobody's Fool as much as any novel I've ever read for pleasure. This book was so eerily realistic to me, though, that its comedy was tinged with discomfort. It is not a stretch to say that my own department, even in the Middle East, perfectly mirrors the fictional English department of West Central Pennsylvania State's. The book peters out some in its final 30 pages, but up until then it is strikingly funny, clear, and biting satire of professional academics. It has some surprising moments of great feeling, too. Don't have a whole lot more to say about it--but the chair of my department and my favorite colleague are now reading it, so there's that.
The God Who Weeps, Terryl and Fiona Givens: Have I written about this? I don't remember. I read this in 2 or 3 days, which was a bad idea because for only 2 or 3 days I recommitted myself to Mormon theology. If I had only taken a little longer, my commitment might have become a habit. This is a very well-written systematic theological tract by two of Mormonism's most thoughtful practitioners. I wonder how easy it is to put some of these ideas into practice, but if there is a way I'll take it. If you read nothing else this summer, read the epilogue to this book.
The Odds, Stuart O'Nan: My enjoyment of O'Nan's astonishly accurate observations have been documented before, and this latest novella is the latest evidence of his ability to observe all the right details. The story is of an older couple that need to strategically divorce for financial and personal reasons, so they give it one last go at a kitsch-laden Niagara Falls with a plan to gamble away what is left. It is a beautiful story with characters that seems as real as those in his last novel "Emily, Alone." While the previous novel hits you with its profundity, this one is more like a sweet fable of marital bonds. I guess I was kind of sad to finish this short book, but glad that I could just sit and stare at my good wife afterwards. That is to a say, a successful novel for a practical thinker.
My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman: This sort of memoir/meditation on belief deserves its own post, which I think I'll write when I finish the book. It is a short book to be savored slowly, so I am taking my time with it. If I were to make a Bermuda Triangle of creative writers that speak to my soul's hunger, I would start with Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, and now Christian Wiman. It is no coincidence that Wiman mentions the previous two as his favorite novelists.
Movies
Iron Man 3 Quiz: Plot of Iron Man 3 is which of the following:
a) Smart aleck guy goes up against smark aleck script, gets in silly costume, boredom ensues.
b) Brooding guy goes up against very serious script, gets in silly costume, boredom ensues.
c) Something else.
d) a and b
As with all superhero movies, the answer is never c.
Side Effects: Plane to America viewing. Pharmaceutical shenanigans with confusions and double-crossings, plots to replot the movie, duplicity, the deception of film and editing, Steven Soderbergh being Steven Soderbergh, intrigue. All this adds up to my enjoyment.
Parker: Plane back to Kuwait viewing. Jason Statham, a bad guy who has been wronged and so becomes a good guy, meets the Jennifer Lopez character from Out of Sight and affects terrible Texan accent, which provides much pleasure to viewer, enacts revenge. All this adds up to periodic enjoyment.
Stoker: Plane back to America viewing: Obvious Korean auteur brings clean lines and pristine grotesqueries to semi-literate Southern Gothic tradition, lots of crazy eyes in repressed bodies (Nicole Kidman!), symbolic stairwells and concerned housemaids, pretentious fun.
Television
Top Gear: It is not a mystery why Top Gear (the proper British version) plays on tv here in the Gulf: the obsession with cars is enough to make you want to move to Amsterdam. So Top Gear is often on the MBC Action! channel, which usually shows American and Korean action movies, and which I have to admit is the channel I go to most often if I have to watch tv here. So I've been able to watch British Top Gear several times, and it is excellent. The three hosts, one too small, one too large, one just right, have a rapport that can only come from real friends. And real British people. The wit from the tall guy ought to be legendary (it probably is), and the other two guys perfectly compliment him. I have never rooted more for Britain's colonial past as when I watched the episodes of these three guys driving through Africa in quest of the source of the Nile. Those episodes were about as perfect a piece of art that a reality show can be. All reality shows should study what they are doing in seminars on how to create happiness in blokes like me at home. I believe this show is on Netflix, and if you find the one where they unabashedly become nostalgic colonialists, even self-consciously, are perfect pieces of entertainment.
Arrested Development season 4: Believe it or not, I actually haven't read much about this new season that was dumped on Netflix one day, but I imagine most of the commentary is going to be more intelligent than my briefs. I have been watching this show on my Ipad while I get on the exercise bike, and I have watched 12 episodes, I think. The first two are not very funny even when they are clever, and that is probably because Tobias, Buster, and Gob (3 of the most wonderful characters ever given life) are not prominently involved. But the season gains steam as it progresses, and I found myself, in one of the later episodes, having to stop the exercise bike four times to laugh. Since I don't laugh a whole lot in reaction to shows, that is quite the achievement.
But what is really amazing about this season is the intricate plotting, and editing, of the multi-focalized narrative. I'll bet my bottom dollar that no narrative experiment like this one has ever occurred on a television show, but that doesn't really matter I guess. What matters is if it works and keeps things fresh. I think it does, not only because it uses the device that plots are never as they appear until you get to that particular character's focalized episode. For example, and I spoil, the Fakeblock software that George Michael has been developing throughout the season turns out not to be privacy software but an app that produces the effect of a stick hitting a block (like more cowbell) for a band. That all the characters' motivations and machinations only resolve themselves through a final focalized moment actually produces the profound effect of empathy. The self-obsessed Bluth family is only as self-obsessed as the rest of us when we realize that we are the center of our narrative universe.
It becomes, surprisingly, a bit like Wallace Stevens's "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (there are 13 episodes of season 4, after all):
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
That IX part of Stevens's poem is about as cool a poetic fragment as there is, not only because of the "Of one of many," which kills me for its sense of our reality in prepositions, but mostly because of the "flew out of sight," a cliche that perfectly describes the feeling of self-interestedness. The selfishness of the Bluths in "Arrested Development" exists as a cry in the world of contingency and coincidence, or a world in which others in the family always reappear from out of sight. This is a contingency created by a God that never sees the blackbird "out of sight" because God's sight has no edge: infinite and "of one."
But mostly, episodes 7-13 are really funny.
Music
Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City: The album of the year! Band that I never liked makes good songs, two in particular are very good songs ("Step" and "Ya Hey"), instrumentation is not twee but solid, voice matures, and everything about this album is everything that their other, previous albums were not!
Jon Hopkins, Immunity: One hour exactly of dance and electronica, dabbles in dubstep, ambient, house, and perfect noise. Album of the year! Has the best closing piece of music in almost ever (title song), have listened to album on more drives than any other!
Exercise Mix for Kathryn: Made of songs that encourage exercising with a beat, complete with Rihanna ("We Found Love in an Awkward Place") and Kelly Clarkson ("Stronger"), but we all come to the conclusion that Robyn is the best pop artist of the last five years, so you should download "Call Your Girlfriend." Justin Bieber! "Beauty and the Beat" great song for ejercicio, but not the Nikki Minaj lyric, which wears out its welcome after two lines.
The National, Trouble Will Find Me: Most listened to album of the year! Every song thoughtful and melodies interesting, all have classical minimalism supporting lovely deep voice, "I Need My Girl" perfect song, makes me sad that I am alone for weeks, probably most tuneful album and excellent follow up to excellent High Violet.
Daughter, If You Leave: If the xx made better songs with fuller orchestrations, it would be the lovely Daughter.
Boards of Canada, Tomorrow's Harvest: By far, my brother John's Album of the Year! Probably for him album of the century. Excellent tonal consistency, exceptionally cool, mathematical and rational construction with occasional surprising warmth and undercurrent of fear.
Eluvium, Nightmare Ending: Ambient Portland music with carefully calibrated feedback and melodic counterpoint. Wall of ambient sound, to be listened to with Mountains's amazing Centralia, both from this year.
Nils Frahm, Screws: Heady pianist hurts hands, get screws in them, can only play with 9 fingers, makes prettiest album of year! Delicate playing with immortal melodic gift. Sunday morning appropriate--or Sunday morning perfect.
There are a bunch more albums, but those are the ones that came to me first. You can probably tell that music is making its biggest impact on me while I am alone in Kuwait. I have been reading my weekly New Yorker too in my spare momentos, and I should recommend Ryan Lizza's inside politics articles and the recent piece of Lyme Disease.
But still, I can't help but enjoy a little pop culture here and there, and here are my mini-reviews for your passing pleasure. And if you decide to consume any of these things yourself, I would call myself successful.
Books:
Straight Man, Richard Russo: My guess is that anyone working in an English Department finds this book exceptionally funny, but especially for those in a small liberal arts college's English Department. I find Russo's wit to be unparalleled, and I enjoyed his Nobody's Fool as much as any novel I've ever read for pleasure. This book was so eerily realistic to me, though, that its comedy was tinged with discomfort. It is not a stretch to say that my own department, even in the Middle East, perfectly mirrors the fictional English department of West Central Pennsylvania State's. The book peters out some in its final 30 pages, but up until then it is strikingly funny, clear, and biting satire of professional academics. It has some surprising moments of great feeling, too. Don't have a whole lot more to say about it--but the chair of my department and my favorite colleague are now reading it, so there's that.
The God Who Weeps, Terryl and Fiona Givens: Have I written about this? I don't remember. I read this in 2 or 3 days, which was a bad idea because for only 2 or 3 days I recommitted myself to Mormon theology. If I had only taken a little longer, my commitment might have become a habit. This is a very well-written systematic theological tract by two of Mormonism's most thoughtful practitioners. I wonder how easy it is to put some of these ideas into practice, but if there is a way I'll take it. If you read nothing else this summer, read the epilogue to this book.
The Odds, Stuart O'Nan: My enjoyment of O'Nan's astonishly accurate observations have been documented before, and this latest novella is the latest evidence of his ability to observe all the right details. The story is of an older couple that need to strategically divorce for financial and personal reasons, so they give it one last go at a kitsch-laden Niagara Falls with a plan to gamble away what is left. It is a beautiful story with characters that seems as real as those in his last novel "Emily, Alone." While the previous novel hits you with its profundity, this one is more like a sweet fable of marital bonds. I guess I was kind of sad to finish this short book, but glad that I could just sit and stare at my good wife afterwards. That is to a say, a successful novel for a practical thinker.My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman: This sort of memoir/meditation on belief deserves its own post, which I think I'll write when I finish the book. It is a short book to be savored slowly, so I am taking my time with it. If I were to make a Bermuda Triangle of creative writers that speak to my soul's hunger, I would start with Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, and now Christian Wiman. It is no coincidence that Wiman mentions the previous two as his favorite novelists.
Movies
Iron Man 3 Quiz: Plot of Iron Man 3 is which of the following: a) Smart aleck guy goes up against smark aleck script, gets in silly costume, boredom ensues.
b) Brooding guy goes up against very serious script, gets in silly costume, boredom ensues.
c) Something else.
d) a and b
As with all superhero movies, the answer is never c.
Side Effects: Plane to America viewing. Pharmaceutical shenanigans with confusions and double-crossings, plots to replot the movie, duplicity, the deception of film and editing, Steven Soderbergh being Steven Soderbergh, intrigue. All this adds up to my enjoyment.
Parker: Plane back to Kuwait viewing. Jason Statham, a bad guy who has been wronged and so becomes a good guy, meets the Jennifer Lopez character from Out of Sight and affects terrible Texan accent, which provides much pleasure to viewer, enacts revenge. All this adds up to periodic enjoyment.
Stoker: Plane back to America viewing: Obvious Korean auteur brings clean lines and pristine grotesqueries to semi-literate Southern Gothic tradition, lots of crazy eyes in repressed bodies (Nicole Kidman!), symbolic stairwells and concerned housemaids, pretentious fun.Television
Top Gear: It is not a mystery why Top Gear (the proper British version) plays on tv here in the Gulf: the obsession with cars is enough to make you want to move to Amsterdam. So Top Gear is often on the MBC Action! channel, which usually shows American and Korean action movies, and which I have to admit is the channel I go to most often if I have to watch tv here. So I've been able to watch British Top Gear several times, and it is excellent. The three hosts, one too small, one too large, one just right, have a rapport that can only come from real friends. And real British people. The wit from the tall guy ought to be legendary (it probably is), and the other two guys perfectly compliment him. I have never rooted more for Britain's colonial past as when I watched the episodes of these three guys driving through Africa in quest of the source of the Nile. Those episodes were about as perfect a piece of art that a reality show can be. All reality shows should study what they are doing in seminars on how to create happiness in blokes like me at home. I believe this show is on Netflix, and if you find the one where they unabashedly become nostalgic colonialists, even self-consciously, are perfect pieces of entertainment. 
Arrested Development season 4: Believe it or not, I actually haven't read much about this new season that was dumped on Netflix one day, but I imagine most of the commentary is going to be more intelligent than my briefs. I have been watching this show on my Ipad while I get on the exercise bike, and I have watched 12 episodes, I think. The first two are not very funny even when they are clever, and that is probably because Tobias, Buster, and Gob (3 of the most wonderful characters ever given life) are not prominently involved. But the season gains steam as it progresses, and I found myself, in one of the later episodes, having to stop the exercise bike four times to laugh. Since I don't laugh a whole lot in reaction to shows, that is quite the achievement.But what is really amazing about this season is the intricate plotting, and editing, of the multi-focalized narrative. I'll bet my bottom dollar that no narrative experiment like this one has ever occurred on a television show, but that doesn't really matter I guess. What matters is if it works and keeps things fresh. I think it does, not only because it uses the device that plots are never as they appear until you get to that particular character's focalized episode. For example, and I spoil, the Fakeblock software that George Michael has been developing throughout the season turns out not to be privacy software but an app that produces the effect of a stick hitting a block (like more cowbell) for a band. That all the characters' motivations and machinations only resolve themselves through a final focalized moment actually produces the profound effect of empathy. The self-obsessed Bluth family is only as self-obsessed as the rest of us when we realize that we are the center of our narrative universe.
It becomes, surprisingly, a bit like Wallace Stevens's "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (there are 13 episodes of season 4, after all):
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
That IX part of Stevens's poem is about as cool a poetic fragment as there is, not only because of the "Of one of many," which kills me for its sense of our reality in prepositions, but mostly because of the "flew out of sight," a cliche that perfectly describes the feeling of self-interestedness. The selfishness of the Bluths in "Arrested Development" exists as a cry in the world of contingency and coincidence, or a world in which others in the family always reappear from out of sight. This is a contingency created by a God that never sees the blackbird "out of sight" because God's sight has no edge: infinite and "of one."
But mostly, episodes 7-13 are really funny.
Music
Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City: The album of the year! Band that I never liked makes good songs, two in particular are very good songs ("Step" and "Ya Hey"), instrumentation is not twee but solid, voice matures, and everything about this album is everything that their other, previous albums were not!
Jon Hopkins, Immunity: One hour exactly of dance and electronica, dabbles in dubstep, ambient, house, and perfect noise. Album of the year! Has the best closing piece of music in almost ever (title song), have listened to album on more drives than any other!
Exercise Mix for Kathryn: Made of songs that encourage exercising with a beat, complete with Rihanna ("We Found Love in an Awkward Place") and Kelly Clarkson ("Stronger"), but we all come to the conclusion that Robyn is the best pop artist of the last five years, so you should download "Call Your Girlfriend." Justin Bieber! "Beauty and the Beat" great song for ejercicio, but not the Nikki Minaj lyric, which wears out its welcome after two lines.
The National, Trouble Will Find Me: Most listened to album of the year! Every song thoughtful and melodies interesting, all have classical minimalism supporting lovely deep voice, "I Need My Girl" perfect song, makes me sad that I am alone for weeks, probably most tuneful album and excellent follow up to excellent High Violet. 
Daughter, If You Leave: If the xx made better songs with fuller orchestrations, it would be the lovely Daughter.
Boards of Canada, Tomorrow's Harvest: By far, my brother John's Album of the Year! Probably for him album of the century. Excellent tonal consistency, exceptionally cool, mathematical and rational construction with occasional surprising warmth and undercurrent of fear.
Eluvium, Nightmare Ending: Ambient Portland music with carefully calibrated feedback and melodic counterpoint. Wall of ambient sound, to be listened to with Mountains's amazing Centralia, both from this year. 
Nils Frahm, Screws: Heady pianist hurts hands, get screws in them, can only play with 9 fingers, makes prettiest album of year! Delicate playing with immortal melodic gift. Sunday morning appropriate--or Sunday morning perfect.
There are a bunch more albums, but those are the ones that came to me first. You can probably tell that music is making its biggest impact on me while I am alone in Kuwait. I have been reading my weekly New Yorker too in my spare momentos, and I should recommend Ryan Lizza's inside politics articles and the recent piece of Lyme Disease.
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