Happy Fourth to the American Dream

July 5, 2009

During a lovely Independence Evening taking in fireworks shows of North Carolina and Virginia from the I-64, I started to wax a bit about how truly different our country’s basic premise is from any other on the globe and how amazing it is that this premise has spread. This premise is that newness, innovation, change, and youth are generally good, that tradition and age are at best slow and tired, at worst parochial and narrow-minded. Michael Jackson’s extensive plastic surgery and Barack Obama’s political campaign platform both embody this.

What is amazing about this theme is how much we take it for granted, even though it is pretty much revolutionary, so much so that movements and cultures all over the world have embraced it and it has changed them. Every time someone crows about the new hip restaurant in Budapest or protests a corrupt election in Iran, s/he is embracing the themes of America. Personal reinvention in particular is the freedom that most of us who will never use our First Amendment Rights to protect ourselves from coercion into a religion or censorship actually take advantage of as Americans.

We are often too quick at the same time to be irreverent toward tradition and conservatism (with a lower-case “c”).

It is a bit scary to think of a society careening on values that translate to youth renewing skin cream and Madonna’s changing persona and just about every American television show, but it is also an amazing freedom to be able to live in a country where we are not limited by our class, even if we are somewhat defined by it.

And on that note, Happy belated Fourth, everyone. It’s nice to celebrate the holiday with a competent president in office.

Leave a Comment » | Dreams, Me-decade | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by elainemeyer

Good advice

June 28, 2009

I think this is good advice, from Cary Tennis, naturally:

That is how you know you have attained your dream: It no longer seems like a dream at all.

Leave a Comment » | Dreams | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by elainemeyer

The journalist’s challenge

June 27, 2009

I’m reading an interesting article by a pilot who frequently writes for Salon about misinformed reporting around the Air France flight disappearance. His criticisms are somewhat technical, like the following:

Next we have a Reuters piece from Miguel Lo Bianco. He writes, “Pilots often slow down when entering stormy zones to avoid damaging the aircraft, but reducing speed too much can cause an aircraft’s engines to stall.” The danger of flying too slowly is not an engine stall, but an aerodynamic stall — that is, a loss of lift over the wings.

I don’t know whether it is material that readers know the stall is aerodynamic, though it does seem at least worth trying to get right. The following criticism, though, seems less pedantic:

But the big gaffe is the reporter’s reasoning for why a Europe-bound plane would stay “overland” along the Brazilian coastline for so long. This has nothing to do with safety reasons. It’s merely the shortest distance.

I think this needs to be reported correctly, but I think there is a  trade that we make as a public, and that our media outlets make, by having to report expediently and constantly. It happens when journalists do not have enough time to write a story that involves some steady concentration. I know that my biggest hang-up when I’m writing stories is that I’m getting something wrong. Then, I spend quarter-hours or half-hours on checking the veracity of an assertion–because that is what these mis-reportings often are, assertions.

Reporters are outsiders, which often makes them look hopefully in-the-dark to people who have been reported on but makes them necessary for everyone else: because it is much more difficult for insiders to communicate a story–because they know more of the nuances and complications–then it is for people who are hearing it for the first time.

So I understand Smith’s desire for the reporting to be less misinformed. But I also understand the reporter’s pressure to report the story and make it reasonably easy to understand.

Leave a Comment » | Journalism, Travel | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by elainemeyer

R.I.P. Michael, and us

June 26, 2009

I think Michael Jackson’s death is so important to many of us because in some ways, it marks the passing of our youth. After all, he has been with us all of our life, if we are Millenials. His song “Billie Jean” was number one on the Top 40 charts when i was born, my third grade class listened to him incessantly and interminably during indoor recess, his friendship with Macauly Caulkin was a memorable tabloid story during an era of tabloids, I discovered the Jackson Five in junior high school at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I threw up 11 times when I had the flu and was watching the Jackson Five tv movie all day.

It is the end of an era for us 1980s kids.

Leave a Comment » | Me-decade, Music | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by elainemeyer

Quote of the solstice

June 21, 2009

Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.-Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby

Not this year.

1 Comment | Books and Film, Quotes | Permalink
Posted by elainemeyer

When photographers get familiar

June 21, 2009

In honor of Father’s Day, I will recount something funny:

When I was growing up, my family used to have a photographer who we used for events named Howard. My mom first hired him for my bat mitzvah, and I guess the family liked his energy, infectious laugh, and photo skills so much that we had him for many subsequent events.

One thing he always did, which I found really funny then and still do today is call my parents “Mom” and “Dad” when he was giving them instructions on how to position themselves in the photo. For instance, we would be standing waiting for him to snap a photo, and Howard would go, “Mom, tilt your head a little to the right. Dad, move in a little.” I can’t remember whether he ever went so far as to say “Grandma” or “Grandpa”–that seems a little crazy!–but I just always found this familiarity really amusing because in that situation it was totally acceptable. A photographer is like a cheerleader for the family. Whether or not kin are seething on the inside as they’re smiling for the photographer, he is totally oblivious, focused most on getting “Mom” and “Dad” and  kids to tilt their heads to the right but not too far and smile more.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

2 Comments | Humor, Me-decade | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by elainemeyer

Whatever Works kind of works

June 21, 2009

My brother and I have seen two movies together since I moved to New York City, both by Woody Allen, both at the independent Lincoln Plaza Cinema. Last August, we saw Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and last night we saw Whatever Works. As the prolific writer/director’s newest feature was about to begin, my brother said “Two New York Jews watching a Woody Allen movie on the Upper West Side.” With the starring role played by Larry David, it was truly a movie for people like us.

Yet, like most Woody Allen movies I have seen in recent years, I have had to prepare myself to be disappointed by self-conscious and unnatural dialogue as well as the inevitable May December romance. It always comes off a little creepy when the old neurotic, Jewish character dates the beautiful young woman (almost always gentile) in these movies, not just because of the age difference but because of the way the relationship depends on the younger woman revering the intellect of the older man.

Whatever Works did not bother me too much for these reasons, though. Maybe this was because Larry David’s intellectual wasn’t a lecherous character but rather almost asexual. Or maybe because I don’t think Woody Allen’s script actually bore out that he thought this kind of relationship, born perhaps of his fantasy (and since he started things up with his step-daughter, his real life), is functional.

No, the real fantasy in Whatever Works was the way Allen portrayed dim, God-fearing Southerners who come to New York City and are inspired to shed their small-minded ways and their NRA memberships. I guess this is the ultimate fantasy for many of us who live here.

Overall, I would give the movie a Meh, but an entertaining Meh. I liked Vicky Cristina Barcelona a lot better, though.

1 Comment | Books and Film, New York, Urban and Regional Issues | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by elainemeyer

Strange San Francisco

June 18, 2009

In order to gear up for my trip out West this August, I’m reading a book called San Francisco in Fiction: Essays in a Regional Literature. It is an anthology of essays about how San Francisco writers like Mark Twain, Jack London, Dashiell Hammet, Joan Didion, and Amy Tan, portrayed the city and the region. The great theme of this region is the search for new beginnings that its settlers bring with them from other American regions and foreign nations.

I have to share this passage from the essay about Frank Norris by Joseph R. McElerath, Jr. Norris wrote in particular about the bizarre urban life of San Francisco. The following description of a scene from The Octopus about the Midwinter International Exposition (similar to the famed Columbian Exposition that took place in Chicago in 1893) is just the sort of weird stuff that makes fin de siecle urban life sound like such a delirium.

[W]ithin the compound, one might also encounter a Japanese Tea Garden (which still survives), a life-sized elephant made of walnuts, an enormous wine bottle composed of wine bottles, a knight on horseback made to scale from prunes, and “native villages” inhabited by Eskimos, Hawaiians, and Africans imported for the occasion (University of New Mexico Press, 51).

1 Comment | Books and Film, Urban and Regional Issues | Permalink
Posted by elainemeyer

Is debating intelligence worthwhile?

June 16, 2009

Today in the Chronicle for Higher Education, a behavioral scientist decides to take up the perennially popular debate over whether there is only one type of genius. The article is a response to a current questioning of genius and the idea of one intelligence by people like Robert J. Sternberg and Malcolm Gladwell. The author of this most recent article, Christopher J. Ferguson, is not buying it. According to him, there is no street smarts that is equal in worth to book smarts. In fact, he says, someone with book smarts has more street smarts than someone without it:

Aren’t there plenty of Ph.D.’s who can’t fix their cars? Sure, but the majority of them could learn if they were so inclined. An individual with low “g” is going to struggle at both book learning and auto repair (although perhaps car mechanics would prove more manageable than literary theory or quantum physics).

Forget that I do not agree with Ferguson based on my own life experiences, I have to wonder what the point of having this debate is. Why are Ferguson and others in his camp so intent on proving that there is only one intelligence? My sense is that he craves a certainty that might allow him to see the world in an intellecutal hierarchy, but that is just a guess.

If he wants to bring this debate toward reality, I think Ferguson ought to look at why people succeed. If he did, I think he would find that there are  intelligences that do not all come in the same package. Successful people can be sociable, persistent, logical, or creative, or a combination of some of those things–usually with persistence as the common thread–but they may lack the others. We’re all familiar with the story of the antisocial nerd who founds a successful tech company or the politician who was not hindered by mediocre academic performance because of outsized social skills. Those people possess different intelligences, but they’re successful. Isn’t figuring out how to harness one’s abilities–whatever they are–an intelligence in itself greater than letting the kind of genius about which Ferguson writes wither to inertia?

2 Comments | Education and Academics | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by elainemeyer

David Simon on the newspaper situation

June 9, 2009

It is hard to go into journalism today, for the obvious reason that jobs at newspapers have been lost and for the less obvious reason that the climate today does not encourage reviving good journalism. What do I mean by that? Well, during my whole year at Columbia School of Journalism, where I generally received an excellent journalism education, many of the speakers who were brought in to talk about the changing media environment–to put it euphemistically– spoke more to the technology deficiencies of newsrooms to explain the decline of newspapers than to what seemed to be the real problem: that newsrooms at some point stopped having as their mission to put out a good product. Why did this happen, and even worse maybe, how have we come to take it for granted?

David Simon, creator of “The Wire” and “Homicide Life on the Streets” and former Baltimore Sun reporter has had a lot to say about it in the past several months. The downward descent began when newspaper owners sold their papers to publicly-traded, shareholder accountable entities that were concerned only with making a profit. Unadulterated capitalism does not work for an organization whose mission in part involves serving the public, he said.  He gave this great talk about this and more that was featured on CSPAN yesterday (go here for it). My uncle who works there pointed me to it. A few highlights below of what Simon said (hardy har):

We’re going to have to start believing in content again. We’re going to have to pay for content to provide it.

I don’t believe in bloggers as anything other than an additional resource…

On whether citizen journalists, like those at the Huffington Post, can replace reporters:

To cover a beat as a reporter: I would not have done it for free, or to inform my blog, or for some sense of civic duty. I did it because the Baltimore Sun paid me a salary that I could support a family on…They paid me to go to the Baltimore Police Department and kiss enough desk sargents’ ass every day to find out what was going on and then to kiss somebody else’s ass to find out if I was being lied to, and then to compare one lie to the other and then to take them out for drinks afterward and find out what else wasn’t in that day’s story that might make it a follow-up story. It was 14, 15 hours a day. Nobody does that as a hobby. And the vanity of the internet having sort of approached the very edge of what journalism is…of this very immature medium is to say ‘We’re already doing journalism. Look, I went to a council meeting…’ Yeah, you went to the public-like, kabuki face of politics, which was the council meeting. But later on, if you actually knew anybody in the bowels of the city administration, you might have actually reported on what’s really going on. But for that, you would have needed to be a fulltime–and you’d deserve to be paid.

During my year at school, I heard a couple of times that there was no longer relevance to covering things like courts and city council meetings. My reporting boot camp class was one of the few I knew of that actually sent us to report a court story. But, as Simon suggests, going to the meeting is not enough, one has to go behind the scenes to get the story. That story will always be relevant.

He went on about USA Today and the rise of “no-below-the-fold” journalism (i.e. articles not continued past page 1):

‘The idea that you can cover something well enough to explain it to the mythical seventh grade-educated reader… I don’t want to write for that guy. To hell with that guy.

Trying to anticipate what readers want–that’s what got us into this mess. Go out and get the story.

Opinion is not the same as news, Simon says, though it appears to be where media outlets, like Newsweek, are going. Blogs like this one simply do not fulfill the same role.

I hope I get a job someday where I can do what Simon talks about, and I hope the hyper-local reporting that is going on is a start of a renewed good journalism, but I believe Simon is right that good journalism needs money. The price of not investing? Well, not to be dramatic, but democracy, or at least decently-functioning democracy. It’s too bad there are not more 1970s-style idealistic folks who still talk about how good journalism keeps the powers that be in check.

1 Comment | Journalism | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by elainemeyer

« Previous Entries