Modeled on the Slate Culture Gabfest‘s weekly endorsements segment, each Friday we recommend things we’ve been reading, watching, listening to, playing, eating, and ultimately enjoying over the past week.
Keith
I don’t understand Broadway. Musicals are pretty clearly overpriced, overproduced, and overwrought, but people fill the seats anyway. Musicians seem to love them, too; one of the latest, Hands On A Hardbody, is scored by Trey Anastasio of Phish.
I have no idea if this show is worth the ticket price. I doubt it. I do know that the documentary on which it’s based, Hands On A Hardbody, is more than worth an hour or two of your time. The film has nothing to do with sex or pornography; “Hardbody” refers to a Nissan hardbody pickup trick, given away by a Nissan dealership in Longview, TX to the winner of an annual contest. The rules: contestants place their hands on the hardbody, and the last one to remove their hand wins the truck. The documentary balances the contestants’ backstories with the surprising drama and strategizing of a contest that pretty much involves standing still for two or three days straight. And it suggests but doesn’t overplay the financial shakiness of everyone involved. The dealership is trying to attract business it doesn’t have and the contestants are trying to score a vehicle they can’t afford, and because this is America it’s all dressed up as a fun opportunity for all. Inevitably, you get into the contest and start rooting for one of the competitors, but you’ll never guess whose hand is still on the truck when it’s all over.
Marian
This week I’m endorsing a certain old fashioned, but to my mind never outdated, custom in the English language. It started with this article about the death of the American pun. I’m whole-heartedly behind the effort to bring back a more robust use of puns. But I’m not as averse to what Simon Akam calls the “adjoinage” (“a functioning portmanteau pun, in case you failed to see, on adjoin and coinage“), which has, in his view, replaced the effortless grace of the classic pun. Sure, modern-day adjoinages like “stagflation”, “bridezilla”, and “chillax” may grate on the ears a bit, but I’m going to venture that the world is a better place for being able to charge someone with the social crime of “mansplaining”. As far as “locavores” or “Wikipedia” are concerned, both the phenomena as well as their honorifics are here to stay. In other words, I’m skeptical that neologisms are ever welcomed into the language with open arms. And besides––and this brings me back to classic puns like “I like to sing solo…so low you can’t hear me” and “a pun is its own reword”––part of the fun of the genre is its capacity to invoke the loudest groans on the part of its listener. Akam reviews John Pollack’s new book The Pun Also Rises, which makes the case that pun use declined in American usage after World War II, “as falling taboos made previously forbidden topics (e.g., divorce, sex, general dysfunction) legitimate material for a new American humor less reliant on wordplay.” Pollack’s book seems like a promising homage to a vintage art form, with groan-inducing chapter titles like “Labs and Retrievers: How the Brain Fetches Meaning from Sound” and “Cutting it Up: The Anatomy of a Pun”. My vote is for a renaissance of puns new and old, not only as an homage to our linguistic past, but as an affirmation of our right to use language in creative, transgressive, and groan-inducing ways.
Sigrid
Judgmental Them: “Free video games online, Sig, are as ubiquitous as porn on the internet. Duh.”
Giddy and Out-of-Touch Me: “Well, I don’t know about porn on the internet but I now know about PONG on the internet, suckers. Weeee, look what I found!”
1972: Exit the Golden Age of Capitalism…enter Pong and one of the earliest markers of the evolution of the video game. Designed by Al Acorn and launched by Nolan Bushnell for Atari, Pong’s less-is-more simplicity obscures a complex history between TV game (the original Pong arcade console was constructed entirely from television technology) and computer game technology and commercialization. For this fascinating story, take a look at Henry Lowood’s argument in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE or I-Triple-E) Annals of the History of Computing (don’t be afraid, nerds).
But really, why would you devote time to that…or to doing your laundry or scrubbing your bathtub or writing your dissertation… when you can procrastinate and return to my childhood by playing an online version of Pong here. Enjoy.
Tom
Over the past few years, my go-to source for North Indian recipes has been the fantastic website Manjula’s Kitchen. Part exhaustive recipe repository, part You-Tube cooking school, the site is run by Manjula Jain, a 64-year old Indian woman living in Rancho Bernardo, and her husband Alex. Although you don’t need to watch the videos that Alex shoots of Manjula cooking to make the recipes, you’re really missing out if you don’t. Their low-budget aesthetic and lack of pretension (Manjula often forgets ingredients while talking to the camera) run counter to just about every other food blog on the internet. But that’s part of what gives the site its charm. The food’s so good, it doesn’t need to be lit well (see below). Once you stock up on a few of the essential ingredients (asafetida, gram flour, etc.), the rest is easy. The recipes are simple, straight-forward, and delicious; I’ve never been led astray by one of Manjula’s dishes. Her Chana Masala (below) and Muthia are staples in my kitchen. I should note that Manjula is a practicing Jain, which means that she doesn’t use any onions or garlic in her cooking. So my endorsement is this: make sure to add onions and garlic to every recipe. Lots. It makes her already great food even better.
Adam
In some respects, this week has been insufferable – largely as a result of so many previously-hawkish pundits and bloggers reflecting on “how much they’ve learned” over the past 10 years of war. Of course, most of this conversation takes place in the abstract; few of the naval-gazers who inhabit the Acela Corridor have any actual contact with real-life soldiers. That’s just how things go, I guess. But instead of reading mea culpas, I recommend spending this time thinking about the cost of war upon people. And to that end I recommend a film I finally got a chance to watch earlier in the week: The Best Years of Our Lives. It’s a terrific movie, and holds up incredibly well after almost 70 years. It’s also timely, considering the current context. Treat yourself and watch it, even if you’ve seen it before.
Dave
S&P’s own Ryan Quintana recently recommended I check out Ursa Minor’s latest release, Showface, which flew under my radar because it’s only available via download. Ursa Minor is a showcase for New York singer/songwriter Michelle Casillas which traverses quite effortlessly between quiet ballads and ballsy riff-rock. The biggest reason she can pull off such a dynamic sound is due to guitar player, Tony Scherr–basically one of New York’s finest and probably the best guitar player in the country who happens to be a professional bassist. Tony has played string bass with most of the great jazz guitarists of the last 20 years (Bill Frisell and John Scofield top the list, but there are dozens) as well as the awesome Sex Mob, and his Downbeat-winning employers have rubbed off on him. But only in some ways. In most ways, Tony has a unique, nearly anti-technique approach to electric guitar which makes everything he plays sound experimental, nearly childlike, and Thelonious Monk-ish. The childlike quality is a ruse, and you can only hint at someone like Monk’s playing if you have a terrific sense of time. Tony does, and he likes to play with feedback too.
