This week, in its “Innovators Issue,” the New Yorker reviews a book whose gist is that innovation isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. The true power of a technology, argues David Edgerton, author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, often emerges from the way people use it [...]
Archive for May, 2007
Maintenance Charge
Posted in City Life, Reflection on 11 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Nota Bene
Posted in Quotation on 11 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
I’m a jogger. Putting my legs through piston-like paces, revving up my heartbeat, giving the gland that secretes endorphins a good bitch slap—for me, this is a critical therapy. I do it because I need to. But for simple enjoyment, nothing beats a stately, vigorous stroll through congenial terrain. So I take Jan Morris’s point [...]
Downtown Loco
Posted in Movies on 10 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
So my wife says: “Martin Scorsese made a comedy?” Yes, well, but it’s a dark comedy.
It’s called After Hours (1985), and Scorsese directed it after studio bosses canceled his long-dreamed-of project to film The Last Temptation of Christ. He received that devastating news just as he was setting up shop near Jerusalem, and, in the [...]
All Things Must End
Posted in Reflection, Television on 9 May 2007 | 1 Comment »
That (“All Things Must End”) was the tagline for the final season of the HBO series Six Feet Under. Used in that context, the old saw cut brilliantly in two directions: In its fifth season, the show itself was coming to an end; and the show, throughout its run, treated death as its core theme. [...]
Bus Stop, Bus Stop
Posted in City Life on 7 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Why don’t more people ride city buses? Is it because the buses don’t feature wireless Internet service? Is it because there are, as yet, no “intelligent” bus stops—“[c]urved and gleaming like a Frank Gehry structure” and “wrapped in an LED ‘skin’ that can play video”? Not so much, I think.
The main piece (“Bus 2.0”) in [...]
Getting to Be a Habit
Posted in Movies on 6 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
A little more than halfway through the classic Hollywood musical 42nd Street (1933), Mohandas K. Gandhi makes a quick cameo appearance. That is, I think it’s Gandhi, or rather an actor playing him. I don’t know who else a middle-aged white man, made swarthy by make-up, wearing big round eyeglasses on his nose and only [...]
Way Out West
Posted in Books, Crime Fiction on 4 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
To provide content for this journal, I am strip-mining my file of brief detective-novel reviews. (I’ve been writing these little squibs for several years now.) This one covers a fine, fine work that I read a couple of months ago.
James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978).
Crumley hits a series of notes that another virtuoso of [...]
Nota Bene
Posted in Quotation, Television on 4 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
TV makes you stupid. It’s not an original insight, but back in 1980 the writer George W.S. Trow wrote an essay in the New Yorker that cast a particularly cold and waspish eye on the subject. Television, he suggested, had settled on the land like a slow, soft apocalypse, laying waste to every force in [...]
Suspicious Character
Posted in Reflection on 3 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Why do I sign the entries in this log as “The Obelist”? For that matter, what is an “obelist”? Taking the latter question first, I note that the word appears in no standard dictionary. Not at Dictionary.com. Not Merriam-Webster Online. Not in the Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, that squats on a shelf in [...]
Mixed Company
Posted in Reflection, Travel on 2 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Three standard ingredients at a wedding reception are dancing, photography, and alcohol. To succeed, a wedding reception should include no more than two of those ingredients. And one of the included ingredients must be alcohol.
I formulated that nostrum this past weekend at a Marriott Resort hotel in the exurban wasteland north of Chicago, where I [...]
