May 26, 2012
Crisper Spoiler

On the way back from the farmer’s market today, I spotted a car with a spoiler. Like this one.

What exactly is a spoiler?

Cars have spoilers to increase their grip on the road. Normally the weight of a car is the only thing that forces the tires down onto the pavement…The way the spoiler works is like an airplane wing, but upside down. The spoiler actually generates what’s called ‘down force’ on the body of the car.

Like an airplane wing, but upside down. What could be more contemporary than an automobile with an upside down airplane wing on the back?

And this made me think, what’s the opposite of a spoiler?

Having just returned from the farmer’s market, my mind turned to the crisper.

Though I imagine most people don’t use it for its planned purpose, the crisper is intended to reduce humidity and keep produce fresh (or, crisper) longer. The crisper prevents produce from spoiling, or at least hinders the spoiling process.

Now, if the spoiler is an airplane wing upside down that produces down force, maybe the crisper is the equivalent of elevating the kitchen to the jet age?

Like what the character from Underworld, by Don DeLillo, has to say:

One of Erica’s favorite words in the language was breezeway. It spoke of ease and breeze and being contemporary and having something others did not. Another word she loved was crisper. The Kelvinator had a nice roomy crisper and she liked to tell the men that such-and-such was in the crisper. Not the refrigerator, the crisper. The carrots are in the crisper, Rick. There were people out there on the Old Farm Road, where the front porches sag badly and the grass goes unmowed and the Duck River Baptists worship in a squat building that sits in the weeds on the way to the dump, who didn’t know what a crisper was, who had iceboxes instead of refrigerators, or who had refrigerators that lacked crispers, or who had crispers in their refrigerators but didn’t know what they were for or what they were called, who put tubs of butter in the crisper instead of lettuce, or eggs instead of carrots.

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May 12, 2012
Self Parking

Several years ago, reports surfaced of luxury vehicles abandoned at the Dubai airport’s long term parking lot. This was interpreted as a harbinger of the pending recession. From a February 2009 New York Times story:

With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield.

I thought this was a memorable incident, a highly evocative scene. Consider the parking lot, or perhaps parking more broadly. I recently read a fascinating book review for Eran Ben-Joseph’s new book Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking (2012).

Moving from Dubai to the United States, apparently no one has taken an exact census of how many parking spaces exist in the country. The United States has over 250 million registered passenger cars. Estimates suggest that an average of three non-residential parking spaces exist for every car, which would add up to almost 800 million parking spaces. Ben-Joseph tells us that this total space would cover an area larger than Puerto Rico.

95 percent of the time, our cars are immobile.

“Parking lots are a central part of our social and cultural life…a modern common,” according to Eran Ben-Joseph.

But Dan Neil, reviewing Ben-Joseph’s book in the Wall Street Journal, challenges this statement.

I find parking lots to be intensely anti-social. I do not engage with strangers on my way to or from the car, and because these tracts are typically shelterless, there is no architectural cue as to where to congregate even if you wanted to.

The parking lot seems to represent pure functionality. Conversation about parking quickly turns towards specific numbers and places: How many cars? How many places? How far? How easy? The parking lot has an almost magical quality in the way it moves us towards shared frustration.

We have become entrenched in expectations of what parking should look and feel like. Ben-Joseph’s recommendations for new surface parking designs disrupt those expectations (surface lots are much less expensive than garages or underground parking, costing 60% less per space than a parking garage and costing 80% less per space than underground parking—so again, Ben-Joseph’s solutions are focused on functionality). More trees spread throughout our parking lots would create shade, making our lots more environmentally friendly. But then, how would we find our cars? Allowing overflow spaces, those areas of a lot only used when unexpected numbers of people arrive, to be green lawns. But then, do shopping malls want to create a state fair experience?

In 1972, Robert Venturi, Scott Brown and Steven Izenour published the folio, A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas. This short piece was later revised in 1977, becoming the seminal book Learning from Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Even here, the parking lot was forgotten, razed over to make room for design critique.

The parking lot is everyday life, pure banality, and like most other infrastructure elements, completely forgotten unless it’s gone horribly wrong.

This, from Ed Ruscha’s 1967 project, Thirtyfour Parking Lots:

Parking is merely functional. It also represents commodified space, a “lot.”

And parking, on the street or in a lot, is always assumed to be temporarily occupied, at best. No one should take up permanent residence here.

In Dubai, foreigners, not locals, are the people who abandon their vehicles at the airport. These are people who were not from Dubai, they lived there temporarily to make big salaries and send wages back home.

The transformation of a parking lot space, from a temporary occupation to a permanent one, only occurs alongside other social or economic transformations. What is this flipside relationship? When purposefully temporary occasions or moments become permanent ossifications, some part of society has evidently been turned upside-down.

People living in cars.

What is a trailer park, but a series of temporary homes made permanent in a parking lot.

There are stories, too, of foul play in parking lots. There is something about long-term airport parking that is particularly troublesome, I think. Mafia hitmen leaving bodies in trunks to rot, or serial killers. This is the last stop, before departure, almost like a graveyard: long-term parking.

This, from a 1996 Chicago Tribune story:

Just a few days after being alerted to look for the van of a missing northern Illinois woman, Chicago police Monday afternoon reported finding it—and a body inside—in a remote parking lot at O’Hare International Airport.

And because no permanent residents live here in these massive parking lots, there is no one around to take notice of suspicious vehicles, eccentric activities or something amiss. These are potentially perfect locations for deviant or abnormal behaviors, exactly because there are no social norms here. Operators paint roadway lines on the pavement to give form to this space, referencing the officialdom of the public street. But if a driver runs a stop sign in a parking lot, is this truly illegal? In any case, if lingering norms seep in from the outside, few eyes or presences could take account.

I have often found myself privately ranting about SUV owners parking in clearly marked “compact” spaces around Los Angeles. Surely they know what they’re doing.

But how to communicate, or apply persuasion?

What about the infamous note, left on the windshield?

One snowy winter night in Chicago back in 2000, Davy Rothbart was hanging out a friend’s place late into the night. After watching a film, he went out to his car parked on the street. There he found a note under his windshield wiper, a note intended for someone else, a guy named Mario:

This was the curious object that spawned Davy’s Found Magazine project, a vast collection of discovered notes and accidental ephemera. Among these objects, messages to fellow parkers are common—and they are most often unkind.

Bad parking, it seems, brings out the worst in us. Ever get complimented for parking? Me neither.

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April 24, 2012

As the counterpoint to the counterpoint I posted yesterday, here are two men taking a walk down the street in Bela Tarr’s 1994 film Satantango.

Feltámadunk means “we will rise” in Hungarian.

So, what about silence? Cruise’s running, while technically silent, seems like dialogue to me, more talking. He’s going somewhere with this. His runs are all part of the narrative, they represent plot movement. They embody his desire and passion.

In Satantango, these two men walk without passion. They walk out of necessity. And the environment represents emotion.

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April 23, 2012

As the counterpoint to that last post about rooms and borders people cannot cross: running.

As you might tell, Cruise doesn’t really develop his distinctive “run” until the early 90’s. I think The Firm (1993) is where he really hits his stride. Before that, he’s just flailing, freestyling. The Firm run is where Cruise starts to get almost robotic, much more structured. And in those later films you can see how tense he looks, which becomes a kind of signature.

I keep waiting for a moment to break out running like this, but it never seems to happen. The only time I see people run, outside of exercise, is to get on transportation on time. This happens at airports, on occasion, and all fellow passengers are supremely annoyed. These runners look awkward to me. They are usually people who would never run. Cruise, on the other hand, runs dramatically, and never with bags or luggage to disrupt him.

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April 22, 2012
Strange Border

(Call this more of a connection in-process, a note towards a connection, but I don’t think it’s quite reached its point just yet.)

I don’t think anyone has formally looked at those rooms and their boundaries which people cannot seem to cross, at least for non-political reasons. I like these strange borders. These limits that people recognize as un-crossable.

I had been reading Geoff Dyer’s book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker. It is really “a book about a film about a journey to a room,” and it’s called Zona. This book is a quite unique long string of connections and even ramblings, as Dyer discusses the film frame-by-frame. Here’s one point Dyer didn’t bring up. In the scene where “The Writer” approaches “The Room” he suddenly stops, for no visible reason.

Just then, winds pick up slightly and a voice, apparently from nowhere says, “Stop. Don’t Move.” The Writer comes back to the small group, demanding, “Why did you stop me?” But no one stopped him. “What the hell,” he says, sitting down and trying to understand his peculiar, perhaps metaphysical experience. “Fear’s sobered you up,” says the Professor, suggesting that the Writer invented the voice as a way to allow him to stop.

(You can watch the film on YouTube here. This scene takes place in Part 1 at 56 minutes in.)

Dyer explains, “the thing about the Zone is that it’s always subtly reconfiguring itself according to your thoughts and expectations. You want it to seem ordinary? It’s ordinary—or is it? And at that moment something occurs to make you think maybe it’s not ordinary, whereupon it does something briefly extraordinary. (Or does it?) Whereupon it becomes quite ordinary again.”

Again, a similarly uncrossed boundary emerges in the 1962 Luis Bunuel film The Exterminating Angel, a film about a party in a room that no one can seem to leave. Formal dinner party guests assemble in the room one evening and end up spending the night in the music room, adjacent to the dining room. Inexplicably, by the next day it becomes clear that none of the guests can seem to cross the border of this room. Panic sets in.

Animals begin to roam the deserted house (a surrealist’s touch).

Makeshift survivalism becomes necessary.

But if the crisis is purely psychological, why can’t the local authorities enter the room either? In the scene below, they assemble outside the house, unable to enter. What strange force? What convention of storytelling?

Two very different contexts, but a similar perplexing and inexplicable border. Is this psychology—more precisely a “group” psychology—or something else?

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April 15, 2012
Shipwreck With Cabin

The website Cabin Porn pursues misconception in its very name. Perhaps that’s on purpose, because the site focuses on isolation. An oxymoron right there, a social media dedicated to separation from society. And ironically enough, the site’s editor/founder is also the co-founder of vimeo, a social media site for sharing videos with fellow users. Cabin Porn provides just one thing: a long string of photos of cabins in the quiet solitude of nature.

(from Cabin Porn: Submitted and photographed by Nick LaVecchia.)

According to Finn Arne Jørgensen, writing in The Atlantic about the site:

Put simply, Cabin Porn is visual stimulation of the urge for a simpler life in beautiful surroundings. Commenters are likening it to “channeling your inner Thoreau.” Cabin Porn represents the return of the homesteader, living off the grid, self-sufficient and self-reliant.

Jørgensen, in his post entitled “What It Means That Urban Hipsters Like Staring at Pictures of Cabins,” is right to point out that the aesthetic of Cabin Porn is very much Dwell magazine (in fact, the latest issue of Dwell is a special issue dedicated to “making super-livable indoor/outdoor space…highlights never-before-seen houses, treehouses, fire pits, and pools, as well as the products to re-create them at home.”) I suppose the “unhappy hipster” has migrated into nature, perhaps feeling disparaged.

But can we just chalk up Cabin Porn to a bunch of “urban hipsters” seeking Walden Pond?

The film Into The Wild, directed by Sean Penn and based on the best-selling Jon Krakauer book, reminds me of the always persistent impulse or dream to escape society. Social and cultural norms may be more loose today than ever, but they always persist, constraining our personal freedom. The injustice or immorality of many modern institutions frustrate us, and often seem to suggest that we should either acquiesce, critique or escape.

Jørgensen partially writes this off, distinguishing the myth of the cabin from the reality: “However, if we look closer we begin to see small hints that the cabin is not as remote from civilization as we may think; TV antennas, satellite dishes, power lines, and roads pop into view. It turns out that cabin life not so simple after all.” True enough in practice, but this myth and metaphor seems to be more the point—especially on a site called Cabin Porn. The “porn” suggests that this site is about being a spectator sport. There are no tips or strategies for actual escape.

Into The Wild serves as compelling debate: Is it purely selfish to want to make a break for it? Or maybe this isn’t about escape at all, but a question of what is essential or  necessary for an individual human existence. There is a hint of social critique implicit here, as there is anytime we see an image of isolation like this.

I see these small, lonely cabins as shipwrecks, washed up on the shore of some strange land.

Hans Blumenberg, in his book-length essay Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (1997), writes of the shipwreck as a form open to many interpretations. Blumenberg covers many instances of the shipwreck metaphor, including the story of Aristippus:

Vitruvius reports that the Socratic philosopher Aristippus, shipwrecked on the shores of the island of Rhodes, recognized that there were humans nearby when he saw geometrical figures traced on the beach. The account has the philosopher—who was not exactly esteemed by the other students of Socrates, because he was too well acquainted with money and pleasure—undergo a kind of conversion. He entrusted to his homebound fellow passengers the message that one ought to provide one’s children with only such possessions as could be saved from a shipwreck, for the only things important in life were those that neither the trials of fate nor revolution nor war could harm. We have here the moralizing version of an anecdote that originally related to sophistic practice: even in the hopeless situation of being shipwrecked on a foreign shore, a philosophically trained person still knows what to do, when he recognizes civilized reason in geometrical diagrams and thereupon decides to proceed immediately to the city’s gymnasium and earn through philosophical disputation what he needs to restore his lost outfit. That is, he is a man who can take care of himself rather than a man who draws lessons from the shipwreck.

Herein lies the fantasies of Cabin Porn: That we are potentially self-sufficient. That we could escape society, at least for a time. That we could even discover our own way of thinking, talking and explaining the world out there—as Heidegger did at his isolated hut in the Black Forest (and described by Leland de la Durantaye).

And here is also the paradox: that we gaze at these fantasies with curiosity, but find it nearly impossible to act on them (…so then again, maybe this is all just mere “recreation,” like in the new Joss Whedon horror film Cabin In The Woods.)

(Patrick Lakey, Heidegger: Hut, Todtnauberg, Black Forest, Germany, I, 2005.)

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April 8, 2012
Pink Slime Is About People!

I’m obsessed with names right now: coining phrases or finding meaningful designations, labels, monikers, handles and appellations.

The latest, most brilliant, sticky and cunning sobriquet: Pink Slime.

A quick recap of this story: For a while now, meat producers have been recovering scraps from butchered cow carcasses, isolating the fat through a centrifuge, spraying this product with ammonia gas to kill bacteria and then packaging it as “lean finely textured beef.” This product is then used by supermarkets as a filler for their ground beef—in some cases constituting up to 15% of what’s purchased.

In early March 2012, ABC News ran a report claiming that 70% of ground beef in U.S. supermarkets contains the product. The public was outraged. Politicians and bureaucrats, such as the Governor of Iowa, tried to defend the filler product, explaining that it is a safe and resourceful use of butchered cattle. Within weeks, supermarkets and schools announced that they would no longer use the filler. Even McDonald’s will stop using it.

(A Beef Products Inc. processing plant in South Sioux City, NE)

In a 1997 book, sociologists Alan Beardsworth and Teresa Keil describe the recurring shape of a “food scare” which they define as “an acute outbreak of collective nutritional anxiety which can seize hold of public awareness and can give rise to significant short- and long-term consequences” (1997: 163).

Many incidents might fit the definition. The archetypal scare may have been the 1986 Alar scare that temporarily decimated the apple industry.

The sociologists simply outline this cultural form in five stages:

First: equilibrium state, where there is little sense of potential risk
Second: the public becomes aware of a potential risk
Third: concerns mount and the risk factor becomes a focus of interest in public debate
Fourth: Public response begins, often consisting of avoidance. “This response may be an ‘exaggerated’ one, apparently not in proportion to the ‘actual’ risk,” writes Beardsworth and Keil
Fifth: Public concern fades, attention moves on and a new equilibrium establishes itself. Chronic low-level anxiety may persist, and a resurgence could happen later.

I would never defend meat filler. However, it should be noted that the food industry has been treating food with ammonia since the 1970’s. More relevantly, Michael Pollan and others have criticized the beef industry for its enormous and negative environmental impact.

And what about cultural norms? Sweetbreads and offal are increasingly a hot menu item in many gourmet restaurants, like Animal in Los Angeles. I’ve got a friend in Houston who sells bycatch seafood to one such high-end restaurant.



In 1976, Marshall Sahlins wrote a book called Culture and Practical Reason where he critiqued the assumed “natural” connections between edible food and inedibile stuff, and how these relationships are undergirded by a seemingly logical division of subjects and objects in capitalism.

Marion Nestle also argues Sahlins critical logic in a recent Atlantic blog post where she claims that the problem here is largely cultural: “LFTB is not really slimy and it is reasonably safe and nutritious. But it violates cultural norms.” She doesn’t want to defend pink slime either, however:

Perhaps the best solution to the pink slime dilemma is simply to label LFTB as an ingredient. This would give individuals and schools the opportunity to decide for themselves whether culture or cost is the more important value in food choice.

An even better idea: Let’s produce safe meat in the first place.

But what about this ABC News story? After all, isn’t “food scare” a cultural production too, a cultural form that, as Beardsworth and Kiel point out, follows an almost scripted pattern?

Diane Sawyer’s introduction to the story:

And now a startling ABC News Investigation.  A whistleblower has come forward to tell us consumers about the ground beef a lot of us buy at the supermarket. Is it what we think it is? Or is it padded with a filler the whistleblower calls, “pink slime”?

Jim Avila has the story:

Gerald Zirnstein grinds his own hamburger these days. Why? Because this former United States Department of Agriculture scientist and, now, whistleblower, knows that 70 percent of the ground beef we buy at the supermarket contains something he calls “pink slime.”

We have named the problem, and it is a great name! In our contemporary world, where many people are more than aware of “culture,” the efficacy of Nestle and Sahlin’s critique is waning. It’s not so much a problem of assumed natural order as it is the appeal of a fascinating name.

And here are some strange twists to this story, as a cultural form.

One: This is not “news.” Take a look at this New York Times story titled, “Safety of Beef Processing Method Questioned,” and dated December 30, 2009. This paragraph is buried deep inside the article:

Another department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, called the processed beef “pink slime” in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues and said, “I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling.”

Two: Gerald Zirnstein, the alleged “whistleblower” isn’t really a whistleblower. The New York Times got Zirnstein’s email through a Freedom of Information request. Without FOIA, the world would have never known the beautiful and alarming magnetism of this phrase.

The pop culture source code here is not alar or salmonella, e. coli or even mad cow disease…

It’s Soylent Green.


The dystopian 1973 film Soylent Green is set in New York City in the year 2022. 40 million people live in the city, food is scarce and most people live on rations provided by the Soylent Corporation. Soylent Green is a small green wafer that advertisements claim contains high-energy plankton. Strangely, “Soylent” is a composite word: soybean + lentils (neither of which has anything to do with plankton, but it kind of sounds like a product Whole Foods would carry today if the name wasn’t already taken). Soylent Green is more nutritious and tastes better than other Soylent rations, but it’s in short supply, which leads to food riots.

Now we get to the real shape of the food scare as a form: The film’s star, Charlton Heston, plays Robert Thorn, a police detective investigating the murder of a wealthy Soylent Corporation Director. Soon, Thorn’s investigation leads him to discover that Soylent Green couldn’t be made of plankton, because internal company documents explain that the oceans are barren. In fact, Soylent Green is made out of humans. Or, as Heston’s character famously puts it at the conclusion of the film, in a last desperate plea to alert the world of this food scare: “Soylent Green is people!”

So if Soylent Green can tell us anything, it’s that Beardsworth and Keil are not nearly ambitious enough in their characterization of the cultural life of a food scare—at least not nowadays, if they ever were.

Consider the ABC News report.

Start with an everyday food product: here, ground beef.

Provide a startlingly simple, but critical question: “Is it what we think it is?”

Introduce the insider, the rogue, the truth-teller and/or the former conspiracist: “A whistleblower has come forward to tell us consumers about the ground beef a lot of us buy at the supermarket.”

And then, drop the real bomb. No, not the intricacies of some kind of food chemical process. I’m talking about naming the crisis. This is the real stuff of cultural production.

Pink Slime

Who’s the real hero then? Charlton Heston, Diane Sawyer, ABC News and Jim Avila: The Investigators.

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March 23, 2012
Foundation Campaigns

Let me start with the conventional beginning of all beginnings:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

The photos above are from the film Adaptation (2002), which is the story of a screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, tasked to adapt a book written by the New Yorker essayist Susan Orlean called The Orchid Thief: a thoroughly complex assignment because of Orlean’s flowing New Yorker intellectual style. Kaufman, already a nervous writer, is driven deeper into anxiety by the seemingly simple, but persistent problem: Where to begin?

Okay, we open with Laroche. He’s funny. Okay. He says, “I love to mutate plants”. He says “Mutation is fun”. Okay, we show flowers and… okay. We have to have the court case. Okay, we show Laroche. Okay, he says “I was mutated as a baby. That’s why I’m so smart”. That’s funny. Okay, we open at the beginning of time. No! Okay, we open with Laroche. He’s driving into a swamp.

The other week, I was struck by the strange opening scene from a short film called Kony 2012 (transcript here), which is about one non-profit organization’s project to collect donations, money that would be put to the purpose of apprehending indicted Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony. For most Westerners, this is an admittedly obscure topic. Filmmaker Jason Russell, a co-founder of the non-profit, was tasked with figuring out how to communicate the campaign. Again, the problem: Where to begin?

The images above are the opening scenes of the film. And this is how Russell begins narration:

Right now there are more people on Facebook than there were on the planet 200 years ago. Humanity’s greatest desire is to belong and connect. And now we see each other, we hear each other…We share what we love, and it reminds us what we all have in common. And this connection is changing the way the world works. Governments are trying to keep up… Now we can taste the freedom. and older generations are concerned. Many people are very concerned about tomorrow. They could get worse next year. The game has new rules. The next 27 minutes are an experiment. But in order for it to work, you have to pay attention.

And…cue the birth scene, video footage of the filmmaker’s son being born…

Every single person in the world started this way.


I come back to Adaptation again because I’m strangely fascinated by the way Russell/Kony 2012 set up this story, and the seeming innocence of the approach compared to Kaufman’s anxiety about adapting the complex reality of non-fiction into a “Hollywood” story, a story that pop culture might embrace:

Charlie Kaufman: The book has no story. There’s no story.
Marty: Alright. Make one up.

Consider also the Formation Scene from Terrence Malick’s 2011 film Tree of Life, not the introduction to the film, but a return, in the middle of the film, to the depths of origins. These images below are from that origin scene:

That film actually found its origins in the Book of Job, the story of a man who has everything in life taken from him, an experiment by God and the Devil to test Job’s faith, to see if Job would question whether he could understand the complexity of truth. The opening quote from Tree of Life:

Job 38: 4,7: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?….When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy


It’s interesting how this universal scope of the earth, the universe, the beginning of things can mean either that we’re universally connected, or that we can’t seem to grasp the complexities of what we’re trying to piece together. It’s either a terrible cliche, or a deeply resonant wisdom. Superficial foolishness or ironic impossibility.

Why start here? Couldn’t any and all call for action begin here? Beginnings don’t determine endings, but they certainly shape our expectations. They set the tone for a project’s ambition.

I’ve been surprised then that, amidst the criticisms of Kony 2012 that I’ve read in the past week, no one has pointed out that the seeds of its special kind of hubris might be recognized in the beginning of its story.

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March 15, 2012
Olive Garden, Between The Lines

I referenced this pretty common idea of “reading between the lines,” in a prior post I wrote called “Under Water”. It’s an idea that I keep coming back to. That post concerned  a past era of communist Poland, a cultural moment when story writers, journalists and other authors often asked audiences to “read between the lines” and read a hidden code of critique about the communist state. Jane Curry wrote about this happening in Polish journalism, so did Janine Wedel, Jacek Kurczewski and others. Stanislaw Lem’s short story about an entire nation breathing underwater, repressing themselves, was a way to  talk of the absurdity of communist Poland.

With this in mind, I became very interested with this week’s big news story about 85-year-old Marilyn Hagerty, who recently became an internet viral sensation for writing a seemingly earnest review of her local Grand Forks, North Dakota Olive Garden. The review, derided by a young generation of bloggers, facebookers and twitterers as ridiculously simpleminded, quickly went viral.

The USA Today, for example, summarized the whole story:

Marilyn Hagerty, a restaurant reviewer for the Grand Forks Herald, reviewed a new Olive Garden in her town, and the straight-ahead review went viral online

But Marilyn Hagerty’s son, a Wall Street Journal reporter, wrote a front page article (in the bottom column “quirky story of the day” area), explaining:

She doesn’t like to say anything bad about the food. Her regular readers read between the lines. If she writes more about the décor than the food, you might want to eat somewhere else. Her Olive Garden review was actually mixed.

Instances of writers subtly inserting critique between the lines of their text are common. So are instances of audiences missing those subtle messages. Hagerty had the last laugh this week however, standing from a higher ground of measured critique, scoffing at the young people who spout out every negative commentary as soon as it hits their frontal lobe.

As her son wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

she didn’t care to scroll through the thousands of Twitter and Facebook comments on her writing style. “I’m working on my Sunday column and I’m going to play bridge this afternoon,” she explained, “so I don’t have time to read all this crap.”

I can’t help but wonder if there is still more critique left between Hagerty’s lines. I’m still searching for what this is, but I think it might have to do with a defense of everyday life in smaller cities, especially for older people who are not on the cutting edge of media. Or maybe this could be a defense of politeness.

Reminds me a bit of something I read in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a passage that I’ve always liked and believed in:

If we really want to understand the moral grounds of economic life, and by extension, human life, it seems to me that we must start instead with the very small things: the everyday details of social existence, the way we treat our friends, enemies, and children—often with gestures so tiny (passing the salt, bumming a cigarette) that we ordinarily never to stop think about them at all.

A critical project that begins with not being a jerk? Let’s continue in the unsaid and the overlooked…

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March 8, 2012
Culture, Connectors & Conspiracy Theories

I’ve been reading Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, sub-titled a “secret history” of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden. It covers the span of time from the late 1970s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan up to September 10, 2001. It’s a remarkable book, on many levels, particularly in the way it illuminates the co-existing conflicts simmering in that region of the world and the challenge of trying to shape policy and events there. Coll tells a complex story with many layers of interests and intrigue, all existing in a haze of secrecy. One thing it’s done for me is put a lot of current news in context: a story today about corruption in the Afghan air force, for example.

Now, here’s a quote from a New York Times story today, about a controversial report that sought to discover the details of how America tracked down Bin Laden in Pakistan:

Mr. Qadir’s report was “larded with strange conspiracies,” Mr. Bergen said, adding that it was indicative of a broader culture of conspiracy theories in Pakistan. “When I was in Abbottabad in July, plenty of people told me Bin Laden didn’t live there. What do you say to that? It’s so untethered from rational discourse,” he said.

Mr. Qadir, for his part, concedes that his conclusions are based on conjecture, and admits that his [Pakistani Intelligence Service] ISI briefers may have concealed crucial facts. “I’d be a bloody fool if I didn’t see that,” he said. “I don’t say this is the entire truth. But it’s the closest you will get at this point in time.”

Coll’s book helps make clear, among other things, why Obama didn’t notify Pakistan that special forces would be attacking Bin Laden. Basically, because Pakistan was probably aiding, if not funding Bin Laden. That sounds like a conspiracy theory itself.

And here’s another interesting background story, this from the New York Times book review of Coll’s book, which the Times reviewed alongside Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies. The story comes from Clarke, who was there in the White House during the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. But unlike most of the new Bush regime, Clarke was acutely aware of the portrait Coll would later paint of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and the how this part of the world functions.

The most controversial incident in ”Against All Enemies” deals with the president’s eagerness to link the Sept. 11 attacks to Iraq, and comes on the night of Sept. 12. Clarke writes that he saw Bush wandering alone through the Situation Room. The president then stopped and asked Clarke and a few aides to ”go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this.”

Clarke said he was ”taken aback, incredulous.” He told the president, ”Al Qaeda did this.”

”I know, I know, but … see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred… .” After the president left, one of Clarke’s aides said, ”Wolfowitz got to him.”

Strange connectors are all too common, some due to secrecy and some due to lack of knowledge. But their prevalence cannot be simply attributed to what we know or don’t know.These connectors are pathways of thinking and decision-making. Some are just curiosities, but some are quite frightening.

Photo: Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of an anti-Taliban guerilla force and prior to that, leader of an anti-Soviet guerilla force. Massoud had actually attempted to warn America about an impending terrorist attack. He was assassinated on September 10, 2001.

10:53am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZB92XyHfu2jm
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