Prisons, Poverty, & Pickups: The Other West

Posted on January 9, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I’ve just driven 1720 miles from Colorado to Pennsylvania . . .

. . .  and the contrast between Western and Eastern U.S. is on my mind. One thing I notice is the discrepancy between the media myth of the West and the reality. When outsiders think of Colorado they (often, usually) think Aspen glitz, the playground of the rich, while most of southern Colorado seems noticeably poor yet hardly downtrodden. People make less money there, but they love the landscape, they love the hardbitten lifestyle. We were in Florence, Colorado, known for its tumbleweeds and vacant lots, piles of cinder blocks in the yard, trailers in various states of disrepair, when my wife jokingly said, “That’s what I like about Colorado. You know, the junk and the poverty.” She compared it nicely to the antiseptic consumer-whore atmosphere of suburban St. Louis, where we visit relatives to and from Colorado. Florence is also famous for its Supermax prison, which we drive by every time we visit, the highway signs warning us not to pick up hitchhikers. And virtually every other vehicle (besides the Subarus, which we drive) is a pickup. Welcome to the Other West. Real America for Real Americans, to play on the new Onion News Network catchphrase.
And here’s a photo of my beloved Custer County, east of my mountain house, out on the prairie:

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Deer & Coyotes in the New Year

Posted on January 3, 2011 by williamjcobb

I’ve had deer and coyotes in my yard at the start of this new year, so something must be right with the world. I double-checked and corroborated that the mountain scenes in True Grit were filmed near Santa Fe, which is the southern end of the Sangre de Cristos, what I rank as my mountains. The deer and coyotes all look healthy. It was 5 degrees when I took this picture:

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"True Grit" in the True West

Posted on December 28, 2010 by williamjcobb

So last night I saw the Coen Brothers’ True Grit in the mountain town of Canon City, Colorado, which was at one point in the 1880s the stagecoach stop east of Bighorn Canyon. A Western in a town of the New (Old) West. Jeff Bridges outdoes John Wayne easily, as the crusty Rooster Cogburn, his voice extra-gravelly and rough, saying lines like, “I don’t believe in fairy tales nor sermons about money, Baby Sister, but I do appreciate the cigarette.” The actress who plays Maddie Ross steals the show. Like Miller’s Crossing, which pays homage to other gangster and film noir directors/writers, True Grit seems to allude to other great westerns, especially Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and Cat Ballou—which, by the way, was filmed in Custer County, Colorado, where I am now. I liked the courtroom scene in particular, and the moment when Maddie Ross jumps into the river and swims it on her horse is thrilling. I still like A Serious Man better, but I’m sure I’ll watch True Grit over and over again.
It was dusk when we left the theater and we headed west toward home, into a sunset silhouetting the Sangre de Cristo mountains, and it was like we were headed into True Grit country, armed only with a halfbag full of popcorn and the black bones of Junior Mints rattling around in a waxy white paper box.

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Peter Benchley's "Jaws," the Novel, as Toothsome Holiday Reading

Posted on December 23, 2010 by williamjcobb

One thing good about the holidays, and about being away from home and routine, is Weird Reading. I have a first edition hardback of Peter Benchley’s “Jaws” (1973) on my bookshelf in Colorado, and picked it up to pass the time while watching it not snow again. It’s actually pretty good. “Toothsome” I think is the word. I read it years ago when it came out, but I didn’t remember that in the novel, the couple actually has Sex On the Beach before she gets chomped while swimming afterward. The sentence that describes it is almost an entry for that Bad Literary Sex Award, the one for which John Updike was a perennial favorite: “They fumbled with each other’s clothing, twined limbs around limbs, and thrashed with urgent ardor on the cold sand” (10). Note the obvious parallels to the woman’s death in the maw of the Great White and her thrashing with weekend hookup stranger (this is revealed in subsequent paragraphs). The ending is lifted straight out of Melville’s Moby Dick, but it’s grisly fun.

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Review of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" Anthology, and a Nod to Holiday Pleasures, of the Guilty Variety

Posted on December 23, 2010 by williamjcobb

I’m on holiday vacation, offline for the most part, doing all those things one does on holiday, like witness TV programs I generally wouldn’t be caught dead watching, such as anything involving “. . . With the Stars!” in the title. Like “Skating With the Stars.” They’re upping the ante, aren’t they? But let’s take it one step further: What about “Brain Surgery With the Stars”? Let’s get Lindsay Lohan on that one.
My review of the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” anthology is here in the Dallas Morning News:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/books/stories/DN-bk_20under40_1219gd.ART.State.Edition1.436f4c2.html

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On Chuck Closterman's Zombie Analogy and Stephen Graham Jones's "The Ones That Got Away"

Posted on December 5, 2010 by williamjcobb

It seems everyone is trying to deconstruct and decode the recent zombie craze, including Gail Collins in the NY Times, who wrote a funny piece about the zombie Congress, and this morning Chuck Closterman has a good(ish) piece in the NY Times describing how modern life is like a zombie attack (failing to mention dinner parties, I might add):
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/arts/television/05zombies.html?pagewanted=2&hpw
In the interest of “transparency” (and so Julian Assange doesn’t rat me out) I should declare that I’m not a fan of zombie movies, stories, or the “zombie mythos,” as one of my students recently put it. It all seems pretty dumb to me, frankly. As do vampires. Too one note. I live in Pennsylvania at least half my life, which is the setting for the original Night of the Living Dead and some of the subsequent sequels, so maybe it seems too close to home. I once told a class at Penn State that Night of the Living Dead was filmed here, and proposed that we should emblazon our license plates with the legend State of the Living Dead. (They frowned and didn’t think it was funny.) But the best writers can always put a new spin on any idea/metaphor: Stephen Graham Jones has a new book of horror fiction out, titled The Ones That Got Away, and it includes his killer story “Monsters,” which is (somewhat of) a zombie story, and puts a coming-of-age spin on it: troubled teen meets girl and has incipient romance, only to be undone by the undead. It’s a great example of genre mixing, a way to reenergize the undead. Or we can just eat their brains. And start saying, “You know, maybe the Republicans are right.”

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On the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" Anthology: Attack of the Dinner Party Zombies!

Posted on December 4, 2010 by williamjcobb

So I’ve been swamped with work the last few days, not to mention trying to decide what Christmas presents to give family members who fall into the Seriously Irritating category (Ah, festive cheer!), but I have managed to review The New Yorker‘s new anthology, 20 Under 40, which is billed, partly, as The Future of American Fiction. (Here let Santa say, “Oy.”) Many of the stories were quite good, and I’ll gladly single out Chris Adrian’s “The Warm Fuzzies” and Joshua Ferris’s “The Pilot” as two of my favorites. Too many of them seemed reminiscent of that blast from the past, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Oh, the horror of a dinner party gone wrong! Oh, the agony of our child getting rejected by the tony preschool! Where is Robin Leach when you need him? Nicole Krauss takes the cake when describing a successful writer (not her, no, seriously) who walks around the Village looking in bookstores to see if they’re stocking copies of her book and displaying them sufficiently to contribute to her self-esteem.
This other little tidbit caught my eye, on MSNBC: Those dastardly dastards at Wikileaks have now promised we’re going to get the dirt on UFOs in diplomatic cables:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40491489/ns/us_news-wikileaks_in_security/
I can’t wait. Seriously. I’ll probably have a dinner party to celebrate.

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A Reason for Holiday Glee: Coen Brothers' "True Grit" to Open December 22nd

Posted on November 28, 2010 by williamjcobb

So the filmmakers who are putting pretty much everyone else to shame have a Christmas present (and they’re Jewish, to boot) for the world, their adaptation of True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges stepping into John Wayne’s boots. Here’s the official website, which includes some killer trailers: http://www.truegritmovie.com/
I’m old enough to have seen the 1969 original, which garnered an Oscar for John Wayne, although it was comically bad in parts, mainly for having Kim Darby and Glen Campbell in key roles. I remember a goofy scene in a rattlesnake pit. Whatever the original was, the Coens are going to blow it out of the water, and probably most every other film of 2010, considering the rather weak year it has been, mainly one anonymous romantic blahmedy after another. All is not lost. If I can swing it, I’m seeing this one in Colorado, on a snowy night.

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Oil Reserves Drop by 90% and Electric Cars Throb: Is That Peak Oil or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

Posted on November 23, 2010 by williamjcobb

I’m a fan of the concept of Peak Oil, even if I don’t know how valid the actuality of it is: In a nutshell, it makes sense to me that oil will eventually reach it’s peak, that is, the halfway point of production, and after that, we had better start coming up with an alternative energy source for the future, the sooner the better. But here’s the rub: Peak Oil experts/prognosticators assert we are at that point now, or very soon will be, and others say it’s all a bunch of hooey.  The Peak Oil skeptics are largely Supply Side oil industry spokespeople or their pundits, who argue, in effect, “There’s no problem, and if there is, we’ll fix it.” When oil reached $4/gallon briefly, that fateful summer of 2007 before economic meltdown (and almost no one mentions how those two events were in lockstep), Peak Oil types had a convenient gas pump price to point to, and after the meltdown, so went the price of oil. Since then the Peak Oil argument has been largely silent. But like climate change, it still looms, and here’s an interesting little ditty I noticed in the small news print of our major webnews:
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/10/27/alaskas-untapped-oil-reserves-estimate-lowered-90-percent/?hpt=T2
Essentially Alaskan oil reserves were just dropped by 9-10 billion barrels. This kind of fuzzy oil industry figuring (how high it was calculated to begin with) is just the kind of mis- or disinformation that warps our belief in the continuity of our energy future. Most oil-producing nations announce their own figure for oil reserves, and the more you can plausibly say you have, the more you can pump, and the more you can sell, the more money you make in the short term. In the long term, it will probably all be used, and the oil fields will be drained: Alaska is a good example. It’s one of the last great Supergiant fields discovered and utilized, only coming to fruition in the 1980s, and it’s already in steep decline.
The other recent development I’ve noticed is the reality of electric cars. They’re about to go on sale, and soon we’ll all be able to own one, with the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf giving the Toyota Prius (a hybrid) a run for the money of market share. But electric cars only make sense for climate change enthusiasts (a small number, that, and with the caveat that only if the electricity is generated by some cleaner method than coal) and those who are trying to avoid high gas prices. My guess is that the auto companies now see something on the horizon that most of us are neglecting: Once the world economies wake up from their doldrums, the price of oil/gas will shoot up quite high. Will that vindicate the Peak Oil people? I still don’t know. But it’s another near-future issue that, like the mortgage crisis and downfall, is being ignored by our (fearful, greedy, corrupt) leaders.
The biggest myth in America is that of the Wise Business Leader. “Trust the market. They’ll save us. Business can fix the problem. Give it freedom, and the wise CEOs will do the smart thing.” It’s absolutely false. The leaders of various financial industries buried the country in the real estate boom/bust, all for short-term gain. It will happen again. A leading oil industry group predicted, back in the early 2000s, that the end of cheap oil would be 2010.
The next year or two will be interesting, to say the least.

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New Harry Potter Film Promises to Change Your Life

Posted on November 20, 2010 by williamjcobb

This week Jon (Sometimes Funny) Stewart had an amusing riff on the Palin brats in the news, dancing and otherwise, and mocked putting a gun in his mouth to end it all due to the absurdity of attention to such cultural muck as Dancing With the Stars. In the same vein, it boggles my mind that Harry Potter drivel gets coddled as much as it does, and here’s an example, a quote from film critic A.O. Scott in the NY Times, which I’m amazed he can write this stuff with a straight face:
“In this chapter their adventures have an especially somber and scary coloration, as the three friends are cast out from the protective cocoon of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry into a bleak, perilous grown-up world that tests the independence they have struggled to obtain under the not-always-benevolent eyes of their teachers. Childish things have been put away — this time there is no quidditch, no school uniforms, no schoolboy crushes or classroom pranks — and adult supervision has all but vanished. Albus Dumbledore is dead, and though Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) and Alastor Mad-Eye Moody (Brendan Gleeson) offer some assistance early on, Harry and his companions must rely on the kindness of house elves, on their own newly mastered wizarding skills and, above all, on one another.”
He later goes on to compare the plot hijinks to that shining beacon of blather, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a halfbaked mystery within a thoroughly idiotic enigma, which made about as much sense as Sarah Palin’s foreign policy. I’ve actually tried to watch the film version several times, and can never make it through. I keep waiting for the moment to realize why sane people would find this at all interesting, much less to make Brown one of the highest paid writers of all time. Like the popularity of those hideous Jersey Shore mutants, it just goes to show there’s no logic to human behavior, none.

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