Friday, June 12, 2009 - Posts
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Moon, an awesomely creepy sci-fi film that opens in New York and Los Angeles today (and nationwide in coming weeks), begins with an advertisement for a futuristic energy company that has solved the world's problems by mining helium-3 from lunar regolith and firing it back to Earth. "Who'd of thought? All the energy we ever needed, right above our heads ..."
Lonely miner Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) has been stationed at an industrial outpost on the dark side of the moon with no one for company but a sycophantic robot named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). As his three-year contract winds down (along with his sanity), Bell begins to think that Lunar Industries has its own dark side-in the form of a ruthless business model that commodifies its workers in the most literal way.
It's tempting to lump the movie in with Wall-E, Dawn of the Dead, and other classic sci-fi critiques of consumer culture. But there's another, more obvious warning here, that couldn't be more timely: Stay off the moon!
Next Wednesday, NASA will launch its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter—the first step in the agency's costly and ridiculous plan to set up a permanent moon base. (The orbiter's mission: "to create the comprehensive atlas of the Moon's features and resources necessary to design and build a lunar outpost.") The recon mission will cost several hundred million dollars; to set up the base may run the tab into the hundreds of billions. Yet it's not at all clear what the potential payoff would be.
The government's rundown of potential "lunar exploration objectives" does include a Moon-like scenario: We might eventually "create a new energy market based on the moon." But even the most optimistic experts say that the use of helium-3 as a fuel source is a long, long way off.
In any case, the mental breakdown of Moon's main character does make a strong case for another of NASA's lunar objectives, coded "mHH8" on the master list (PDF): "Provide leisure activities to support the psychological health of those living on and visiting the moon."
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Behold the Comfort Wipe—an 18-inch plastic stick to which you may attach a clump of toilet paper, thus easing the arduous task of wiping your bottom. I'm sure this product serves a vital purpose for some, and, hey, that's wonderful. I'd just like to make a couple of comments about the ad:
First, I think we could have done without the testimonials. Anyone who would actually benefit from use of this product will immediately recognize its utility. No need for a series of fecal narratives from "ordinary" people. And I'd prefer not to ponder the precise physics implied by the fat dude when he says, "Being a big guy certainly has its advantages and disadvantages. This is a great product." (Likewise, the older woman seems disproportionately jazzed about her newfound wiping freedom. I swear she's on the precipice of winking at us.)
Second, the ad claims that the Comfort Wipe is "the first improvement to toilet paper as we know it since the 1880s." I'm not sure what they mean by this. According to the invaluable Toilet Paper Encyclopedia, packaged bathroom tissue was introduced in the United States by Joseph Gayetty in 1857. The next major breakthrough came in 1890, when the Scott Paper Company put TP in roll form.
Anyway, and more distressingly: Comfort Wipe's assertion completely ignores the advent of "wet toilet paper" around the turn of the millennium. Have we already forgotten Charmin Fresh Mates and Cottonelle Fresh Flushable Moist Wipes? Pre-dampened bumwad was a brilliant innovation, as these things go—even if consumers have been slow to catch on.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 28: "digital converter box." If you're Googling this, chances are you woke up to find your TV has gone snowy. Congratulations: You live in one of the more than 1 million homes that are unprepared for today's digital TV switchover! (Slate's Farhad Manjoo explains what just happened to your TV, and why you should be happy about it.)
No. 59: "Banksy." No, bloggers haven't uncovered the infamous graffiti artist/trickster's identity (though not for lack of trying). All this Googling is related to Banksy's new show, which opens tomorrow in Bristol, U.K. It's the biggest exhibition yet for the artist who once sold a painting titled "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit," and in typical Banksy fashion, no one knew about it until the day before its opening.
No. 62: "Pedamundo." Yesterday, singer/songwriter John Mayer coined this word for a made-up holiday that consists of "7 days apologizing for the year's indiscretions, culminating in a nice garden salad." Less than 24 hours after Mayer posted it to his Twitter account (followers:1,299,783) "pedamundo" is strongly trending on both Google and Twitter. The Wikipedia entry for "pedamundo" has already been written and deleted (stated reason: "does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject"), but there's no Web site, yet.
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With today's release of The Taking of Pelham 123, Tony Scott's remake of the 1974 caper film about a hijacked No. 6 train, I am bracing for another onslaught of nostalgia for New York City in the 1970s. The theory goes like this: Back when the city was nearly bankrupt and everyone looked like Al Pacino in Serpico, New York was scuzzy, but it had soul. (Because it was scuzzy, it had soul.) The lofts of SoHo were hives of funky industry. Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin were trying to strangle each other in the Yankee clubhouse. Television was playing at CBGBs; Bianca Jagger was snorting coke at Studio 54. Everyone was out of work; there was a real-live serial killer on the loose; and when a blackout hit the city, actual looting and mayhem ensued! You know, New York was dangerous, "edgy"—authentic.
This has become a party-line position among New York's arty chattering classes, especially as the economic downturn threatens to teleport us back to the bad old days. A trendy thing to say (in certain New York circles, at least) is that '70s-style deprivation would ultimately be a boon, scrubbing the gilding off the 21st-century metropolis and purging the town of hedge-funders and Eurotrash. The rents would drop, and bohemia would blossom again in the shadows of the condo towers and chain stores.
James Wolcott doesn't go that far in his tone poem to '70s New York published in the June issue of Vanity Fair. But "Splendor in the Grit" typifies the romantic pop-historical vision of the period—a surprise, coming from Wolcott's normally acid-dipped pen.
Wolcott draws reasonable contrasts between the city of then and now, pointing out that New York was "a more egalitarian city than it subsequently became with the rise of the super-rich," and that Manhattan below 14th Street holds less surprise today than it did in the days when "art galleries and Off Off Off Broadway theaters could spring up in shoebox storefronts."
But then he gets all rhapsodic about how hard-boiled the place was. The city, he writes, instilled in its denizens a "jungle-cat quickness ... and fine-tuned a ninja ability to suss out something ugly about to go down at the pimp bar." The tourists "looked scared." (Awesome!) And Wolcott's kicker is a doozy. Evoking the possibility of a "second go-round of the 70s" this time with "those spiky glass buildings that have gone up in recent years ... reflecting our own overreaching folly back at us with sterile mockery," Wolcott concludes: "Really, I much prefer rubble."
Oh, does he? Wolcott may have seen rubble on the front page of the Times when President Carter visited the South Bronx. But I doubt he had to step over any on his way to the art-house cinemas about which he waxes lyrical. I don't know about Wolcott's own circumstances, but I'm confident that many of his fellow travelers in '70s bourgeois-bohemia had a social safety net to fall back on if things really got ugly—namely, parents in a Westchester colonial or a Central Park West classic six with an empty guest room and a full refrigerator.
If you weren't a scene maker, New York's crumminess held a lot less allure. Stagflation, rotting infrastructure, sanitation workers' strikes, and rampant crime didn't just turn New Yorkers into ninjas and jungle cats—it made the city an incredibly unpleasant and often terrifying place to live. I have a memory, from around the time I was in second grade, of a perhaps forgotten New York folkway: the breakfast table distribution of "mugger money," cash that parents would give to their kids before packing them off to school. The idea being that a $20 bill would placate the mugger so he would opt not to blow a child's head off.
Or take some more memories from my family scrapbook. My mother was robbed at knifepoint on upper Broadway two times in 1974. She worked for a time at a city-run drug rehabilitation program in the Bronx, where she witnessed appalling corruption, including the sexual exploitation of junkie prostitutes by the bureaucrat in charge. (Her attempts to report this to higher-ups were met with indifference.) She got laid off in fiscal crisis of 1975 and took a job driving a taxi, which was very scary work, especially for a woman. Eventually, she had to move with her young son to Boston—a far worse fate, as I'm sure Wolcott knows, than living in a New York with fewer storefront galleries.
I hasten to add that my mother was a Barnard-educated professional who grew up in a tony Connecticut town, in the heart of New York's affluent commuter belt. Things were much direr for those teenage hookers in the rehab program and for millions of other New Yorkers whose plight is reduced, in the Life on Mars-Bronx Is Burning version of history, to the backdrop before which scenes of "gritty" glamour unfold.
Don't get me wrong: New York in the '70s was uniquely vibrant. No reasonable person is immune to the charms of Bella Abzug's hats, the Rolling Stones' Some Girls album, or Joseph Sargent's crud-caked lens. But the town was also uniquely miserable—not a place we want to revisit. There is something gross about nostalgists aestheticizing squalor that they never really, fully experienced.
As for rubble: It still exists in New York City in 2009, and Wolcott doesn't even have to leave his home borough of Manhattan to see it, although he might need to use his MetroCard. The thing is, rubble looks a lot better from a distance of 35 blocks, or 35 years.
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