Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Anyone whose interest was Piqued by recent Peak Oil discussions on this blog should check out Scott's OilDepletionDebate blog. Scads of facts, thoughts, and links. Scroll down to the bottom of the current page and you'll find ways to watch and listen to talks by all kinds of experts and authorities. There's more than enough fodder at Scott's blog to keep the conversation churning for a very long time.

Best,

Michael

at May 17, 2008 | perma-link | (2) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Bowhards--

Tomorrow, as the sun sets behind the lovely O'Hare control tower, we will be bidding a fond adieu to Flyover Country and boarding our silver oiseau for the Left Coast. Herewith are a few more short observations regarding the curious country we have been exploring, a land apparently unknown to the Mainstream Media.

* Nancy was impressed by the University of Illinois campus. And so was I, even though the Georgian(?) architectural style is not my absolute favorite. The quadrangles are large -- large enough that I wonder if they really relate to human scale. Moreover, the campus is huge. That makes me wonder if it's hard for students to dash from class to class if they only have a 10-minute break. The University of Washington was effectively about a half mile across in my student days, and getting from one end to the opposite could barely be done in 10 minutes.

I also wonder about getting around during winter at Illinois. Those distances and large quads strike me as fodder for the occasional frozen corpse come January.

Still, I liked the place so much I bought my son a University of Illinois baseball cap.

* Indianapolis was nice. Nothing famous there save the Speedway, but I can see where it could be a pleasant place to live. One can take nice walks in the general area of the canal, the government center and the Memorial.

* Cincinnati has the Roebling Bridge to Kentucky, opened in 1867, less than two years after the end of the Civil War. It was designed by John Roebling, who also designed the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. We walked across the Roebling and I took photos of rusting.

The town has the Netherland Plaza Hotel, a great Art Deco monument opened in 1931. If you go to Cincinnati, be sure to check out its Palm Court, which would not have been out of place on the liner Normandie.

* The Air Force museum near Dayton has been expaned since I was last there. Another exhibition hall was added, allowing more breathing room for the planes. An interesting addition is a display of four Presidential planes: FDR's "Sacred Cow," Truman"s "Independence," Eisenhower's "Columbine" and the Air Force One where LBJ took the oath of office.

* Near Detroit, we visited the Edsel/Eleanor Ford house on Lake St. Claire. Ace architect Albert Kahn designed the building to resemble a cluster of Cotswold cottages. I'll probably post some pix later.

Later,

Donald

at May 16, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments

Friedrich von Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards,

In a previous post, I asked what plans our presidential candidates have to address the sheer financial drain implicit in importing $120 a barrel oil. In the resulting comments, the discussion quickly turned into a debate over the reality (or unreality) of the Peak Oil hypothesis. Given that most oil reserves are now held by national oil companies that prefer to keep their production and reserve data secret or announce figures that cannot be independently verified, I know of no way to prove or disprove this hypothesis. (The whole question has become awfully metaphysical.)

But there is some publicly available data that would seem to provide us with guidance here. As the blogger Hellasious remarks:

Exxon is the world's largest non-state oil company and the largest publicly traded corporation by market capitalization ($478 billion). If anyone has both the incentive and the resources to find and sell more oil, it is them. But they can't. In the last five years, as the average price of oil more than tripled, their production has been flat[:]

Data: Exxon Annual Reports, NYMEX

And it's not as if they haven't been trying: their capital and exploration expenses for upstream operations have nearly doubled in recent years.

Data: Exxon Annual Reports

What do I take from this? Well, de jure peak oil may or may not exist, but de facto peak oil looks like our current reality.

Some additional confirmation of this comes from a story by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard from the Daily Telegraph, "US-Saudi oil axis faces day of truth":

When President George Bush went to see Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah in January to plead for higher oil output, he was politely rebuffed.The rematch is likely to be a great deal more strained.

If the Saudis deny help once again, they risk incalculable damage to their strategic alliance with Washington. The price of crude has rocketed by over $30 a barrel since that last fruitless meeting, briefly touching the once unthinkable level of $127.

Why would the Saudis alienate their prime military protector? Well, maybe they aren’t increasing production because…they can’t. The article goes on to quote a source who is not exactly a raving extremist on the subject of peak oil:

Chris Skrebowski, Editor of Petroleum Review, said the awful truth is that Saudi Arabia cannot raise oil output much even if it tries. "The myth of Saudi spare capacity is convenient for everybody: it gives OPEC leverage, and it gives the West hope.

"But Saudi reserves are secret. They have never been verified," he said.

Mr Skrebowski said oil is soaring because output is falling in Mexico, the US, and the North Sea. Russia stunned the markets with a 1pc fall in first quarter in Russia. "We are running the system flat out," he said.

Could there be other explanations? Sure. It’s possible that producing nations are afraid that if the world tips into recession the price of oil may take a large tumble, and they’re reluctant to invest significant sums in raising production volumes. But, again, who cares? The result is (de facto) peak oil.

Cheers,

Friedrich

at May 16, 2008 | perma-link | (12) comments

Michael Blowhards writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Star YouTube webcam dancer Patty Mayo now has her own website. (On the tab in my browser it reads "Patty Mayo -- Official Fan Site.") A cute bit from Patty's self-description:

Ima small girl barely standin at 5 ft but i love it, im fun sized.
Im single and crushin.
Just give me a guy who likes me for me..and i'll stop wit this myspace bullshit and just be with him <3

Here's some footage of Patty in action:

I don't know about you, but I'm guessing that the level of teenaged booty-shaking virtuosity in the U.S. has skyrocketed since the birth of YouTube. Talk about having a stage. Talk about competitive pressures. Talk about feedback.

I ran across Patty thanks to Agnostic, who writes that he can smell the difference between "older" (30ish) women and younger ones; and who -- speaking of "game" -- has come up with some "Facebook game."

Best,

Michael

UPDATE: In the Comments, DOBA recalls a simpler time, or at least a time when he didn't feel quite so horrified by popular culture. It was the era of Cheryl Tiegs:

at May 15, 2008 | perma-link | (27) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Well, that's certainly a relief!

But what if he's being optimistic?

Best,

Michael

at May 15, 2008 | perma-link | (5) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

I've been thinking some recently about the difference between "what a person considers the ideal" and "what a person thinks might be useful in the here and now."

One reason for this is that The Wife and I recently visited a show of paintings and drawings by Nicolas Poussin at the Metropolitan Museum, and Poussin will often get a person thinking about such things.

Another reason is a small-t theory that I'm working on: It seems to me that people often get themselves in trouble because they scramble the two categories. Instead of doing what they can with what's available in the present tense, they try to impose their ideal regardless of what the actual situation before them really presents. Or maybe they too-regularly deduce their way to present-day behavior from the ideal, despite the practical fact that there's often not much connection between what idealism suggests and what's-needed-here-and-now.

Still, there is that question of the ideal ... Whatever else it is, it's certainly a part of life. What to make of it? How to deal with it?

To me, the question of the ideal is a little like the question of sex fantasies. We all have them. What to do about it? And what to do with them? (If anything, of course.)

Sad experience suggests that imposing fantasies ("Hey, honey, let's me dress up like Batman and you like Catwoman!") can flop. Instead of delivering the expected bliss, acting on the desired ideal can instead spoil what might actually be magic about the present moment.

Still ... It's impossible not to feel an attachment to your favorite dreams and imaginings. And maybe there are in fact some ways of indulging in them that can pay off nicely. For some reason, for instance, I'm especially vulnerable to topless-beach fantasies; they seem to represent some kind of erotic ideal to me. And damned if a week The Wife and I once spent on a French-Caribbean island wasn't one of the most pleasing things I've ever lived through. Of course, it took an enormous amount of practical real-world effort to arrange, execute, and pay for our week of ideal bliss ... (If anyone was wondering: The Wife enjoyed it too, or so she tells me.)

My tentative conclusion: Our ideals and fantasies are resources that can confer much pleasure; that can sometimes serve as beacons and reminders; but that can also screw our lives up completely; and that are therefore perhaps usually best enjoyed at a bit of a distance.

Rough rule for myself: Enjoy the fantasy -- don't impose it. If the moment's right, go ahead and enter into it -- but be prepared for the fact that even a week on a topless beach in the Caribbean will come to an end. But, generally speaking, do what you can to deal honorably and fairly with what's immediately before you. And don't be too hard on yourself when you screw up, because you will screw up, and most of the time that's OK too.

So far as practical life goes, I rather like the way that much classic art (and much Michael Oakeshott-style conservatism) handles the ideal. Instead of trying to make the artwork (or the moment) achieve the ideal -- instead of letting the ideal dominate -- it sets the ideal off on a distant plateau, gives it respect, and acknowledges its beauty. And then it shakes the spell off and gets back to fumbling through the here and now.

The real and the ideal ... Nature and civilization ... Facts and imaginings ... Can't we all just get along?

Idling around Wikipedia earlier today, I was reminded that -- speaking purely about the ideal, and not proposing anything in the way of concrete action -- I don't have too many quarrels with anarcho-primitivism. A few things that I can't go with ... A few things from bioregionalism and Vedanta that I'd like to stir in ...

But generally speaking, ideal-wise, I'm down with anarcho-primitivism. Not that I'm about to turn into Ted Kazcinski or anything. But (awful those his acts were -- dude shouldn't have gone that far with it!) I could certainly see his general point, and I share a few of his general feelings. I try not to let this attachment to the anarcho-primitivism ideal derange my here-and-now behavior too much. But, y'know, for me there's no getting away from the fact that anarcho-primitivism is over there, on that distant plateau, glowing under the same golden light that warms my ideal topless beach.

Have you ever run into a p-o-v (that has a label, of course) that pretty much nails your ideal way of seeing things? I mean, when you really get down to how you really feel about things? Screw responsibility and adulthood entirely: I'm talking total romanticism, no compromises, and extreme impracticality here.

Here's a visit with the anarchist John Zerzan, who really does seem to live the credo, or much of it anyway. I've read a lot of Zerzan, and I've found him smart and fun; god knows he's nothing if not provocative. Hey, is there any reason why an ideas person shouldn't play his axe as nuttily as a punk rocker? Can't excitement and extremism make their own worthwhile (if only because provocative and fun) contributions?

A few other uncompromising extremists whose thoughts I resonate to: Stewart Home (his book "Blow Job" is a riot), Colin Ward, and Edward Abbey, whose "Desert Solitaire" is a real beauty. This is a nice read-it-in-an-hour intro to Vedanta.

* Semi-related: Back here I wrote about the Situationism- influenced post-punk band Gang of Four. Much of Situationism clicks for me too -- especially when it's accompanied by a great dance beat.

OK, now: Back to real life ...

Best,

Michael

UPDATE: Thursday, Ricpic, and Peter have got me humming this song:

at May 15, 2008 | perma-link | (5) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Those curious about the Peak Oil theory but perhaps a little tired of James Kunstler may enjoy this interview with investment banker, conservative dude, and Peak Oil believer Matthew Simmons. It would be hard to turn up a clearer, more concise presentation of the thesis than this one.

If you haven't had your fill of Kunstler, here's an interview in which he brings together nearly all his themes.

One especially nice passage:

The ideas issuing from the highest circles of architectural education today are patent absurdities, such as the idea that novelty ought to trump the public interest, or the idea that ‘creativity’ (so-called) is a superior method than the emulation of forms that have already proven successful (meaning problems already solved). Personally, I view some of the leading architects of our time as being among the wickedest people in the world ... The record of their ideology in the cities and towns of America is there for anyone to see: abandonment, ruin, and the dishonour of the public realm.

I know less than nothing about Peak Oil. But where Kunstler's evaluation of the high-end architecture establishment and its work goes, I'm with him all the way.

Best,

Michael

UPDATE: Thanks to BIOH, who points out a blog that takes quite a different view of Peak Oil.

at May 15, 2008 | perma-link | (5) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* Thinking person's rocker Brian Eno has turned 60. The Independent visits with Eno, who has collaborated with Bowie, Byrne, Cold Play, and Microsoft. (Link thanks to William Sauer.)

* Life is sometimes good. (Link thanks to Anne Thompson.)

* BHH sometimes wonders if he shouldn't take up a manual occupation -- something useful, and that can't be shipped overseas.

* It lives! Or seems to, anyway. (Link thanks to Marc Andreessen.) Marc also turned up a priceless clip of Bill O'Reilly showing how he gets his way.

* Lots of tasty-sounding lectures and talks can be downloaded here.

* Learn about China's fastest-growing city. (Link thanks to Michael Wade.)

* Educated black people (at least in Atlanta) evidently like gated communities.

* Stuff one black guy hates includes "stupid names." Chris isn't crazy about Isaac Hayes either.

* Why shouldn't people be able to live in a yurt on their own land, Stephan wants to know.

* MBlowhard Rewind: I took issue with the general view of Louis Kahn as a great architect.

Best,

Michael

at May 15, 2008 | perma-link | (1) comments

Friedrich von Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards,

The blogger Hellasious raises an interesting point I haven't heard dicussed much by any of our presidential candidates:

…at $120 per barrel, revenue from exporting crude oil and its products comes to over $1.85 trillion per year. The Middle East alone gets nearly a trillion and the former Soviet Union $300 billion - and that's before including natural gas.

At current oil prices, this is by far the largest capital recycling and concentration pump in the entire history of the world. A dollar may not buy as much as it used to, but a trillion every year still buys plenty…Very plenty, in fact: [it buys] US and European banks, other resource companies like ore and coal miners, shipping and port operators, electricity, water and telecom providers and a host of other essential businesses. That's where all the SWF [sovereign wealth fund] and private oil money is going, most commonly channelled through secretive private equity funds.

Obviously, the oil exporters are furiously planning for their post-Peak Oil future: sensibly, they don't want to ride camels again. And if this goes on much longer, by the time their oil wells start to decline they will own everything that matters and will be sitting - literally - atop all the money in the world.

What are the rest of us - Americans and Europeans alike - doing to plan our post-peak future? Next to nothing, is the painful answer. If a few EU nations like Germany, Denmark and Spain are attempting to face the alternative energy challenge, the US as the largest oil consumer is making a momentous mistake by its absence. Stubborn reliance on imported oil is rapidly impoverishing the nation. That sucking sound we all hear in our pockets is money vacuumed out by the oil exporters, only to come back as foreign equity ownership of everything.

I think a detailed policy response to this situation would be kind of reassuring from our future leaders, don't you?

Cheers,

Friedrich

P.S. Is it just me, or is this whole campaign the most surreally irrelevant and, ahem, beside the point exercise you can remember? Surely somebody -- somebody at the DoD perhaps -- must be thinking hard about what the new world heralds and what we might do about it. Or is everybody just asleep at the switch?

at May 14, 2008 | perma-link | (17) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Is Palm Springs the gayest city in the U.S.?

And did you know that the Dinah Shore Golf Tournament (officially the LPGA Nabisco Golf Tournament) is one of the country's premier lesbian gatherings? It's such a party that it's sometimes known as "Spring Break for lesbians." Buy an all-expenses-included ticket to what has become known as "The Dinah" here. A little late for 2008, but 2009 is just around the corner ...

Semi-related: Don't miss this Steve Sailer classic. I wrote an appreciation of the gay Canadian pornographer Bruce LaBruce. Is Apple an especially gay-friendly company?

Best,

Michael

at May 14, 2008 | perma-link | (9) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

An entertaining Roissy posting -- bouncing off of an Alias Clio blogpost -- about whether women and men can ever be friends has spawned a very entertaining commentsthread.

New slang term to me: LJBF, for "Let's Just Be Friends." Coolly enough, "LJBF" can function as a verb -- a woman can "LJBF" a dude. Betas, I've learned, get LJBF'd all the time. Alphas know enough not to let the possibility arise in the first place.

How do you react to the scene over at Roissy's, by the way? (Skipping over the fact that he's a very talented badboy blogger.) FWIW, I'm amused, if a little appalled, by it. I like the rowdiness, the lack of inhibition, the defiantly anti-PC exuberance ...

Plus, visiting Roissy's is always an instructive keeping-up-with- the-zeitgeist experience. That whole Alpha-Beta-"game" way of thinking about and discussing romance and sex was almost entirely new to me when I first stumbled across Roissy's blog.

Following the discussions there, part of me thinks, "Well, good. At least they're talking about courtship, if in their own raised-on-first- person-shooters kind of way." Another part of me thinks, "Hmm, back in the day I'd probably have done a little better for myself, bed-notch-wise, had I had some 'game'."

But I confess that a third part of me listens in, gasps, and thinks, "Have relations between the sexes really come to this?" It seems to me like such an everyone-out-for-himself, seething-with-mistrust- and-antagonism scene that -- were I young -- I wouldn't want to take part in it at all. What can I say? That's just how I react to shark-tanks.

What the to-and-fro on the current posting has mainly left me thinking about, though, is something unrelated -- and very basic: women and the way they chew things over.

Here's my comment from Roissy's:

What *do* women get out of endlessly combing over the micro-shit of their unremarkable day? Christ!

Does it take them that much effort to digest what they've been thru? Do they do it for the pure girly joy of it? Like most men, I can’t help suspecting that they do it partly to drive men crazy with impatience.

With The Wife (who I adore), I’ve gotten to the point where, when she swings into chewing-her-day-over mode, I tell her “OK, I’ll give you 10 minutes on this, but then we either move on or I start throwing chairs around.”

Any insights or theories from anyone? When I ask The Wife what it's about she just gives me one of her patented "You'll never understand even though you clearly ought to" looks. And when I look at myself I find no such compulsion no matter how deep inside I plunge. At the end of my day, I may or may not need to indulge in a five-minute vent, but that's a purely functional thing -- a matter of gunning the motor once before shutting it down for the rest of the night. Because, at the end of my day, what I really want to do is let go and move on, or maybe just relax.

End-of-the-day girltalk by contrast seems to have no point or goal whatsoever. It's ruminating for the sake of ruminating, and the unbraiding of details seems to want to go on forever. But maybe women simply don't want to let go and move on. And maybe fretfulness is a rewarding state of being for them. Of course, I'm reading all of this in male terms ...

BTW, I actually find the way women experience life enchanting, and I always have. Their hopes, their dreams, and (up to a point anyway) their feelings ... And, where romance and sex are concerned, I'm very much of the "her pleasure is my pleasure" school, though (I hope, anyway -- Roissy has me worried about this) not to the point of wussiness. OK, maybe to the point of wussiness. But that need women have to re-live, to examine, and to re-examine every damn thing that happened, and every micro-feeling they felt, during the day ...? That I could live without.

Ladies: Enlightenment, please. Dudez: How do you react to (and deal with) gals' determination to rake the day over? There's always the vanishing-behind-a-newspaper option, I suppose ...

* Semi-Related: Thongworld.

Best,

Michael

at May 14, 2008 | perma-link | (39) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Thanks to visitor Bryan for pointing out this NYTimes article about the current fashion for glass staircases. Funny comment from Bryan: "Glass, glass, glass. You would think it's this mysterious brand-new material, architects love it so much."

Please, can someone commission a nature-or-nurture study of modernistic architects? Is the tendency to worship transparency and geometry something that some people are born with? Or are they brainwashed into their fascination with it?

Small point: Given that pre-modernist and non-modernistic architects aren't mesmerized by abstraction to anything like the extent that the modernistic crowd is, this can't have to do with architects and architecture per se. After all, some architects -- not the kind who get tons of coverage from the likes of the NYTimes, alas -- are actually concerned with such values as shelter, social life, solidity, and even coziness. Visit John Massengale and Katie Hutchison for glimpses of a world the NYTimes will tell you very little about.

Gotta love this quote from Rick Mather, the architect who created the glass staircase featured in the Times' story:

“I like the ambiguity of it, I like that it brings in light, and I like that it disappears,” Mr. Mather said. “I like to not show how it’s supported.”

Yup, that's what we want our architects doing: not creating satisfying and solid spaces and structures, but dissolving our structures around us. At his website, Rick Mather shows off a lot of flat planes, geometry, glowiness, crisp edges, and glass. Mather shows off little but that, it seems to me ... But, heck, well, at least his clients know what they're in for.

God, but it must be exciting for architects to imagine themselves to be not just humble service-people doing their modest best to contribute a little to our shared quality of life, but instead to picture themselves as gurus, philosophers, and experimental scientists. Let's rescue humanity from tradition, from brick, even from rooms (modernistic architects prefer "spaces" to "rooms") -- from any familiar sense of how we're being sheltered! Too bad about those people who are terrified by the experience of, say, glass staircases ... But (as always) sacrifices need to be made so that the "liberation" process can move forward.

Bryan's note reminded me of some vidclips I'd collected of the glassy insides of one of NYCity's Apple Stores. So I threw them together and hit iMovie '08's "Upload to YouTube" button. Here's my latest production, already viewed by 12 discerning and fortunate viewers, I see:

Not a complete surprise to learn that Mr. iPod is a transparency buff himself, is it? I wonder if someone might want to suggest to Steve Jobs that the values that make for a nice computer or music player might not be the ones that are appropriate for buildings.

In any case: Some people sure have weird tastes in architectural thrills. Too bad so many of them are architects. Modernistic architects: Preening zombies we need to learn to protect ourselves against.

Incidentally, I have no quarrel with people doing what they want with interiors, of course. None of my business. But when the mania for glass and geometry starts to be imposed on the public realm it's another thing entirely:

Let me be the first to express my gratitude to those planners, developers, and architects who show such determination to transform our cities and town into sterile hospital corridors.

Nikos Salingaros argues -- to my mind convincingly -- that modernistic architecture is a kind of cult, and that its ideology is a pernicious mind-virus.

One of these days I'll get around to making the case that today's highbrow-architecture scene is well understood as something akin to the high-end women's-fashion world. Both fields specialize in the creation of brittle, hysterical whimsies that are sometimes amusing in snobbish and absurd ways. Little harm is done when such productions are fodder for the pages of Vogue, and when they're understood to serve fantasy purposes. But what kind of person would impose high-strung, soon-to-fall- out-of-fashion craziness on our public realm?

Semi-related: I wrote back here about how often ad designers are making use of something I call "the Glow." Visuals galore. If you're at all like me, you sometimes look at new buildings and spaces and think, "Gosh, why are developers and architects so devoted to making new buildings that look like magazine layouts?" Back here, I ventured the observation that today's banks look like brochures for themselves.

Thanks again to Bryan.

Best,

Michael

at May 13, 2008 | perma-link | (10) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Here I am in the Midwest, acting as sherpa for my wife who has never been here. Below are a few short thoughts that might (or not) get expanded into real blog posts.

* The touristy part of Chicago is much nicer than it was 15+ years ago when I was last there. Clean, fairly friendly. Lots of really tall condo towers or hotels-cun-condos going up. The Daleys, despite other faults, know how to run the place.

* Milwaukee was another matter. Hollowed out downtown. Some large blocks razed down to dirt. Everything has moved to the 'burbs. Call it a region without a center.

* Madison, Wisconsin also disappointed. Here you have the state capitol building and the University of Wisconsin on each end of a half-mile street. I was expecting State Street to be nice. Instead, its highlights were the campus book store and Potbelly's sandwich shop.

* Springfield, Illinois isn't much of a town, but has several places of interest. There is Lincoln's tomb and his house (the guide noted that the bannister of the main stairway is the one thing you can touch that Lincoln himself surely also had touched). And there is his presidential library and museum. The latter is overdone and I might do a rant about new museum displays. Not far are a nicely restored train station and a large Frank Lloyd Wright house that, unfortunately, was closed yesterday. Oh, and my father was born in Springfield 100 years ago minus two weeks. So it was high time that I got there.

Later,

Donald

at May 13, 2008 | perma-link | (11) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards

By The Birds and the Bees -- co-starring Mac OSX:

Best,

Michael

at May 12, 2008 | perma-link | (5) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

I have Terry Teachout envy. No, I don't envy everything about him, though there is a lot to admire.

Specifically, I envy his productivity as a writer. For example, he writes 1.5 columns a week for The Wall Street Journal. He has a monthly column in Commentary and posts an occasional book review on their web page. He has a blog (see the above link). He writes books -- biographies of H.L. Mencken, George Balanchine and (forthcoming) Louis Armstrong.

What I find astonishing is his ability to crank out thousands of words over a few days on his book projects. And the results are good-quality writing. Teachout has even mentioned on his blog that he has the ability to estimate how many hours it will take him to produce copy of a certain length about a given subject: amazing!

Me? I struggle.

As regular readers know. I'm toying with the idea of a sort of art history book. I want to send prospective publishers an annotated outline, the introductory chapter and a sample chapter from the main part of the proposed work.

And boy is progress slooooow. I started chipping away on things nearly half a year ago and I'm only now within striking distance of completing the first draft of everything. Then I'll have to polish, add more material, perhaps reorganize things. I'll be lucky if I start publisher-shopping by July.

There are reasons for my snail's pace. Foremost is that fact that the project is speculative, and that means my motivation is less than it would be if I had a contract and deadline in hand. Then there is the matter of life -- the quotidian stuff and all the travel we do serves to interrupt and distract. And there is the blogging. I love blogging, and will post an essay before getting around to book work. By that point, my energy level can be a lot lower because writing can be tiring.

Perhaps the most important reason why I'm making such slow progress is that I'm not a natural writer of book-length pieces.

Some people like Terry Teachout and our own Michael Blowhard can sit down at a computer and words simply flow. Not me. The post you are reading now will probably take an hour to complete. My book-writing sessions yield 600 words if I'm doing well and half that if I'm struggling.

I suspect that my "natural" writing length is on the order of 600 words -- around the size of a newspaper column. Moreover, I think that I can usually make the points I want to at that approximate length. I find it hard to elaborate or the keep tossing in new examples.

Perhaps it would be different if I were writing a narrative of some kind, a biography or perhaps a history or description of a well-defined event such as a battle. In those cases, the what-comes-next problem is largely resolved once research and outlining are completed.

Maybe I can find a little cheer by realizing that plenty of other writers find it difficult to squeeze words out like toothpaste. In fiction, some writers are best at short stories, others do well with novellas and the remainder often seem to be in the same length league as Tom Clancy and Leo Tolstoy.

I'll be fortunate if I can land a publisher. And even more so if I can get one that doesn't mind doing a book with lots of pictures and maybe only 60,000 words.

Does anyone out there know how to become prolific even when working against type?

Later,

Donald

at May 11, 2008 | perma-link | (4) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Lemmonex takes her tax refund and invests it wisely.

A nice bit from Lemmonex's self-description:

"I have become increasingly ambivalent regarding politics; it is all a lie and they are all the same. Really. DC has embittered me further. Save yourself some trouble, pick one or two issues that are really important to you and just vote along those lines."

I ran into Lemmonex over at Roissy's.

Best,

Michael

at May 11, 2008 | perma-link | (18) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

The whole world is going video. YouTube ... Video comments on blogs ... For a while now it has also been possible to use video to review products at Amazon. If you haven't yet run across a Customer Video Review at Amazon, here's an example.

Best,

Michael

at May 10, 2008 | perma-link | (0) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* Peter L. Winkler is pretty sure that D.C. madame really did commit suicide.

* Dennis Mangan is thinking about leaving California. Visitors offer many tips.

* Alice is trying not to become a tiresome geezer-blogger. It's already too late for some of the rest of us.

* Gotta love it when a girl finds a career that really suits her. (NSFW)

* The worst cities in the country for hay-fever sufferers.

* Have these guys figured out how to predict the results of the Presidential election? (Link thanks to FvB.)

* Great motorcycle. (Link thanks to Graham Lester.)

* Men eat more meat; women eat more fruit. (Source.)

* Hey, a mammoth black vs. brown riot at an L.A. high school -- who could have anticipated it? Any bets on whether we'll be seeing more or less of this kind of thing?

* Yahmdallah reached towards a bug that he thought was dead, and ...

* Eyeball the pixel couch.

* Who's the spanking-est of them all? (NSFW)

* James Kunstler wouldn't be surprised if the economy falls apart in the next month or two.

* Agnostic tries to figure out why beautiful girls from more traditional areas are more modest about their looks than beautiful big-city girls.

* Derek Lowe takes a look at yet another anti-cholesterol drug flop and offers this: "For now, there’s no way to really know what will happen in humans without, well, using humans." Can someone please share Derek's wisdom with the entire field of economics?

* Her new HDTV has reawakened Lynne Kiesling's interest in hockey.

* I'll probably never get around to reading Yuri Slezkine's "The Jewish Century," praised by Steve Sailer among others. How nice then that YouTube carries a good hour-long Harry Kreisler interview with Slezkine.

* MBlowhard Rewind: I ventured a General Theory of women's fashion magazines.

Best,

Michael

at May 10, 2008 | perma-link | (6) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* Speaking of art that lasts ... Did anyone in 1965 think that "Shotgun" (by Jr. Walker and the All-Stars) would still be enjoyed more than 40 years later?

Read more about Jr. Walker here.

Question: When he was creating "Shotgun," was Jr. Walker aiming for a place in the Western Civ canon? Or was he trying to come up with a way to get an audience dancing? Plus: Sigh, if I only had one-tenth the personal style of Willie Woods, the All-Star's guitar player, I'd do a lot better in life ... Here's another All-Stars track that's bursting with more than its share of funk.

* Did you continue watching the clip above? If you got a kick out of the smooth moves of The Temptations, perhaps you might enjoy learning a bit about Cholly Atkins, the man who was Motown's house choreographer during the label's peak years. Yes, that's right: There was one guy who was responsible for giving Motown's stars their gorgeous and influential moves. Is there any way to argue that Cholly Atkins wasn't a major culture-figure? The man choreographed The Temptations, The Miracles, and The Supremes, for God's sake. Forgive me for thinking that Cholly Atkins deserves a place on the same shelf where Jerome ("West Side Story," NYC Ballet) Robbins has already been placed.

Back here, I raved about a documentary focusing on the guys who played in Motown's house band.

* One of the misleading things that's often said (or unconsciously maintained) about the arts is that they're automatically progressive. To make good art is to be progressive -- that's just how it is.

Few fields are more infected with this loony idea than jazz, whose story is often presented as a series of innovators, one after another doing what they could to move the music in the direction of "freedom." Psychotherapeutic and political overtones have most definitely not been run away from.

What then to make of a phenomenon from more than 50 years ago: the Dixieland Revival? In the midst of all the "progress," one of the most important developments in jazz from 1940 right through the '50s was a revival of the very earliest jazz styles. Here's one of the most prominent of the Dixieland Revival bands, Eddie Condon's:

And don't they swing hard! Though that clip is from 1952, and though that's quality jazz, that most definitely ain't bop. Deal with it, dogmatists. RedHotJazz writes this about Eddie Condon:

In 1938 he led some sessions for the Commodore label and he became a star. He had a nightly gig at Nick's in New York City from 1937 to 1944. From 1944 to 1945 he led a series of recordings at Town Hall that were broadcast weekly on the radio. Condon opened his own club in 1945, and recorded for Columbia in the 1950s.

In other words, during a period when orthodoxy would have us convinced that what was going on in jazz was the transition from swing (popular, accessible) to bop and post-bop (difficult, increasingly esoteric), in actual fact one of the busiest and most popular jazz figures around was a guy who performed jazz in the most traditional of ways.

* People who dislike the usual jazz story might love (as I do) Philip Larkin's collection of reviews and essays, "All What Jazz?" It's cranky genius. This appears to be the currently-available version of the book. Nice passage from an Amazon Reader Review of the book:

One warning for serious Jazz fans -- for Larkin, the downfall of Jazz began with Charlie Parker. He had no interest in Parker, Mingus, Miles Davis, or almost anyone who recorded after the later 40's. In fact, he lumped Charlie Parker with Ezra Pound and Pablo Picasso as person with reputations as great artists, but whom he felt had a terrible effect on their art.

Here's a review of a couple of books about jazz that touches on some of these themes.

* Finally, some punk-era smoking-ness from Chryssie Hynde and the Pretenders:

Chryssie's performance has got me marveling once again at the intensity of '90s feminism. Do you look at Chryssie Hynde -- snarling, having her way, leading a tough and blunt band -- and think, "This poor thing is really being exploited. Women sure do still have a long way to go!" Me, I look at her, think (very briefly) "Wow, Chryssie's really kickin' ass tonight," and then join everyone else out on the dance floor.

Funny thing: We at the time (early '80s) thought feminism had finished its job, much as we took it for granted that gays had achieved liberation.

As Hannah, who gave us an interview about being raped while a college student in the mid- 1970s, said:

I honestly don't remember there being a strong or strident feminist presence on campus. I had grown up with a kind of practical feminism myself. My mom was a pioneer in her field, back in the 40’s. I knew all her stories so I knew what it was like for real groundbreaking women. We had it easy by comparison.

Anyway, there were 20 women out of 200 students in my department at college. I only remember one of them being militantly feminist. She was a lesbian as well, as it happens ...

My friends and I distanced ourselves from "Feminists" with a capital F. We were more intent on proving ourselves by what we did than through politics. I had read "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan, and I thought, "Well of course, women are going to be more than homemakers." I was surprised that someone needed to read this in a book in order to accept it.

Of course, at the time we also thought that punk rock was bringing a once-and-for-all end to pop music ...

So why did feminism roar back in in the '90s? And why do college kids going on getting worked-up about gay lib? Hmm: Is "liberation" by its nature a quest that can never come to an end? Is it a fantasy as addictive as a drug?

* Oh, OK: a bonus clip. Because more people ought to know about him, here's Jackie Wilson (with Billy Preston on organ and the immortal "Shindig" go-go girls) doing "Lonely Teardrops":

Among his many virtues, Jackie Wilson was certainly the world's best-ever suitcoat stripper-offer and tosser-asider. And I'm tolerating no disagreement about that judgment.

Best,

Michael

at May 10, 2008 | perma-link | (2) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

The University of YouTube, Continuing-Ed Dept., brings us a dancing lesson from Prof. James Brown:

Good God!

Best,

Michael

at May 10, 2008 | perma-link | (3) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Ah, the pressures of modern living ... The Telegraph reports that more and more men are losing interest in sex.

Best,

Michael

at May 10, 2008 | perma-link | (12) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Why are actresses and models willing to get so much more naughty and frisky for European magazines than they are for American ones? (NSFW)

Best,

Michael

at May 10, 2008 | perma-link | (1) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

A cool new cultureform -- the YouTube dance-off: challenge, response, response-to-response. Lots of mischievous choreography, sharp-witted direction, cute kids, and hiphop acrobatics. (And that Lacey Schwimmer is one racey Mormon. Vavavoom!) Lots of work for chiropracters and surgeons around five years from now too, I'm guessing.

Hey, has anyone else been following Bravo's "Step It Up and Dance"? God, I do love watching dancers. I managed to get through an entire episode and half. That's a new reality-TV-watching record for me.

Here's a funny spoof of that Miley Cyrus / Vanity Fair photoshoot.

Best,

Michael

at May 9, 2008 | perma-link | (1) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Nearly twenty five percent of Los Angeles County’s welfare and food stamp benefits goes directly to the children of illegal aliens, at a cost of $36 million a month. (My emphasis.)

Source.

Best,

Michael

at May 9, 2008 | perma-link | (18) comments

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

On an interesting thread over at GNXP, Thursday issued a challenge. I'd been goofing around, writing that "novels themselves were quite disreputable at the outset -- the reality TV and tabloid-TV of their day. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that some novelists started putting on airs."

Here's Thursday:

Bullshit. No less a "serious" personage than Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a novel and a very good one too. Novelists like Richardson, Fielding, and Burney were considered serious writers right from the beginning. Haven't you read Boswell's life of Johnson. I have a hard time believing Jane Austen didn't take her meticulously planned and written books as high art. Tom Jones is planned to classical perfection. Critics like Hazlitt and Coleridge took the novelists like Richardson, Smollett, Sterne and Fielding seriously right from the start. Stop trying to rewrite literary history as if no-one had any clue what was high art and what wasn't.

OK then: Time to get serious myself. Here's my response to Thursday:

You're making a basic mistake. You're projecting current-day critical rankings back onto past eras. You're assuming that what we now consider great was self-evidently Great at the time. No.

Look, what a work's reputation is today often has zip to do with how it was taken (and what it represented) when it was produced. What we now consider great was often taken for granted at the time, or looked-down-on. Defoe's novels are just one example. At the time they were published they weren't taken to be novels in our current sense. They were made-up fantasies that pretended to be works of reportage -- in other words, they were aesthetically and morally dubious productions akin to today's scandal sheets and reality TV, or maybe even to those books that turn up every few years about alien encounters in Australia. It took more than a century before many people started wondering if maybe "Robinson Crusoe" wasn't a pretty good novel. Works often become "literature" in hindsight, not at the time of their production.

No matter how great we recognize "Tom Jones" to be today -- and I'm a big fan myself -- the early British novel was a scrappy and aesthetically scorned form, far more akin in its time to what journalism and TV are these days than to today's "literary fiction." The early English novel was a middle-class market phenomenon, not a serious or intellectual or literary one. We've learned to see structure, complexity, grandeur, and depth in these books only in retrospect.

From Wikipedia's "literature" entry: "Early novels in Europe did not, at the time, count as significant literature, perhaps because 'mere' prose writing seemed easy and unimportant."

From an online resource about Jane Austen: "In Jane Austen's era, novels were often depreciated as trash ... In Jane Austen's day, novels actually had something of the same reputation that mass-market romances do today."

No matter what your opinion of Austen's books these days, and no matter how seriously Austen took herself, in other words, novels at the time were taken to be a lowclass medium.

More from that same page: "Though she always had her admirers, Jane Austen was not the most popular or most highly-praised novelist of her era (none of her novels were reprinted in English between 1818 and 1831), and she was not generally considered a great novelist until the late nineteenth century."

None of this is a big secret, btw. Here's a passage from the NYTimes critic A.O. Scott:

"Since its beginnings in the 18th century, the Western novel was a bastard form, the chaotic hybrid of art and commerce as likely to offend norms of high literature as to uphold them. The 'high-art literary tradition' was, in Augustan England, the preserve of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and the great figures of antiquity, in contrast to whom the popular novelists of the day -- a redundancy, since no other kind existed -- were hawkers of morally dubious entertainment."

A few other facts to take into account:

• "Art history" in our modern "critical" sense didn't begin until the mid 1700s, with Winckelmann.

• Public museums and concert halls didn't arise in numbers until the 19th century.

• The term "high culture" didn't come into use until the mid-late 1800s -- around the same time that some Anglo-and-American authors, like Henry James and George Eliot, started making more serious and elevated aesthetic-moral claims for their work than had generally been made for novels before.

• The terms "aesthetics" in the modern sense was invented in the 18th century.
  

In other words, the whole sifting-and-sorting- and-canon-making thing that you seem to take for granted didn't in fact begin as a semi-organized, respectable cultural activity until the mid-1700s, and didn't hit its stride until well into the 1800s. People just weren't thinking that way until fairly recently.

This doesn't mean that people didn't read or revere works from the past. But it does mean that the particular story that profs and critics tell us today about the history of something called "literature" and "serious writing" is one that we've made up fairly recently.

Look, we have plenty of examples of this kind of process going on right around us. Think of the Italian "giallo" thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s, for instance. At the time they were made they were considered crap, or at best stylish crap. Serious critics sneered at 'em, and the audiences for 'em weren't art-house sophisticates. The real film art was Antonioni, Bellochio, etc. Yet today the giallo movies are thriving on DVD, and are probably more influential than "La Notte" is. It could well be that in 20 years Antonioni will be a footnote, and Dario Argento will be recognized as a giant.

Here's Thursday, back at me:

Indisputable fact #1: Rousseau, Johnson, Hazlitt were prominent public intellectuals and recognized as such.

Indisputable fact #2: They took novels, or at least certain novels, very seriously.

You can't dismiss that. That _most_ novels were taken to be trash is neither here nor there. Its analagous to films now. Its widely acknowledged that most movies are just trashy entertainment. That doesn't mean that Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg aren't recognized as great artists in their own lifetimes. There isn't any contradiction here. Both can be true at the same time.

BTW have you actually read Johnson, Hazlitt etc? How come the only novelists discussed by Johnson in Boswell's life are Richardson, Fielding, Burney and Sterne? Geez, those are exactly the same novelists from that era with the highest reputations now. Ever wonder why? Have you actually read Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Comic Writers? The novels he picks to discuss there are all the exact same ones from his era we think of as important now. Geez, coincidence again. Why _do_ these great critics _only_ choose to discuss the same novelists, contemporary with them, that anyone still cares about today? How come they have such an uncanny ability to only discuss winners? Why not just take the next step and acknowledge that Johnson and Hazlitt, great critics that they were, could recognize that these were the only novelists worth discussing?

Remember, just because _you_, Michael Blowhard, cannot recognize what will and will not last does not mean that people of the intelligence and sensitivity of Hazlitt and Johnson cannot. Great artists and critics can pick each other out, because geniuses see the patterns before everybody else. Just because you and most other people cannot is irrelevant.

And my final response:

You're living in a fantasy world, one where responsible serious people -- whose seriousness and eminence are recognizable at the very instant they're working, by, presumably, other trustworthy and serious people (hahahahaha) -- make trustworthy judgments that endure for centuries.

I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you, but that isn't the way the actual cultural world works. Reputations come and go. Periods (and individuals, and schools) interpret the past to suit themselves. Ensuing periods then reinterpret the past to suit them. Talented work and artists get overlooked and forgotten. Everyone has a career they're looking out for.

Work that no respectable person championed (giallo films, or Gold Medal Books, for instance) turns out to have more of a lifespan than the work that all the serious, responsible people thought would be enduring.

It looks like some people's judgments were freakily prescient (aka "wise") only because we're looking back at them.

Out of this free-for-all, something called "an artistic tradition" has emerged. But no one has control of it. It's an emergent phenomenon in the evo-bio sense -- no one's in charge, and we're all part of the bewildering churning process. Perhaps we have a few microseconds now and then when we seem to have a bit of perspective on it all -- but then we're submerged in the tumult once again.

There are probably some general rules to be deduced from the meta-ebby-flowiness -- but what are they? And do they function as any kind of guide to the future? Because there's always the possibility, after all, that the things we think of as trustworthy general rules have embedded in them a kind of telomere-like sell-by date. We may think we understand the game, we may feel certain that we've gotten to the very heart of it -- and then the game itself may change. Can you trustworthily predict in what way it's likely to evolve? Can anyone?

Besides, since "art history" and "literary history" as we know them didn't really get started until the 18th century, they may well come to an end. They had a birth, after all -- why shouldn't they also die? It isn't entirely unlikely that in 350 years, art history and literary history will expire. No one will care about the art of the past. The reason this isn't a totally unlikely scenario is that that's pretty much how people lived for most of human history. Our little stretch may prove to be a little blip of an exception to s