April Fool’s Favorites?

Anybody hear about or play any exceptionally fun April Fool’s Day tricks yesterday? These made me chuckle:

NPR’s B-Flat

TWF’s announces a new hobby

NSP’s book deal

 

West of Southby…

I’m too far West this year to complain about all the hipsters crowding our regular East Austin hang-outs (1,2,3) during the wonderful madness that is SXSW.  There’s something great about living in a place that turns into a cultural mecca for a week or two out of the year and feeling like part of that – even if you’re not particularly musical and you feel a bit exhausted by all the hipster-ness. Phoenix isn’t a mecca for anything but anti-immigration sentiment. So I’m spending Sunday morning listening to the My Morning Jacket concert podcast on NPR, “writing letters” with CJC,  nursing LEC, and cleaning bathrooms. Vicarious living. Who said I’m not cool?

 

Seven new sins

As reported by the NYT and a slightly different version from NPR. Created by Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti to attune the Catholic leadership to some of the real evils in our world and reinvigorate the practice of confession (a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for months). I’ve long thought the 10 Commandments might need some updating, and I’d have written a slightly different list, but I’m very much on board with the overall sentiment. If only the announcement had come out during a slower news week and gotten more coverage….

1. Genetic modification

2. Experimenting on humans

3. Drug abuse

4. Polluting the environment

5. Causing social injustice

6. Excessive wealth

7. Creating poverty

 

Reading and non-reading 2/15

READING
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore. (Imitation leather-bound edition!) Cheeky and acutely reverent at the same time. The Biblically literate amongst us have a great advantage for appreciating the subtleties of Moore’s humor in addition to the laugh-out-loud stuff, which is precisely paced. GC and I are reading this one together. Reading aloud (and being read to) is a wonderful activity we’ve inconsistently engaged in for years. I tend to forget how much I do enjoy it when I go for long spells without sharing a book. If you’ve never done it before, try it in lieu of a Seinfeld re-run some evening.

NONREADING
Eric G. Wilson’s Against Happiness, which I heard about on NPR. There are multiple layers to his argument, but the one that is most interesting to me concerns evaluating the cultural costs of systematically eradicating sadness if it is, indeed, a necessary part of the human experience. Will the successful minimization of sadness, angst, melancholy, gloom, and suffering upset the polarity of life (it’s probably actually a dialectic) that makes it, well, life? In Portuguese, saudade doesn’t have the strongly negative connotation its closest English translation (melancholy) carries. In Brazil, saudade is embraced & celebrated — not always enjoyed but almost never pathologized — and it imbues a particular richness into Brazilian culture (i.e., the arts) and daily life. The risk of romanticizing depression and other bona fide illnesses is very real, but Wilson’s is on to something real here – something worth discussing further.

 

Reading and non-reading this week

Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher
A real page turner that offered a nuanced and sweet account of the culture wars to someone who doesn’t even believe in the culture wars. Probably coming soon to a theatre near you, but the book is worth it.

Eric Finklestein’s The Fattening of America: How the Economy Makes us Fat, If it Matters, and What to Do about It
Though I probably won’t actually read TFOA (it’ll go into Bayard’s “known books” category), I’m sure to be bringing up Finklestein’s argument in conversation during the course of the next few weeks. He argues that our economy incentivizes sedentary productivity over health maintenance. The argument is subject to many different criticisms, and in typical economist form, Finklestein doesn’t actually seem to have talked to real people about his claims. But he does make some excellent points and provides a welcome relief to the silly Freakonomics-style arguments about incentives. Yesterday’s interview with Finklestein on the Diane Rehm Show was excellent.

 

The case against fast fashion

This is something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, as evidenced by several recent entries on the topic, and a slew of conversations with Please Save Me From Myself about fashion consumption, shopping to fill “that hole,” environmental responsibility, and the challenges facing small designers and their labels. It’s clearly on other people’s minds as well. This NPR clip sums up a lot of the issues PSMFM and I have been discussing over the past few weeks. The Sinful Saint was kind enough to pass the story on to me after hearing it on his way home from work. It’s well worth the 4 minutes of your time it will demand.

Can you believe that, on average, the number of garments a person consumes has risen by 33% in the past five years? That’s really astounding – especially in such a short period of time.

 

Everyone (including sociologists) weighs in on food

It seems that absolutely everyone is talking and writing about food right now. I heard this interview with sociologist Barry Glassner on Marketplace yesterday. His new book promises to be just as good as his old one and way better than The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I really admire the good scholars who make their arguments both relevant and available to the public. I also imagine that he, unlike most academics, makes quite a bit of money from his book sales. Note to self.

Other food-related insights on culture I’ve come across recently-ish:
- Americans are becoming olive oil snobs
- Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s book “Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine“
- Silicone kitchen tools (which I already mentioned yesterday in a fit of rage)
- That French Food Bricolage ASR article
- Cotton candy paper – a 10 for creativity, but I’ll pass.
- The author of “The United States of Arugula” on tonight’s The Colbert Report
- My own post on Food Drama in 2006, lest I forget