Month / February 2005

by DrMabuse

Rushdie Rumored to Be Joining Stanley Crouch for Anger Management Class

We’re not quite sure what to make of Salman Rushdie chasing down journalists with a baseball bat. On one hand, we’d probably be a bit pissed if we had to live secretly while a price was on our head or the novels we turned out were declared more and more irrelevant. But Rushdie’s fury was driven by words against his wife. We only wonder how he’ll survive the acid barbs of Fleet Street.

by DrMabuse

Personally, We’ve Always Thought Hunger Involved Food Stamps, Barely Getting By, Remaining Isolated, Depressed and Lonely, Hoping to Hell That the Electricity Isn’t Shut Off — The Kind of “Hunger” Knut Hamsun Wrote About. But That’s Just Us.

Dave Eggers interviewed at the Onion AV Club: “I would disagree about “isolated” or “lonely.” Those are two things that I don’t know very well, so I can’t write about them. I think that most of the characters are people who aren’t settled in what they’re doing, and maybe have been uprooted in one way or another, by an event in the world or their own restlessness. Most of them are abroad and looking for something. This is what the hunger is about: whether they’re hungry for some kind of affection, or something else.” (via the Rake, who has a few theories of his own about this slightly different Eggers interview)

by DrMabuse

The Brownies Return

With Mark on deck with the Los Angeles Times Book Review and Scott Esposito watching the Chronicle, the time has come to restore the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch again. Starting this Sunday, we’ll be watching Sam with the same eagle-eyed stance of a jester and letting you all know whether or not Tanenhaus has earned his brownie.

(And, incidentally, should Sam Tanenhaus earn his brownie, we will in fact be sending them to him. Let it not be said that we didn’t honor our pledges.)

Now if someone else will step in with the Washington Post, the litblog community should have its bases covered.

by DrMabuse

Fuck the iPod

Will somebody give me one good reason why I should own a fucking iPod? Will somebody explain why I should give Steve Jobs 350 hard-earned George Washingtons to apply the Apple logo to my hip?

Sure, it’s a handy little device, I suppose. But then so is a garlic press. The garlic press, however, is much cheaper and will actually do something beneficial. Such as saving you some time when you’re cooking some pasta.

Frankly, I don’t get it. The little bastard doesn’t even allow me to record onto it. (To its credit, the Zen, Creative’s response to the IPod, does.) The least one can expect for this kind of money is a consummate fuck from a second-class Hollywood hooker. But from where I’m sitting, I’m looking at a bunch of teenagers and twentysomethings on the subway not really enjoying themselves, plugged into earphones and passing the time in the same banal way that non-iPod riders are.

Would someone explain why it’s so important to be completely out-of-touch with the waking world around me? If the iPod is about control, why don’t these folks use Nero to burn a custom CD for their pre-existing Discmen?

I’ll confess that music is important and that I listen to a lot of it. But who knew that one out of 10 Americans view the iPod as their fucking savior? Did we learn nothing from Ridley Scott’s 1984 commercial? We’re supposed to throw a hammer to the evil corporate overlords, right? Funny how the iPod has been airbrushed into a new version of the commercial. Never mind that this “Greedo shoots first” version is no longer available at the Apple site.

I’d like to chalk the iPod phenomenon up to a “kids these days” benediction. But I’m too young to be a scolding old man. Even so, I’ve seen grown men fucking around with this thing, as if the Apple Click Wheel was some technological justification for revisiting Billy Squier. Why subsidize some half-baked mofo who doesn’t even know how to spell “tonight?”

And what’s with this whole bullshit notion of the iPod empowering you? Am I missing something here? You mean to say that if I go into a Universal Unitarian church with an iPod strapped on and start talking with some slinky blonde that I’ll take her home and ensure her at least six orgasms? Wow, who knew? The iPod as muscle car. Throw the basic aspects of mutual attraction out the window, my friends.

I’m utterly convinced that historians will view the iPod in the same light that people remember the Olympus Pearlcoder: a half-baked technological tool that suggests something personal and refined, but that is ultimately about taking advantage of people’s inability to figure out the technological tools they have on their Dell computers. Namely, these things called CD burners, BitTorrents and MP3s, the latter being a format that isn’t particularly bad for something coming through your headphones.