Clash of the Titans: Sheryl Crow vs. Maroon 5

We had a heated musical debate in the English office Wednesday, and it wasn't typical (Beatles vs. Stones) or elitist (which Radiohead album is the best?) or hip (I'm too old to make an allusion here) and I'm happy to say I precipitated the discussion, first by bringing up a new singer I like (Courtney Barnett) and then comparing her to Sheryl Crow, and then revealing that while I was cooking the night before, I drank too much beer while listening to Sheryl Crow, because her music-- a guilty pleasure of mine-- always makes me feel a bit giddy . . . one of the younger teachers enjoyed the image of me bopping around the kitchen, slightly tipsy, singing "Soak Up the Sun" (although she wished I was drinking a Leinenkugel Summer Shandy instead of beer) and I was able to fully satisfy the role-reversal because I was also texting my wife and reminding her that dinner would be ready soon and she needed to get home . . . anyway this led to an odd debate where the older folks in the office were lauding the merits of Sheryl Crow, and Kristen the youngster was defending Maroon 5 . . . I'm not sure why she chose to pit Maroon 5 against Sheryl Crow, but it resulted in everyone pulling up songs on their phones and Chromebooks and playing them at once (especially "Move Like Jagger," which even Kristen detests) and while we couldn't convince her that Maroon 5 was awful (she kept defending these hypothetical and unnamed deep tracks . . . "the ones they never play on the radio") everyone else united in the defense of Sheryl Crow, and I think it comes down to this: neither one is Led Zeppelin, but Sheryl Crow has more good songs that Maroon 5, and less awful songs than Maroon 5, and it's way more fun to drink beer and cook while listening to The Very Best of Sheryl Crow (which doesn't even have Steve McQueen on it) but Kristen will never understand this because she associates Sheryl Crow with her mom and light FM, not Lilith Fair.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once?

I've listened to several interesting podcasts lately-- and I also can't help connecting them to the non-fiction texts we read in my College Writing synthesis class . . . I suppose this is because we're constantly teaching the kids to make connections between the texts and to everything else in the world, to support some kind of argument-- eventually, you start to see connections between everything, like the conspiracy theorist with all the diagrams, pictures, symbols, pins, and strings on his study wall . . . anyway, the podcasts are good even if you haven't read this year's College Writing texts, here they are:

1) The Billionaires’ Secret Plan to Solve California’s Housing Crisis (The Daily) is a fascinating conundrum that connects to Stephen Johnson's writing about organized complexity and emergence--the question is: can a bunch of tech billionaires build a model city in California that feels like a European city? a city that feels like it emerged from a culture that values public transportation, locality, walking, biking, and mixed housing-- and does NOT value traffic and automobiles-- usually these kinds of places are built from the bottom up- they emerge from millions of tiny individual decisions of the city dwellers, over time-- and reflect the evolving core values of the city . . . but these dudes want to do it from the top down-- and they are meeting some resistance . . . an interesting investigative journalistic foray into an ongoing story;

2) Lean In (If Books Could Kill) tells the story of Sheryl Sandberg-- who was an upper-level manager at Facebook-- and wrote a book explaining how to move up in a man's world-- but her version of feminism doesn't address systemic issues, it's just very specific (and often lousy or useless) advice for upper-middle-class women trying to make it in a hyper-accelerated capitalist culture . . . and this really connects to Anand Girdharadas's description of Amy Cuddy's journey from academic to thought leader and Jia Tolentino's chapter "Always Be Optimizing," which discusses how she grapples with the unending expectations of modern feminism;

3) How Do We Survive the Media Apocalypse (Search Engine) is Ezra Klein's generally depressing take on the direction journalism, the internet, and the media are heading-- this episode gets into the costs of market-based competition, the unbundling of advertisements and your local newspaper, the benefits of inefficiency and local media monopolies and the idea that news worked much better when car ads and movie ads were paying for war reporting-- these ideas really complement Anand Giridhaardas's book "Winners Takes All" and Steven Johnson's ideas in "Emergence"-- we've collectively created a system that is incredibly and perfectly competitive-- the online world-- where Netflix competes with the best journalism and Pitchfork and Buzzfeed and YouTube videos about losing your belly fat--  and the result is that a bunch of social media companies make money; AI might cannibalize journalistic sources and therefore destroy the ecosystem that it relies on for information; ideas that are bite-sized, palatable, and digestible win out over the truth; and whatever you direct your attention to on the internet-- and in media in general-- is going to survive and what you neglect will die . . . so read some real books, magazines, and local news-- get off those social media sites, support longform investigative journalism, and recognize that the only reason that many of the fun sites that are now going extinct-- Gawker, Pitchfork, Vox, Buzzfeed-- were often supported by venture capitalists and had no real model to make money in this awful media environment . . . what is slowly emerging on the internet is exactly what we asked for and deserve, a bunch of bullshit.

Topeka to Boulder . . . Not as Close as It Looks on the Map

I made it to Boulder and it's beautiful (but quite hot) but I nearly lost my mind in Kansas . . . and if you're a fan of Sentence of Dave, then you'll really appreciate this-- I got incredibly pissed off TWICE, once on each leg of my journey, each time when I realized I had an hour more to drive than I thought because of the time change (I hate time changes) as I was relying on the GPS, which based its ETA on adjusted time (and so I got pissed off at Central and Mountain time, respectively) and I also learned that listening to stand-up comedy album after stand-up comedy album, one after another, each angrier and edgier and more political and weird than the last, is a great way to stay alert, but also a recipe for going crazy, podcasts are a lot more mellow . . . anyway, here's how I killed eight hours yesterday:

1) Patton Oswalt Feelin' Kinda Patton;

2) Slanted and Enchanted Pavement;

3) Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots The Flaming Lips;

4) No Respect Rodney Dangerfield;

5) Fashion Nugget Cake;

6) Funkadelic America Eats Its Young;

7) Shame-Based Man Bruce McCulloch;

8) Sheryl Crow Tuesday Night Music Club;

9) Rant in E-Minor Bill Hicks;

10) Born to Run Bruce Springsteen . . . of course;

11) Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything;

12) The Test, episodes 34 and 37 . . .

and, yes-- I know it is narcissistic and absurd to listen to your  own podcast-- but I was really losing my mind and it was nice to hear the sound of my own voice, interacting normally with other people and here's a few things I chose not to do: I did NOT stop at Eisenhower's Boyhood Home and Library, nor did I care to take a gander at the World's Largest Czech Egg or the Kansas Auto Racing Museum . . . maybe next time, when I'm in a self-driving car, I'll have the robot driver pull over so I can check out the Czech egg.

How Did Sheryl Crow Get Motivated to Write "Soak Up the Sun"?

The weather has been really pleasant around here for the last few days, and it's made my motivation to write sentences and record music and practice the guitar and even read a book severely wane; I just want to go outside and soak up the sun . . . and this makes me wonder how anyone who lives in a beautiful climate gets anything done, especially artists . . . I know Georgia O'Keefe found her inspiration in New Mexico, but she's probably the exception to the rule; this might explain why most of the movies coming out of Hollywood are crap, as the weather is so good out there that it must be very hard to focus on making a great work of art (and really, how can you connect and empathize with the common man when it's 72 degrees and sunny every day . . . I'm sure Hollywood movie production people start off  with the best intentions, revising scripts and shooting scenes, but then it's just so damned nice out that they feel compelled to call it a day and go catamaraning . . . anyway, if the weather wasn't so nice here in Jersey, then I'd start a massive meta-study of great artists in the style of Franco Moretti . . .  cross-indexing great works with the location in which they were created, and then see if my hypothesis holds water: that there is a negative correlation between good weather and great art (and if there's someone living in Greenland reading this, and you're stuck inside because it's hailing large chunks of ice, feel free to steal my idea and write the study).

Many Americans Are Walking on a Tightrope

 Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope Hardcover is a tough read; Pulitzer Prize-winning husband-wife-super-journalist team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn trace the lives of a number of Kristof's childhood friends, all from the vicinity of Yamhill, Oregon and they end up reporting on income inequality in America . . . one of my favorite phrases I learned from the book is "talking left and walking right," which a number of successful liberal families employ . . . they are all for divorce and abortion and legalized drug-use, but rarely need these in their own lives-- it seems conservative values about family and school make the difference in who escapes poverty in places like Yamhill . . . anyway, here's a couple of excerpts that I pulled by taking a photo of the page with my phone and then opening that photo with Google docs . . . the Google AI "reads" the photo and does a decent job making it text:

When so many Americans make the same bad choice, that should be a clue simply individual moral failure. It is a systemic failure.

Here's one way of looking at what happened: Daniel was injured on the job, and then doctors in and out of the military prescribed highly addictive opioids that got him hooked. That was because the government, through lax oversight, empowered pharmaceutical companies to profit from reckless marketing. Once Daniel was addicted. didn't try adequately to help him, but rather spit him out, and the became a target not of public health efforts but of the criminal system. The government failed him, blamed him, and jailed him. 

A couple of generations ago, the United States rewarded veterans by affording them education and housing benefits. More recently, the United States helped get veterans hooked on drugs and then incarcerated them.

    *    *    *    *    *

We Americans are a patriotic tribe, and we tend to wax lyrical about our land of plenty and opportunity. "We have never been a nation of haves and have-nots," Senator Marco Rubio once declared. “We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who have made it and people who will make it." We proudly assert, “We're number 1!" and in terms of overall economic and military strength, we are. But in other respects our self-confidence is delusional.

Here's the blunt, harsh truth.

America ranks number 40 in child mortality, according to the Social Progress Index, which is based on research by three Nobel Prize-winning economists and covers 146 countries for which there is reliable data. We rank number 32 in internet access, number 39 in access to clean drinking water, number 50 in personal safety, and number 61 in high-school enrollment. Somehow, "We're number 61!" doesn’t seem so proud a boast. Overall, the Social Progress Index ranks the United States number 25 in the well-being of citizens.

Triple Threat

I may not be a great cook, and I'm certainly not a great singer, and (compared to my friends) I'm not the world's best beer drinker . . . but combine the three of them into one event and I think I'm right up there, one of the best there is at beer-drinking and singing while I'm cooking (especially if I'm listening to Sheryl Crowe).

2020: A Good Year For Reading Books

I read 54 books in 2020-- the most since I've been keeping this list-- and one of those books was The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, a monstrous time that should count as two books-- and while there are a number of good reads on the list, if I had to pick three favorites, they would be:

Best Literary Fiction:  Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Best Non-fiction: Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

Best Sci-fi: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

and the best detective series would be the first three Easy Rawlins books by Walter Mosley

here's the complete list, happy reading . . .

1) The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston

2) The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch

3) Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré

4) Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

5) This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

6) Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

7) Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino

8) A Red Death by Walter Mosley

9) White Butterfly by Walter Mosley

10) Death Without Company by Craig Johnson

11) Best Movie Year Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Rafferty

12) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

13) Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh

14) The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding

15) The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

16) A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

17) The Secret History by Donna Tartt

18) Phil Gordon's Little Green Book by Phil Gordon 

19) Elements of Poker by Tommy Angelo

20) Harrington on Hold'em Vol I by Dan Harrington

21) The Bat by Jo Nesbø

22) Small Stakes No-Limit Hold'em by Ed Miller, Sunny Mehta, Matt Flynn

23) Hold'em Poker by David Sklansky

24) Harrington on Hold'em Vol II by Dan Harrington

25) To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey

26) Waiting for Straighters by Tommy Angelo

27) American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard

28) Townie by Andre Dubus III

29) Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hansen

30) The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

31) Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

32) Do Not Resuscitate by Nicholas Ponticello 

33) The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez

34) The Cipher by Kathe Koja

35) Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosely

36) Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

37) "H" is For Homicide by Sue Grafton

38) The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani

39) Strategies for Beating Small Stakes Poker Tournaments by Jonathan Little

40) Soccer Systems and Strategies by Jens Bangsbo and Birger Peitersen

41) The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide edited by Michael Craig

42) Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

43) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

44) Tightrope: Americans Reaching For Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

45) The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

46) The Peripheral by William Gibson

47) Set My Heart To Five by Simon Stephenson

48) The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey

49) A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

50) Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

51) Deacon King Kong by James McBride

52) Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter

53) Agency by William Gibson

54) The Fifth Season by J.K. Jemisin