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Culturally Speaking

By Sarah Stodola

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Welcome to Culturally Speaking, a new weekly column featuring the culture that interests the author over the course of any given week (please note that even though she watches reality television, she's not going to cover it in this column.  There's enough of that kind of coverage already).

We all have an interest in culture. Culture is what makes us human. And goodness knows there's enough culture coverage floating around the web these days to make you want to kill it off altogether. But we are going to cover it anyway.

Culture is often deemed to be synonymous with Pop Culture, which is deemed by many to be a pathetic excuse for culture. I'm not going to comment on that.  What I will say is this: The kind of culture I cover might be high brow, and sometimes it might be low brow, but it will never, ever mention the letters J, L, and O in that order.

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Whether Fast Food Nation creeped the living Big Mac out of you, or simply provided some much needed support for your sneaking suspicion that the friendly Golden Arches never really had the customers' interests in mind at all, it's undeniable that the book also offers a striking case in point of what can happen when instead of the government shaping industry, industry shapes the government.

Other good reads in this arena:

No Logo, By Naomi Klein
One Market Under God, By Thomas Frank

(Other suggestions? Email [email protected], and they’ll be posted in next week’s column.)

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I love Paul Krugman. The Princeton economist and Times columnist always manages to back up my unresearched opinions for me. There aren't very many economists in the world who take it upon themselves to help non-economists understand economics, and who succeed in making everything appear so clearly before his readers.

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Underexposed band of the week - Quasi. I just assume that they are one of the bands everyone has heard of, and then I mention them to someone, and whoever that someone is always like, "Who?"

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The New York Press just named "Methods of Expository Writing and Styles of Cultural Criticism," a class taught at the New School's Graduate Faculty by Melissa Monroe and Christopher Hitchens, the best classroom experience in New York. It of course doesn't mention Melissa Monroe, who is the real reason this class is so good, which I know because I took it last year. Also, the NY Press could take some fact-checking cues from someone other than the New York Times. Guys, the class is a graduate class, no undergrads allowed. And it's hardly "co-taught," considering that Hitch sightings were actually pretty few and far between - at least he was nice enough to take us out for drinks when he did show up. But what I want to know is, how did you guys know we read Orwell in there?

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Writer, critic, and Columbia professor Edward Said passed away last week after a long battle with Leukemia. The weird thing is it makes me want to finally pick up that big book Culture and Imperialism that's been on my bookshelf for so long.

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And then the next day, George Plimpton passed away. I just ran into his assistant a couple of weeks ago, and he was talking about how George was still going so strong. It's not a good time to be a famous intellectual, seems like.

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Take a look at this survey conducted by Denis Johnson's Moby Lives website. Apparently, The New Yorker, that pinnacle of elite journalistic severity, is no more progressive when it comes to gender equality than the investment bank where I work. For an essay detailing possible reasons, click here.

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On PBS the other evening (I can't remember which evening or which show), they covered a redevelopment plan for the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The sketchings for the plan make it look as if they are trying to turn Williamsburg into Battery Park City - it's all new-looking doorman-protected high rises with landscaping all around and a recreation path along the water, and green green grass, and probably an underground parking garage because you just know that all the residents drive either SUVs or Beamers. I have mixed feelings about Williamsburg these days, but the idea of this neighborhood that was such a hotbed of creativity being turned into just another pseudo-urban nightmare of a planned community is really upsetting. At least I'll be able to say I lived there way back when.

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I just read that only 1% of people have IQs over 135. Initially this might make you feel pretty good if you have an IQ over 135. But, then you think about it a little more and you realize that with a US population of roughly 292 million, there are about 2.9 million people in this country who are in that upper echelon of smartness. And you already know that really smart people seem to have a tendency to drift toward the intellectual centers, which in the case of the US means New York City, and then if you live in New York City it no longer surprises you that you can’t get Harper’s to offer you a position.

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And finally…

Cape Cod is pretty.

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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2003 Me Three