The release of R.E.M.'s latest has at least one critic wondering whether the band still has any steam left in it. Same as it happened back in 2001.

'Twas The End Of R.E.M. As We Knew It (Do We Still Feel Fine?)

May 15 will see the release of R.E.M.'s new plate, Reveal, which will show whether, after their first drum machine record, the Bill Berry-less group still has it. Yet, there's already advance word that they don't, and they haven't for a while. That's the opinion published by Slate, that respected icon of music criticism. According to them, the band has undergone three stages in their professional life: the 'college rock' era, the top-of-the-world years, and the awkward decline, 'marked by 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi and the departure of Berry. Surprise! Now most R.E.M. songs are dirges, which go nowhere.' Horse puckey. R.E.M. have been together for 20 years, and yes, 'reinvention's hard when you're pushing 40,' but they can't be counted out yet.

With all the frequent questioning, it seems R.E.M. will age as gracefully as the Rolling Stones. And these days, that can hardly be considered a compliment.

Lately, I've been thinking about money a lot.

That happened because I ran short of it during a long, long time.

It seemed to me like even the New Yorker shared my concerns, what with a review of money books it recently published: Smart Money, by John Cassidy ("Two Wall Street classics appear in new editions").

Interesting books, by the way. One of them, The Intelligent Investor, teaches the layman the principles of "value investing."

Valuing companies based on the information contained in their financial statements constitutes an entire discipline, much of it established by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd in their 1934 textbook, "Security Analysis." Graham, who taught at Columbia Business School for years, and numbered Warren Buffett among his students, is regarded as the pioneer of "value investing," the painstaking pursuit of cheap stocks. In 1949, Graham explained his methods to the general public in "The Intelligent Investor" ... Buffett has described it as "by far the best book on investing ever written," and although the case studies it cites are now decades old, its practical advice on how to look at balance sheets and income statements is timeless. Followers of the Graham-Buffett approach to the stock market love nothing better than to spend an evening with a pencil and a calculator going through a stack of annual reports, trying to work out whether a company is trading above or below its intrinsic value.

The other one, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, makes the case that the market can't be beat through the "value" approach.

E.M.H. [Efficient Markets Hypothesis... which holds that a company’s stock prices already reflect all the available information about that company’s prospects], in one version or another, held sway in universities and business schools for more than a quarter of a century; even today, it is routinely taught to M.B.A. students. One of the people responsible for this state of affairs is Burton G. Malkiel, the Chemical Bank Chairman’s Professor of Economics at Princeton. Back in 1973, Malkiel, who was then a little-known professor, published a book entitled "A Random Walk Down Wall Street," which expounded efficient-markets theory for the layman. To the surprise of many, not least the author, it turned into one of the most durable investment guides ever written...

Interesting stuff. If only reading them guaranteed that I'd make easy money on the stock market...

A couple of new articles showed up on PopPolitics this month, which proves that the website is still alive. However, this slow drip of items may indicate that there's not too much life left in it. I guess we'll have to be satisfied with an article or two every other month. But I digress; a list of the new articles follows.

10.18.03
Apocalypse Now!
by Douglas L. Howard
The films of Summer 2003 reflected a fascination with metamorphosis that spoke to our anxieties toward a world in flux

10.22.03
Searching for a Real Gay Man
by Hemal Jhaveri
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy feels like an especially well-executed marketing campaign for homosexuality -- but it plays it too stereotypically safe.

PopPolitics has been on a very light publishing schedule since May 7. Maybe their usual collaborators have been moving to better paying gigs? Whatever the reason, I hope they'll be able to resume publishing regularly; there are very little good webzines left out there. A list of the articles they've published in the last 4 months follows.

05.20.03
The (Un)Bearable Darkness of Buffy
by Christopher Wisniewski
Buffy grew darker -- but no less compelling -- as it traded in the well-trodden world of teen angst for the more ambiguous territory of young adulthood.

05.20.03
Life After Death
by Cynthia Fuchs
While Buffy is about powerful girls and youthful agency, it has always retained its somber, iconic and mythic interest in death

07.13.03
True Love for Losers
by Richard C. Crepeau
Now is the time to celebrate the Chicago Cubs' gloriously unmatched century of futility

07.13.03
Muzak for the Masses?
by Bret McCabe
Radiohead and Steely Dan reach the limits of their experimentation

08.05.03
The Culture Industry Has You
by Thomas Dodson
How the Frankfurt School might be the key to unlock the postmodern mysteries of The Matrix

08.05.03
Alternative America
by Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr.
A new documentary amplifies voices of dissent

A new entry has been added to the Nathan Alderman ouvre on TeeVee: Salvador Dali Meets Saturday Morning, an appreciation for capital-dubya Weird cartoons ("quality brain-melting") which, as he points out, can only be found on Cartoon Network. Namely, he talks on and on about Courage the Cowardly Dog ("I don't know what frequency creator John R. Dillworth's brain is tuned to, but my mental radio certainly can't pick it up") and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law ("a comedy smart bomb, dead set on violating all your beloved cartoon memories").

I've previously written about Harvey Birdman, so I'll just add my agreement to Mr. Alderman's endorsement of Courage. Though I'm not too fond of the character design on this show (I'm more of a Hanna-Barbera classisist, prefering simple lines and curves and minimal features; I like the character designs on Dexter's Laboratory or Johnny Bravo a lot more), the rougues gallery parading through this show is quite the funny lot: try to imagine a dam-building beaver whose dream is to play the skins at jazz nightclubs or a duck deity who tries to woo Courage's mistress off to his heavenly home, and you'll just begin to get the picture.

Damn, I love cartoons!

The following rejected Plastic submission ("appreciated, but [declined due to] lack of user interest;" you'll see) would have probably made more sense had I posted it last Thursday, or Friday at most. Well, if I was too lazy to come up with something new, it wasn't much of a stretch to not put the effort to be timely.

This 4th, Just Say No To Fireworks

What would a 4th of July be like without fireworks? After considering the tons of metals and poisons that burst to the air on every pyrotechnic display, it could be called "environmentally sound." In addition to the charges of blackpowder (containing carcinogenic sulfur-coal compounds) that send skyrockets airborne and blast them into patterns of glowing sparks, fireworks contain a number of toxic metals that produce a range of dazzling colors. Strontium produces blazing reds, copper compounds burn blue, magnesium, titanium and aluminum create brilliant white sparks. Sodium chloride produces orange-yellow fire, boric acid burns green, potassium and rubidium compounds produce purples and burning lithium glows red. Glittering greens are produced by radioactive barium. Maybe it's time to put that bandstand in your town's park to good use again. But July 4 only comes around once every year. What about Disney World's nightly extravaganzas, which are held every single day?

{Update, July 31, 2003}

Time for yet another
Declined submission (no thanks):

A Thinking Person's Anime — No Irony Intended

Japanese animation, despite having a wide audience on the Western shores, is still considered a treat for kids and obsessives, a form whose range barely covers from cute, fuzzy whatizits to —uh— stag films. But when we're ready to dismiss the thing altogether, something comes along that shows more nuance than the usual 30-minute saucer-eyed show. Something that focuses on character and mood, and has style in spades. Something like Cowboy Bebop. So, what is Cowboy Bebop? It's a jazzy show that, in the words of TeeVee collaborator Nathan Alderman, "takes old familiar themes, invests them with maturity and soul, and does so with style." It's the story of a crew of interplanetary bounty hunters, a story that tends more to meditations on failure and loneliness than to celebrate gee-whiz action. And without a single giant mecha in sight. Who knows if this show is a crossover success, a trendsetter among run of the mill cartoon fare, but it no doubt is a cool singularity and a lot of fun.

Seems like nobody cared for bringing some attention to the article Nathan Alderman wrote about Bebop. Still, I like what he wrote, giving the show the Vidiot's seal of approval. I noticed, though, that when it was originally published, Mr. Alderman's bio simply stated he "is a writer, editor, and web designer from San Antonio, Texas." Currently, it also adds: "He has learned, only too well, not to say mean things about anime fans." Do you think the fact that he wrote the following paragraph had anything to do with it?

And as for you anime fans... liking Cowboy Bebop has made me feel a bit more charitable towards you all. But if even one of you starts whining about how Bebop is getting popular with sullied masses and ruining the pristine sanctity of your fandom, I'm seriously going to go to that basement you're living in and stomp on each and every one of your imported model kits. And not even the sight of you in a poorly-fitting homemade costume will stop me.

(On a completely unrelated note, what does Mr. Alderman have to do to get his own "About" page on TeeVee? He has written a not-so-shabby seven articles in little more than a year, which should amount to something... If he ever gets such a page, I guess it would look something like the one I rolled myself.)

By the way, the link in the submission mentioning "stag films" points to a Nerve article that's gone Premium.

One Man's Anime by Jack Murnighan Just how much animated Japanese porn can our writer take?

Not to worry; if you'd like to read it, you can always look it up at the Internet Archive; the Archive wasn't returning the pictures included in that story when I last checked, though. Pity.

{Later...}

Serendipitious happenings! I found through my referrals that someone arrived to this weblog from an old page of the Reverse Cowgirl's blog which contains the following picture:

As Tom Wolfe would have put it: Cosmo!

{Edited on July 31, 2003. Changed "If he such a page" to "If he ever gets such a page".}

Can you tell me Luis Mandoki's date of birth?

Huh? What do you want with a guy like Mandoki? Have you ever paid close attention to the movies he's made?

You don't care what I say. Fine! See if I give a damn then: the Internet Movie Database page for Mandoki doesn't give his date of birth, only his city of birth (Mexico City).

Good luck elsewhere, chump.

Garry Trudeau is at it again. This time, he has aimed his rapier wit to the issue of the intelligence presented by the President to make the case for war. And as he shows, all it may take to continue coming up with such convincing "evidence" is the proper training...

• June 23: "...we're learning to tailor intelligence to fit policy."
• June 24: "'...Enhancing Risk Assesments.'"
• June 25: "Be creative!"
• June 26: "You bring in the garbage."
• June 27: "...we're here to serve the President."
• June 28: "Give me an enhanced threat assesment for Syria!"

And then, just when she is thinking (and not for the first time) about how this life holds no more surprises, no unplumbed marital depths, he says in a strangely casual voice, "It's a good thing you weren't sleeping with me last night, Jax. I had a bad dream. I actually screamed myself awake."

She's startled. How long has it been since he called her Jax instead of Janet or Jan? The last is a nickname she secretly hates. It makes her think of that syrupy-sweet actress on "Lassie" when she was a kid, the little boy (Timmy, his name was Timmy) always fell down a well or got bitten by a snake or trapped under a rock, and what kind of parents put a kid's life in the hands of a fucking collie?

She turns to him again, forgetting the pot with the last egg still in it, the water now long enough off the boil to be lukewarm. He had a bad dream? Harvey? She tries to remember when Harvey has mentioned having had any kind of dream and has no luck. All that comes is a vague memory of their courtship days, Harvey saying something like "I dream of you," she herself young enough to think it sweet instead of lame.

"You what?"

"Screamed myself awake," he says. "Did you not hear me?"
— Stephen King, "Harvey's Dream"

Finally, a Stephen King story published by the New Yorker shows up at their website. Since it went on-line, the magazine has published two stories by Mr. King (the current one and "The Death of Jack Hamilton"), but only this one had been posted to the Internet.

Beyond that, one essay by Mr. King had also been published in the magazine and posted to the website:

CONE HEAD
In the spring of 1970, when I was twenty-two, I was arrested by the Orono, Maine, police. After a traffic stop, I'd been discovered in possession of some three dozen rubber traffic cones. After a hard night of drinking Long Island Iced Tea at the University Motor Inn, I had struck one of these traffic cones while driving home. It bounced up under the car and tore off the muffler of my ancient Ford station wagon. I had noticed earlier that the town of Orono had been painting crosswalks that day, and now realized they'd left their damn traffic cones all over the place. With a drunk's logic, I decided to cruise around town—slowly, safely, sanely—and pick up all the cones. Every single one. The following day, I would present them, along with my dead muffler, at the Town Office in a display of righteous anger.

This was part of 6 recollections by different authors of a particularly low moment during their lives (hence, "Lowest Ebb"), which also included essays by Lillian Faderman ("Take It All Off"), Mary Karr ("College Try"), Dagoberto Gilb ("Spanish Guy"), Joye Carol Oates ("Bound"), and Denis Johnson ("Homeless and High").

Oh! Besides a new Stephen King story, the New Yorker's website has also included something from their archives: an excerpt from On Writing, where Mr. King recounts the story of the accident that almost ended his writing career.

ON IMPACT
Smith sees that I'm awake and tells me that help is on the way. He speaks calmly, even cheerily. His look, as he sits on the rock with his cane across his lap, is one of pleasant commiseration: Ain't the two of us just had the shittiest luck? it says. He and Bullet had left the campground where they were staying, he later tells an investigator, because he wanted "some of those Marzes bars they have up to the store." When I hear this detail some weeks later, it occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character out of one of my own novels. It's almost funny.