SXSW: My Annual Romance

South by Southwest is an awesome festival. It's been around since what, 1987?, and although it's been accused in recent years of going 'lite' on the kind of people it attracts (Playboy parties, really?), I'm still a fan. I love that it has panache enough to showcase Neil Young back-to-back with Justice and The Lemonheads, and it doesn't hurt that it all goes down in Austin: definitely on the shortlist of places to be if you like to consume art and culture with a palatable shot of Americana.

I admit that I don't make the effort to follow the rise of new bands, and I'm unlikely to stoically wait hours in line in order to watch 16 bad shorts before a really brilliant director takes the stage. As a result, I appreciate all the enthusiasm and effort that goes into staging SXSW. At the end of the conference, even I, with limited band loyalty and low tolerance for mediocrity, will learn of some new voice worth getting to know, some new film that will leave me slightly breathless.

To that end it's a good thing that I barely recognize the acts lined up this year -- it means these bands and movies haven't had their moment yet, that they're still in the gestation period when success depends more on what matters - raw talent and craftsmanship - than what doesn't: packaging and hype. Isn't art, after all, in its most vivid and pulsating form when it hasn't quite crossed into the mainstream?

Vegetarian Times

The Japanese are strange. I determined this during a trip to Kyoto back in 2006, when it was impressed upon me that as a vegetarian traveler I was privy to a singular experience of Japanese behavior and traditions. Nowhere else in the world, for one thing, have I caused an actual outburst for the simple fact of refusing to eat meat. This arose one afternoon in Kyoto, when a harried friend and I grew tired of walking on the sunbaked pavement, and thankfully turned into a local restaurant. We sat down and, the tea having been served, began the arduous process of explaining my dietary restrictions. It didn't go as planned:

"This is Japan....Japan!" came the shocked voice of one restaurant owner when it was made clear that the all-beef special was not going to fly. As further recrimination, he strode into the kitchen and emerged victorious with his wife in tow: a small and sweet creature with her hair pinned neatly into in a bun. In another lifetime I saw myself benevolently patting her wrist and drawing up a chair for her to join our gathering of world citizens. At the time, however, she ignored any such charitable warmth I emitted, and cast herself as deputy prosecutor, seconding her husband's gesticulations with a series of wise nods and darkening glances in my direction. The latter I found particularly unnerving.

My friend, playing host at the time, gamely began a civilized discussion that, with due time and fluency, would have undoubtedly hit the salient points on freedom of choice, cruelty to animals, health concerns about beef and patron-server relations in the postmodern era. Instead, the exchange quickly dissolved into a 5-round back-and-forth of "no meat...no fish" and "but this is Japan!", with rising vigor on each side. Finally my friend fell back on our strongest defense: "I eat meat! Only she does not," she announced, pointing an incriminating finger my way. Unaware that I had been blacklisted, I smiled widely, hoping to lend a note of cooperation. "Oh! You are like the Japanese! This is Japan; we eat meat" came the delighted response.

Thus diplomacy won the day and goodwill resumed. From that point on, the owner became charm personified. He poured us more tea, cleared the table, and in true Japanese style, repeated our earlier exchange with a series of ill-timed and abortive giggles. His wife eventually presented me a handsome bowl of rice ("just rice?" came a final protest) and an assortment of root vegetables and pickles, neatly tucked into a series of minuscule bowls. I tried to ignore the pickles' resemblance to octopus tentacles (would they dare?), and instead watched as a cauldron of beef was planted in front of my friend, flanked by a side of what I imagine was more beef, fried. While she dove in with chopsticks and a broth spoon, I began my own meal with the delicacy of a trained surgeon.

Such was the luxury of vegetarian cuisine in Japan. I'd like to claim that it was delicious rather than just odd, but I'll at least admit that it was by far the sweeter for having been won.

Americans Only

My sister recently sent me an article from Forbes, on a provision in the stimulus bill that restricts how financial firms manage their hiring practices.

What happened in brief is that last month, two Senators - Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Bernard Sanders (I-Vermont) - added an amendment to the stimulus legislation, forbidding banks that are being bailed out from hiring foreign workers, in particular if the banks have laid people off in the past 3 months.

Makes sense? Or at least: it's not entirely unexpected, right? And yet I'm still confused by the role of politics in economic decisions.

I realize that the financial sector, like its good friend the auto industry, is not going to win sympathy awards anytime soon. There's a limit to how much we feel for those who have lost access to jobs and livelihoods sustained by stratospheric bonuses -- especially in light of how many innocent bystanders, with little to no safety net, have been devastated by the financial meltdown.

That said, I found this article interesting because it questions the soundness of the amendment that Grassley & Sanders put forward. Is it in fact a good thing if companies such as JP Morgan Chase and Merrill Lynch are forced to retrench and reevaluate their hiring policies? Hiring is hardly the cornerstone of high finance. In fact, I would suspect that it's among those factors least likely to drive the more serious restructuring of financial practices that we need.

What is of course going on is that there's a miserable unemployment rate of 8.1%, itself expected to rise over the year. With the reality of millions of Americans out on the market, it makes sense to keep as many jobs as possible available to them, to get them back in the workplace and to pull us back from the brink of breadlines.

What I do question, however, is where this kind of strategy works best and where it causes harm. Financial jobs require a highly-developed skill-set and aptitude. They invite high performers rather than average Joes. More to the point, in order for the US to remain competitive in any given market, shouldn't its priority be to give jobs to the best - rather than most available - candidates? The problem with such legislation seems to be that it runs the risk of devaluing and losing talent in order to fix a small hole in a threadbare economy. And do we really want the second string to take over management of our already ailing financial institutions?

Rescinding offers to foreign workers isn't a longterm solution. On one level it simply means that instead of Alice Su, who was quoted in the Forbes article, a similarly impressive American student is going to get a very lucky break. On another level, it means that some of the best and brightest young minds who have come to the US will simply go elsewhere and succeed in companies abroad. They don't need our pity -- it's more the case that we desperately need them and their first-rate abilities if we're going to work ourselves out of this mess. You don't see Obama soliciting economic advice from anyone who came in at #2.

The thing that puzzles me is that in terms of party lines, don't Democrats typically advise against outsourcing jobs - and if so, why is it that a Republican and an Independent senator have drafted an amendment banning the hiring of foreign workers? Why do Republicans typically preach free market economics, hailing any kind of intervention as 'socialist', but simultaneously grandstand on protectionist values that can only be mandated by a governmental body?

At the end of the day this legislation is, as I noted earlier, not a huge surprise. What's interesting to me is that beyond the clamp on Merrill Lynch's hiring policies, and outside of the challenge that now faces non-American graduates of business school, the article illuminates two contradictory impulses in American economic thought: free trade vs. protectionism. I guess the real question is: which one will the stimulus bail out?

You Are What You Read

Not long ago I went out for a long, luxurious evening with a friend. We migrated from a group party to supper at a cosy restaurant, closing out the night at a European bar. Over the course of several hours, we covered personal heroes, the best way to cut cheese, sibling relations, the Balkans, and the canon of his ex-girlfriends. I was at my social best; drink in hand, I steered us along a frank and humorous exchange that cast both of us in a flattering light. It was in the taxi home, however, that I made my fatal error: I stumbled onto the subject of books, and probed for his favorite title. As of that moment, the evening lost its innocence.

Discussion of literary taste has all the pleasantness of walking onto a minefield. One false step in any direction - too commercial? too stuffy? too stylized? - and you cease to matter. I'm sure this partly stems from the tendency of any bibliophile to anxiously tally up all the books they haven't read, to wonder when they can - if ever - declare preference for a genre or author, even a single book. Martin Amis, for one, identifies Ian McEwan's greatest achievement as "the first two hundred pages of Atonement."

Of course music and film share the book's ability to nuance our impressions of one another. You can tell from someone's Netflix queue and playlists what their taste runs to: whether they are experimental, Romantic, bloodthirsty, escapist, etc. It's not as though the bookshelf alone reveals character.

What book choices do contain, however, are clues to our literary past and our intellectual limits. Unlike songs or movies, books are prescribed the world over as bearers of wisdom both ancient and modern. You could get through 14 years of school without watching a documentary or learning the difference between requiem and rhapsody. But you can't get away without knowing what Romeo said to Juliet and why it mattered, without having thumbed even halfheartedly through Gatsby and Malcolm X.

What changes over time is whether and what we continue to read. It's unlikely, in a developed society, for us to avoid watching movies or listening to music--they can become so habitual as to form a pleasant soundtrack to our consciousness. "Lite" reading material has a similar effect. Literature, on the other hand, could not be more different. It demands pure concentration. It creates a vacuum in which we are fundamentally focused and present, a space that no one - not even our partners - can intrude upon. As a result, the only people who read without a mandate are those who've learned how vital literature is to the human experience.

It's this segregation that often prohibits me from discussing books. I don't want to discover, as I did with my friend, that people fail to sustain their intellectual development, that they've put Shakespeare back on the shelf and picked up Sophie Kinsella or nothing at all. Because to me it means that they've quit the process of frequenting new ideas, of divining subtler means of expression and exploring diverse authorial voices. The effect, in dramatic - but nonetheless real - terms, is a mind imprisoned by stale conceptions.

I admit that in this case I'm a partisan player. One of my greatest joys as a reader is the moment in a book when the surface layers of plot and theme yield to substrata such as style, form and language. By penetrating these depths I get to witness the writer's ingenuity and craftsmanship. I grow complicit in or antagonistic toward the book's agenda. I intuit that the same linguistic resources can produce wildly different tones. I discover that true to life, narrative doesn't have to move on a linear path. I learn what I consider precious knowledge: that words can be woven together so as to give each sentence has its own genetic code, its own quiet or raging pulse.

How could I bear not to share this with everyone?

Recent Obits, Esq. March 2009

Perks, 4200 years old, Are Dead

Perks, the free goods or privileges that workers receive in addition to a salary, died Saturday. They were 4200 years old. The cause was Glenview Graphic Design's announcement that the weekly "Wednesday's Bagels and Brainstorm" meeting would now be known as "Wednesday's Big Brainstorm."

Perks were born in Assyria, where indentured servants were allowed to eat leftover scraps of roasted pig without fear of execution. They led a long and vigorous life that included free trips to the Bahamas, half off at the local Denny's, expense accounts at strip clubs, and the occasional $6000 shower curtain. But perks became gravely ill during the 2008 subprime-mortgage crisis. The "Bagel and Brainstorm" meeting had already suffered a loss of orange juice and chive cream cheese before the bagels themselves were eliminated.

Perks are survived by baseline salaries and some bathroom privileges.

Citizen Green

I stumbled on this signpost in the carpark of a local supermarket and was utterly taken aback. I admit I was also highly irritated, which is why I took the photo: I wanted to figure out why I was so annoyed. 

On the spectrum of support for the environment and green economy, I confess to being a quiet and sometimes unsmiling participant. This is not because I don't care. I have lived in tropical climates where it's impossible not to be filled with awe at the scale and intensity of weather phenomena. In particular I remember a cyclone that hit Bombay when I was eight. It brought winds that toppled gigantic palms flat on the ground, and wrought such an furor in the ocean (across from which we lived) that waves surged over the cliffs and onto the streets, casting a spray of water that rattled like gunfire on our windows. I've also been lucky enough to live in calmer green surroundings--homes bordered by thickset pines and woods, gardens that housed anything from jasmine and wild orchids to blue plum and pear trees. 

I even had early stirrings of activism. At 10, I wrote a blistering letter (one thesaurus word after another) to the local supermarket, admonishing them for the mass production of plastic bags--all this because I learned that when cast into the ocean, plastic bags confused and occasionally choked sea turtles to death! As an adolescent I came to worship Wordsworth, and wrote a series of appalling poems about dryads and wanderers in the forest. I pressed and classified flowers, and even thumbed through a tantalizing book called "The Amateur Naturalist."

So why now am I not a green citizen?

Because of what the parking sign represents: that it's not enough to just be eco-friendly. Now there's a hierarchy of consciousness and a meritocracy based on eco-performance. I can't park my hand-me-down SUV near the entrance to the market not because it's reserved for the disabled, but because someone arbitrarily decided that the fact that I can't afford a hybrid is worth being penalized. Things like this make you feel permanently, exhaustingly negligent--it's not enough to get your groceries in a cloth bag, print double-sided, buy halogen bulbs; you have to have a Prius too! When did the process of encouraging civic duty mutate into a caste system that excludes and shames the majority?

The problem with being green is that it seems you can't just be; it has to shoot out of your pores. Every environmental "activist" who turns me off is of the proselytizing variety. It's not even as though they're full of self-congratulation; in fact, they're depressingly intent on fetishizing their tiniest consumption. If this bleak approach were the means to inspiring people, we'd have seen the results by now. I don't see people across the nation lining up for compost heaps and 60-second showers just because someone tells them that's the right way to live. 

From a marketing angle, this - here I return to the parking sign - can only work for a fixed population. What happens is that people who already belong to a subsect of the populous - mostly financially solvent folk who can afford to eat and live organic - are reaffirmed in their decision-making, value systems and mode of expenditure. The supermarket targets a specific customer and pats them on the back. It's a tactic to keep your consumer base loyal and to make them feel valued. On that level it works, though I wonder if someone who's chosen the organic route needs increased incentive?

On another level, where I blunder in, this is not a way to motivate people outside the core audience. It can only incentivize being what you already are: the owner of a hybrid. Else you're suddenly a second-class citizen. And in this particular economic moment, any eco-friendly person like myself is also a cost-conscious person--and therefore worried about how to get by without a salary bump, how to eat healthy and save money, how to manage insurance bills. I'm not in a place to create the kind of lifestyle change that involves $7 organic raspberries, let alone the price of a 'preferred parking' spot. 

I suppose it's interesting that in the face of what I call flag-waving 'green' rhetoric, my defense is equally high-flown. I am not perfect and although I do more in the way of integrating energy-saving solutions and care for the environment into my life than ever before, I could always go one step further. But my point is simply that people are awake to the world around them. They see the damage they've wrought and inherited, and make gradual, calibrated decisions to alter their lifestyles and to practice new consciousness. The green revolution is alive and important; I just wish we could live it without needing to see who's shouting the loudest from the rooftops. 

The Dollhouse

Last night I saw the animated movie "Coraline," directed by Henry Selick. In case you consider this another shiny happy kids' movie, beware: the dolls are spies, there's a mother who preys on her children, and even the talking cat is mangy. 

Coraline is charming and sinister all at once - part of a wave of gothic (horror) animation squired by Tim Burton and his peers. Unlike your average Disney/Pixar fare, they give prominence to the subtle presence of evil in the world, integrating sins such as gluttony and curiosity to disturbing effect. I rarely laugh during these movies because I've noticed the trick of the filmmakers to shift from funny to strange and uneasy just as I'm drawing breath from my first chuckle. In contrast to the Disney movie, the real drama of these animated stories takes place beneath the surface of dancing images. 

As if to corroborate, there were no children whatsoever in the theatre. My guess is that a psychological subtext wards off cautious parents. But to be fair, "Coraline" brings the menaces up front: if she doesn't rescue the souls of three children and save her parents, she will have buttons sewn onto her eyes and be trapped in the "Other World" she has wandered into. The threat is manifest to ghastly effect on her accomplice, whose glass-button eyes hover over a mouth pin-tucked into a permanent smile.

Again, the physical damage is just the tip of the iceberg. We are invited to imagine the pain of these horrific surgeries, but Selick underscores what it would actually mean to lose your eyes, to lose the ability to smile or frown at your own volition--it's free will, as much as the ability to express emotion, that Coraline has to fight to retain. 

To my mind there's a clear difference between the fear factor of Cruella Deville the animated character and C.D. as played by Glenn Close. With no disservice to Ms. Close, the cartoon is by far the more terrifying. 

For all their effects and lifelike qualities, animated movies still prompt us to enter the world imagined. It's a place where characters have long spindly fingers that belong in our nightmares, where the crescent moon looks sharp and menacing, and the forest is a den of darkness and danger. An evil character in the flesh invites our compassion - here too is a soul suffering the burdens of mortality, of bad parenting, of social anxiety, of psychological decay. With animated figures we have no such braille with with to decipher the nature of good and evil. 

One final point I'd like to make is that it struck me in watching "Coraline" that most gothic/horror movies in the adult world result in characters fleeing evil. I have strong visual of women running from slashers, of people struggling with doorknobs, and screams in the woods as handheld cameras jostle forward. In this movie I sat in stock terror, wondering how an 11-year-old was going to save not only her parents but three children from the "Other World." The wonderful thing about Coraline the character is that she's so full of pluck. "Be brave, Coraline," she encourages herself; or "come on, Coraline!" at a moment of panic. How many times do we see a character teach herself to be brave?

To watch her I was in awe of how beautifully the filmmakers handle their protagonist: they present a chatty, inquisitive child who learns the price of following her imagination too far, and then they enable us to witness her resilience and ingenuity in saving both herself and those she loves. Of course there's magic and helping hands along the way, but the cleverness of it all is that there's a lot of common sense too. In fact, as Selick reminds us, it's common sense and pluck that can free Coraline - and us - from the pull of a destructive imagination.