Steven Rubio's Online Life

in the night kitchen

I don’t have much to add to the many heartfelt paeans to Maurice Sendak. But I will add what seems to be a minority opinion, that my favorite of his books is In the Night Kitchen, not Where the Wild Things Are. The surreal trip into the milk bottle, the happy/scary Oliver Hardy cooks, “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me.” … I love it all. Gene Deitch did a nice animated version:

can a leftist love 24?

A few years ago, I wrote an essay for a book in the Smart Pop series from BenBella Books, on the series 24. For one week only, the Smart Pop website is running that essay for free: “Can a Leftist Love 24?”

It was an odd project for me. We were originally told that the idea was to avoid polarizing the audience. Then, conservative writer Richard Miniter was named editor, which freaked me out a bit, perhaps especially when I found out he liked my essay. But I have to say, Miniter was a good editor. Most of the time, when I wrote for BenBella, the famous editor was window dressing, but Miniter actually edited my stuff. (I should add that then, as often with BenBella, my primary editor was Leah Wilson, who is one of the best editors I've ever worked with.)

Here's a brief excerpt from my essay. You can read the whole thing at the Smart Pop website for a week, or you can buy the entire book if you're so inclined.

It is one thing to want popular culture that better reflects who we are as a diverse populace, and another to say that we should turn off our critical faculties in the name of supporting something that has more cultural importance than it does artistic value. And it is one thing to have concerns about the use of torture on 24, and another to say that 24 is bad art because it features scenes of torture. It might be more dangerous art, but the cultural impact does not necessarily change the aesthetics.

that was a ten

For one week only, the Smart Pop website is featuring, for free, my essay from their book on the television series House. The book is called House Unauthorized, and the essay is titled “`That Was a Ten`: Why House Is More Ordinary Than House”. Check it out!

We’re looking at a pretty unusual central character for television. Irascible, okay. Misanthropic, a bit of a problem, but can be worked with. Drug addict? Oops. Toss in a rationalist’s disdain for religious belief and you have a pretty dangerous character, at least in the context of prime-time American broadcast television. Is it any wonder that Shore does everything he can to normalize his show, that he covers the complex House with a mundane House? How else can he sneak this godless druggie past the public?

marcy alancraig, a woman of heart

It occurs to me that the title of this post, which gives us the author and title of a book I just finished, works quite well as a descriptive phrase, for Marcy Alancraig, a friend for almost 30 years, is indeed a woman of heart.

When I was taking creative writing classes from Marcy in the mid-80s, she was working on a novel about chicken ranchers in Petaluma in the 1920s. A Woman of Heart is that novel, I believe, finally published earlier this year. It was worth the wait. I admit it took me awhile to realize that while the setting was indeed Petaluma chicken ranchers in the 20s, the book isn’t really “about” that subject. You won’t learn how to run a chicken ranch from reading this book.

A Woman of Heart is a character study, informed by its context (leftist politics amongst American Jews). The family at the center of the novel is finely drawn; every member is a distinct person, and every one of them has real depth. This includes those who have passed away, for A Woman of Heart is also something of a ghost story, although not in the sense of Casper and the Ghostly Trio. Instead, many of the characters communicate with ghosts, and many of those ghosts are deceased family members. The chapters alternate between several narrators, and the ones who experience the ghosts describe events as if the ghosts were just like everyone else. This adds a realism you don’t expect, for while Rheabie, the aging matriarch of the family, has lived with the ghosts her entire life, the rest of the family is largely ignorant of the ghosts’ existence. A good part of the novel is taken up with Rheabie’s memories, which give the family history, as she finds one granddaughter who believes in the ghosts (because she has experiences of her own).

The result is a book that feels quite real in its depiction of a family history, even with its supernatural trimmings. Alancraig effortlessly allows the reader to believe in both the concrete reality and the fantastic accompaniments, all to the point of creating memorable characters.

In the acknowledgements page of my dissertation, I thanked Marcy, noting that without her tutelage in my earliest days as a writer, I would never have been able to finish a book-length project. I’m very glad I finally got to read A Woman of Heart, which is full of both heart and skill.

kindle fire, first thoughts

The Kindle Fire is a piece of ideological machinery.

I suppose I should explain what a Kindle Fire is, for those who don’t know. The Kindle is an e-reader from Amazon that is very popular. There are now many models of the Kindle for you to read your books and newspapers on. The Kindle Fire is something like a tablet: it reads books and newspapers, and magazines, and plays music, and shows movies, and plays games, and … well, you get the idea.

I said “something like a tablet” because it’s nonsense to compare it to “real” tablets like the iPad. It doesn’t have a camera, or a microphone, or GPS. This, among other things, is why the Kindle Fire only costs $199, while the iPad 2 goes for $499.

That is the magic number, 199. If it was $299, I wouldn’t have bought it. I don’t really need a tablet, even a crippled one like the Kindle Fire. But $199 makes it an impulse buy.

And so I pre-ordered one, and it arrived Tuesday, which was pretty quick considering Tuesday was originally the release date. I turned it on straight out of the box … it knew my name, it knew what books I had bought for previous Kindles, it knew what songs I’d bought through Amazon along with all the songs I uploaded into the Amazon cloud, it knew what apps I had gotten for my smartphone via the Amazon Market. There is something cool about turning on a machine straight out of the box, and it already knows who you are.

I signed up for a three-month free trial subscription to Wired. When I opened it, there was an animation of curtains opening, and then the cover gradually “drew itself” until it was complete.

I listened to a song, “Alcohol” by Brad Paisley.

I read a chapter from a book, A Woman of Heart by my friend Marcy Alancraig.

I downloaded the Amazon free app of the day, Bejeweled 2, and played it for a bit.

I checked my email, played around a bit on Facebook, looked at my blog.

I watched a movie, Vengeance with Johnny Hallyday. The movie was free as part of my one-month free trial of Amazon Prime.

I probably did some other stuff. Then I went to bed.

So, why is the Kindle Fire an ideological machine? Because, while it allows you to do all of the above, it exists for only one purpose: to get you to spend money at Amazon. The magazine came from the Amazon newsstand. The song was uploaded by me to my Amazon cloud storage, but if I wanted more Brad Paisley, I could buy it from Amazon. The book was from Amazon. The game was from Amazon. The movie was from Amazon.

It took less than a day for hackers to start breaking down the Kindle Fire so it could be used for extra functions, but I’m not much for that (too lazy). Without those hacks, you have a machine that resembles a tablet, except you can’t play outside of the yard Amazon has created for you. It’s like a prison with invisible walls. You think you are free, but you are only free to buy from Amazon.

This isn’t a bad thing for a person like me, who already buys stuff from Amazon. I don’t need most of the things a real tablet offers. I use my computer for most things (I am on it a lot), and I use my smartphone when I’m out of the house. To say that the Kindle Fire is like a crippled iPad misses the point … you know the old line, “you say that as if it was a bad thing.” The Kindle Fire is simple, it does what I want it to do, and does it easily. There are things it doesn’t do, and if I cared about them, I wouldn’t have a Kindle Fire. If you decide to stick a Kindle Fire in a loved one’s xmas stocking because they want a tablet, that loved one will be disappointed.

It’s not a tablet. The Kindle Fire is a media machine that locks you largely into the Amazon world. The ideology of the Kindle Fire is that Amazon will give you what they think you want/need, and you won’t ask for anything Amazon doesn’t give you. (Unless you’re a hacker, or you know how to get the fruits of the hacker’s labor.)

In case it’s not clear, BTW, after two days, I love my Kindle Fire. I could complain … the glare on the screen is bothersome, the screen itself is only 7” (although I’ve gotten used to reading and watching movies on my little smartphone, so the Kindle Fire seems huge to me), and, of course, it is nowhere near being a functional computer on the level of a real tablet like the iPad. But, like real tablet owners, I now have this little machine that lets me read books, listen to music, watch movies, play games, check my email, hang out on Facebook, read magazines and newspapers … you know, the stuff you do on a real tablet … and it cost $199.

One last note: it took me less than 24 hours to start treating the Kindle Fire like just another tool lying around the house. The thrill wore off by the time I woke up Wednesday morning. It’s fun to have around, though.

fred setterberg, lunch bucket paradise

Just finished this book, which the author calls “a true-life novel”. Much of the book’s fascination can be found in that brief description; it’s autobiographical, except some of the events happened to other people, and some events were made up (I’m guessing at some of this, although I know Fred, and he has said as much). The chapters are accompanied by old black-and-white photos from the era covered in the book (50s-60s), but not all of them are of Setterberg … hell, for all I know, none of them are him. The blend works fine. It allows Setterberg to pick and choose from the events of his childhood, while adding in other stuff to make more general points.

The book takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area, and there is much that will delight those of us who grew up in that time and place. Which isn’t to say that the pleasures of the book are area-specific. Anyone who grew up in an American suburb in the post-WWII era will recognize their past in this book.

If all Lunch Bucket Paradise had to offer was nostalgia, I’d be complaining right now, but Setterberg mostly avoids that danger. Yes, the times are recognizable and in the past, but the coming-of-age tale is universal, and the picture of suburban life, while evocative in a mostly positive way, nonetheless always allows for the need to escape, which is the antithesis of nostalgia (which wants to return).

Of particular interest to me were the sections about the narrator and his soul band, the Lost Souls. Setterberg gives us a feel for the joys of playing in a band, and also shows us the love of music that leads one to want to perform on stage in the first place. There is also a brief moment when the band, made up of Latinos and white boys with a major love for James Brown, expand their repertoire of JB tunes by playing “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud!)” at an East Oakland high school dance … the song made no more appearances on their setlists, once “the obvious made everybody uncomfortable.”

I found the timeline of the story a bit confusing at times, and I often wondered if anachronisms were sneaking in (although the only time I checked, Fred was right and I was wrong). The novel clearly began as a series of shorter pieces; it’s an episodic tale, although everything coheres nicely. The book is true to its time and its narrator … this is a boy’s coming of age, with girls making appearances mostly as mysteries the boys can’t begin to solve.

I don’t read a lot of fiction. I’m very glad I read this one, even if “fiction” isn’t quite the right word for what appears between the covers.

pauline kael: a life in the dark

I’ve finished Brian Kellow’s biography of Pauline Kael.

Kellow was inspired by her work, and he’s an astute critic of same, so this isn’t a hatchet job. You get a good feel for why she was “Pauline Kael”. She could be incredibly supportive of rising talents (film makers and writers), but you didn’t want to get on her bad side. If she loved you and then fell out of love, it was worse than if she’d never loved you at all. All of us who bristled at the notion of “Paulettes” but still wanted to be one might change our minds after reading this book. To be a Paulette was to be insecure about your status. Easier to just admire her from a distance.

I can’t say I learned any key new insights about her writing. Kellow does well in showing what Kael did, what made it different and important, and why she ended up influencing all who came after her, whether or not they liked her work. But I mostly knew that stuff already. He has a good sense of which of her pieces were the most important, although at times, he seems content to just quote her. He’s willing to address her blind spots, and he helps us understand why she became so addicted to superlatives (as I interpret it, it’s related to her stance about never seeing a movie more than once, and about how she tried to write about a movie as soon as possible after seeing it … she wanted to write while the feelings the movie inspired were still fresh, and we’re always more ready to say “greatest ever” in those first hours, before distance gives us a more measured approach). He nonetheless reminds us that those superlatives were easy for others to criticize. In her later years as a critic, movies became something different than they were for her in the heady post-Bonnie and Clyde years, but Kellow shows us how it wasn’t that movies passed Kael by as much as movies let her down. And we get a real feel for how her physical frailties as her Parkinson’s worsened were especially trying for someone who had spent her whole life trying to be in charge.

There are two stories that struck me as particularly damaging. I had heard the rumor long ago that her negative review of Ryan’s Daughter made David Lean so depressed he didn’t make a movie for more than a decade, but this really hits home in the book, partly because by the time it turns up, we’re already aware of Kael’s capacity for hurting others, and partly because she didn’t just attack the movie in print, but also to his face (in fairness, it was in a group of critics, and she wasn’t the only one).

More serious is the story of the writing of “Raising Kane”, her controversial take on the classic film whereby she argued that Welles was far from the sole, or even largest, contributor to its success (she championed screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz). Kellow explains that Kael became aware of the research of a UCLA film professor that worked along a similar path to her own. She convinced the professor to work with her (she already had a contract to write about Kane) and split the money. She gave him just under $400, never managed to finalize a contract with him, wrote her essay (which became part of a book), used a lot of the professor’s research, and never mentioned him anywhere in the final product. About the only positive thing I could take from this is that Kael had to take 100% of the attacks that came her way in the wake of the book’s controversies.

We needed a Kael biography, and this is a good one. Reading it, you get the context to her career, which will be especially helpful to future generations who might read her criticism and want to know more about where it came from. I don’t think any less of her, now that I know what a shit she could be … it’s not like I didn’t suspect it already. Perhaps the final word comes from her daughter, Gina, who declined to participate in the book. She comes across as a very sympathetic character … it wasn’t easy having Pauline Kael for a mom. Kellow quotes her in his concluding chapter, from the speech she gave at Kael’s memorial tribute:

My mother had tremendous empathy and compassion, though how to comfort, soothe, or console was a mystery that eluded her. Pauline tried to make me aware of people’s needs and she taught me to be considerate of other people’s feelings. But when Pauline spoke to someone about their work as if it had been produced by a third party, it had repercussions. There was fallout. In my youth, I watched what she left, unaware, in her wake: flickering glimpses of crushed illusions, mounting insecurities, desolation. … She truly believed that what she did was for everyone else’s good, and that because she meant well, she had no negative effects. She refused any consideration of that possibility and she denied any motivations or personal needs.... This lack of introspection, self-awareness, restraint, or hesitation gave Pauline supreme freedom to speak up, to speak her mind, to find her honest voice. She turned her lack of self-awareness into a triumph.

Kellow concludes with his own, final take on Kael’s legacy:

Pauline’s great victory was that, like a visionary novelist, she widened the scope of her art—she redefined the possibilities of how a critic could think, and how a critic’s work might benefit the art form itself. …

We should be grateful that once she found her subject, she never deserted it, never grew bored with it—the trap that awaits nearly every critic. Her almost childlike optimism about the screen’s possibilities, even her unsuccessful time in Hollywood, was an attempt to draw herself closer to her subject. She lived her entire life the way so many of us do only for a brief time as college students, staying up all night in coffee shops with our ragged copies of Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov and Flannery O’Connor, reading and debating, unable, yet, to imagine that we could ever grow weary of the world of books and music and movies and ideas.

return to spacewar

I’m reading Fred Taylor’s fascinating book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and I got to thinking about when I first became aware of the possibility of computers as something you could have in your home. No, that’s not it … computers as something cool that you would want in your home.

I can remember the first times I saw computers in people’s homes. Robin’s cousin had a Xerox back in 1982, friends in Berkeley had an Apple II I think, not sure what year, and we went to a party in L.A. around the same time where the host had a TRS-80. Our own first computer, a VIC-20, arrived in ‘83 or ‘84, not sure which. Well, I saw the movie War Games right about when it came out in June of ‘83, and I had a VIC-20 by then because that movie made me want a modem really really badly, so it must have been Spring of 1983 or so. And I know I was obsessed with that computer from the moment we got it … I remember believing it thought “just like me.”

So, early 1983. Except I’m not trying to figure out when I got a computer, I’m trying to figure out when computers seemed cool. And I don’t have any idea.

Until … in the book I’m reading, I’m up to 1972. And Taylor spends a few pages talking about a article in Rolling Stone that was very influential in some circles. It was written by Stewart Brand, and it was called “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums” (follow the link and you can read the article). It appeared in the December 7, 1972 edition.

I read Rolling Stone religiously in those days, and as soon as I saw the mention in Taylor’s book, my memory clicked. I remembered the article. Not the details, just the part where I read it and thought, wow, computers are cool.

So now I know, within a few weeks, anyway, since magazines always seem to come out earlier than the date on the cover. Sometime shortly before Pearl Harbor Day in 1972, I found out that computers were cool.

popular crime

I am one of many who will read anything Bill James writes. Hell, I pay $3/month for his web site, the highlight of which is “Hey Bill,” where James answers questions from his readers. Not all of the questions are about baseball, which I like:

bill is funner a word? if saying 'playing checkers is funner than playing chess' is wrong than why is saying "susan is tanner than Catherine' acceptable? I had two friends tell me today that funner is wrong but 'funner' is in the new dictionary.
Asked by: Anonymous
Answered: June 5, 2011

Anything that people say and other people understand is a word.    There have been, in the past, people who wanted to decide what words others could and should use, and one of their diabolical tricks was to declare words like "funner" to be off-limits, and to pass judgment on those who used such words.    But no one, in truth, has any right to decree what words others should use, and gradually the world is learning to pay no attention to those who try to tell others how to talk.

James made his name as a baseball analyst, although it’s a sign of his excellence that many of us have found ways to apply his general methods to non-baseball life. (An entire book, How Bill James Changed Our View of the Game of Baseball, is filled with essays by a variety of authors that begin with baseball and end up at some other point in the writer’s life.)

James has written a book (Popular Crime) about crime, a subject that has interested him for his entire life. Of course I read it … if James decided to write a book about spinach, I’d read it, because I am interested in where James’ mind has taken him. (In college, if I found a professor I liked, I would take as many courses from them as I could … I wanted to know what else they had to offer, because what I’d already seen was insightful.) Is the book any good? Well, I don’t read a lot of true crime books, so I don’t know how it compares to those. It’s not as good as his best baseball books, but I’m not sure that’s the point. While a lot of research went into the book, much of the pleasure of reading it comes from watching James work his way through the various crimes.

He tells stories in a chronological fashion, but otherwise the book is rather haphazard. Once in awhile, he’ll take on a larger topic and expound for awhile. Some of these are quite Jamesian in a rather goofy way (figuring out a 1-100 scale to help juries discover guilt or innocence, or creating a kind of indexing system to identify types of crimes so that the murder of JonBenet Ramsay is an IQBX 9). Others are thought provoking, like his idea of changing our penal system so that all prisons are limited to a population of 24 convicts.

But the best stuff comes when James breaks down a crime. Even here, things feel tossed together. Some crimes get a couple of paragraphs; others get two chapters. It’s safe to say that the longer the passages, the more interesting they are. And so we learn that James thinks they got the wrong guy for the Boston Strangler, that Julius Rosenberg was probably involved in espionage but nothing happened to warrant execution, and that JFK was killed by an accidental stray bullet from the gun of a Secret Service agent. In each of these cases, he walks us through his logic (not that I’m convinced re: Kennedy).

There are also the odd asides that James has been including his books for as long as I’ve been reading him, which is close to 30 years. Here’s a favorite. In the midst of a long discussion of a case regarding a Rabbi who cheated on his wife (the wife is the murder victim in this one), we learn that many years later, when the case still hadn’t been solved but many of the people involved have moved on, the Rabbi had a new girlfriend. “His new girlfriend was Ms. Vicki—the same Miss Vicki who had married Tiny Tim on The Tonight Show in 1969. Those of you who are old enough will remember it.”

I don’t know if I’m exactly recommending this book. I enjoyed it. I think its obvious audience is made up of James Fans who don’t mind him talking about something besides baseball. I don’t know that I learned much about crime. But I learned something about Bill James, and that was good enough for me.

band of misfits

When I was a kid, I loved to read sports books, mostly about baseball. There were three basic models. One was a biography directed towards a young audience (“And the lesson Mickey learned from his father when he was six helped make him the man he would become”). A second was more interested in general history, with lots of anecdotes … Joe Garagiola’s Baseball Is a Funny Game was like that. Finally, there were books that came out in the spring of each season, telling the story of the champions of the previous year.

The only real break from these traditions, prior to Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, came from Jim Brosnan, who wrote two books about life in the big leagues, The Long Season and Pennant Race, while working as a pitcher in the National League.

I don’t read many of those books these days. There is so much to read during a season, thanks to the great volume of material available online. And Bill James started a revolution not only in baseball analysis but in baseball writing when he started publishing his annual Abstracts. I even did a little writing myself, working a few years for fantasy guru John Benson and a few more with the Baseball Prospectus folks.

It makes sense, though, that I would return to the old-school books in this spring of 2011, because it’s the first time I had a Giants’ championship to relive. And so I just finished Andrew Baggarly’s A Band of Misfits. Baggarly is a Giants beat writer for the Mercury-News, so he knew the story of the 2010 Giants very well. He’s also a stylish writer, and he does a fine job of bringing together the various elements that led to the World Series. He blends stories about the individuals (the “band of misfits” … Baggarly is quite convincing in demonstrating the aptness of that cliché) with the narrative of the 2010 season, finding just the right moment to offer character studies while keeping the story moving. The result is the kind of book where you keep telling yourself “just one more chapter,” only to find that you’ve finished the book in record time.

And … I really can’t believe this is true, and at least I’ve gotten to the point where I control myself for the most part when I’m around others … but the one reason I couldn’t just blast through the book was because I kept having to stop and compose myself as the tears flowed once again. It’s been six months, and I still get choked up, still can’t believe it’s real. I opened up for a bit the other night and told my wife how confusing this all was, and she replied matter-of-factly that when you wait 52 years for something, it’s going to have a lasting impact.

So, I guess I’ll thank Baggarly for writing an enjoyable recap of that great season. But I’m going to have to do something about these darned allergies … my eyes water up every time I open his book.