Friday, November 28, 2008

Thanks for Blessings Received and Forthcoming

It's been a while, but I've been busy at work and I don't feel like you yelling at me about it. Give me a break, Daddy's been busy. But I promise I'll make it to your piano recital.

Thanksgiving was, as it always is, a full stomached affair. We've come to Connecticut from Manhattan (and previously Long Island) for Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember. It is one of the few things that my family has that I would consider a tradition. Our friends in Connecticut are gracious enough to host us while we eat all their food and drink all their wine. But perhaps most importantly, we actually do sit and give thanks.

I consider myself lucky that my family was big on instilling in my sister and I a sense of gratitude and appreciation for the things we have and how comfortable our life is. Of course, these comforts were achieved by dint of hard work and are richly deserved, but its surely worth reflecting upon that we are lucky to live in a country that opens is arms to immigrants and provides them with a way to make a better life for their families. While we glance at the TV and see the terror taking place in our homeland, our heart weeps for those that died, and we have to remember that the promises of a better life for the next generation is not yet inevitable.

But we will make it so.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Look Back In Kindness

Not to overplay it, but when historians look back at our age and try to divine what we thought about the world, I'd hope they look at this commercial. I think it is our best representation

Monday, August 25, 2008

A Beneficent Convergence

In the past 13 years, I've visited my family in India 8 times. These summer pilgrimages were at the insistence of my parents and in lieu of the more popular American summer pastime of sleep away camp. At the time, I probably resented being shipped over 8,000 miles to spend the hottest time of the year in the hottest place I'd ever been. My grandparents house at the time did not have hundreds of TV channels and the electricity sometimes went out for hours at a time. I didn't really understand when I was 9 that it was important to forge a connection with family and one's ancestral homeland during childhood--I just knew I couldn't watch Salute Your Shorts.

After coming back from India as (more of) an adult, I am embarrassed at how spoiled I was. My relationship with my Grandparents, Uncles, Aunts, and small army of Cousins is so cool and breezy now because of those hot summers. The pride in the art of storytelling, the willingness to argue any point from 5 different angles, the sense of playfully mocking loved ones--so many elements of my personality that I value can be directly traced back to these vacations and just observing the clan. Just driving around with my Uncle on his motorcycle, grabbing dinner at a beach side restaurant and talking politics, family, cricket is one of those memories I'll always remember and forever seek to duplicate with each successive trip.

I can't fully decide if my growing comfort with India, and my increased desire to return, is down to my maturation or the fact that India has Americanized so much. The standard of living in the country has skyrocketed in the past 13 years; people in cities have more money, nicer amenities, more varied food options (including the large scale introduction of supermarkets) and now my grandparents house does have hundreds of channels and programs which I watched in English, Tamil and Hindi. I'm happy to admit that I am more willing to visit when the house is air-conditioned and I can watch Seinfeld while eating Pizza Hut, but I am even happier to reveal that I love India just as much when it's high noon, the power is out and there's no fan or television, not a word of English or scrap of America is around and I'm sitting with my Grandmother playing dice and hearing stories about my Mom.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Rambling at Full Tilt

Don't say you weren't warned by the title.

One of the central ideas you focus on when you study economics, especially in college, is the way that markets distribute goods. The greatest advantage that capitalism has as an economic system is that it is best suited for an efficient distribution of resources. Of course, even the most market fundamentalist of economists will tell you that a free market cannot provision all goods properly, that it is just the best model that exists. The classic examples of market failures typically deal with public goods, but I've always held that art is an example of the type of things that can be underprovided by the market. Which is why I particularly love Netflix.

Netflix as a business model is pretty great, because on top of selling movie rentals they really sell convenience. It is not the best in its class--Blockbuster has the benefit of physical locations to facilitate movement along your queue of films--but it's damn good. But the most interesting thing about Netflix's lower cost model is their ability to stock obscure, little seen films. A lot of the time these obscure art films stay that way because they're shit, but sometimes they are really good. For one of these more esoteric films, it only needs to be rented a handful of times for it to be a good investment for Netflix. The same can be said for those brilliant but cancelled TV shows (Darren Star's Grosse Pointe was a delight to watch on DVD).

I think the trend in newspapers and television of reporting box office numbers for films as evidence of their quality is wrongheaded. The financial success of a film is really only important to the studio, but more troubling is the idea that because a film makes $70 million in a weekend that it is good--that because millions of people like something that you should like it too. Box office reporting causes studios to become obsessed with opening weekend numbers and the truth is to have a big opening weekend you don't need a good movie you need a good poster and marketing campaign. Spending loads of money on marketing blows out the budget of the film--budget that could have been used to improve the quality of the film. Big budget films have to capture huge audiences to recoup their costs, but they have to do it in three days or risk being labelled a flop by the Hollywood Reporter. David Milch, perhaps one of the best television writers (or writers period), notes that the revenue model for films necessitates a big audience and thus a broadening of the story. It cannot sustain nuanced or complex narratives, and instead must be fixed around set pieces--an explosion, a sex scene or some protracted bit of slapstick comedy. In order for films to appeal to such a diverse body, they have to smooth all the edges so that each new film is just an amalgamation of 4 previously successful films. The cable TV revenue model--needing a radically smaller audience to be financially viable--is why the best dramatic and comedic work of the last 10 years is coming from television (The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Brotherhood, Californication, and now Mad Men). If we want to trace its roots, I feel confident saying that The Larry Sanders Show completely changed the television comedy and created the idea of cable being the vanguard of intelligent television. If you need to know how influential Larry Sanders was, just look at the names of people who got their start or honed their skills there: Judd Apatow, Jon Stewart, Peter Tolan, Ken Kwapis, Todd Holland, Jeremy Piven, Jeffrey Tambor. To complete the effusive praise, the shows that Larry Sanders directly influenced are incredible: The Daily Show, The Office (UK and American), all Judd Apatpow productions, Entourage (Ari Gold is actually the second TV adaptation of the legend that is Ari Emanuel), Arrested Development and 30 Rock. You can rent shows like this that have long since left the air because of the great gods of Netflix. Netflix presents such a fantastic platform for these smaller art pieces to be showcased and make them even more likely to stick around. The innovation that comes from these shows is more likely and stronger because of Netflix.

It would be better if you bought the DVDs though.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008



We've all seen them, nobody likes them, but deep down we all want to be them. I'm talking about that guy with his shades on strolling into a coffee shop (he gets bonus points for going to Think Coffee instead of Starbucks, because if it's not fair trade it's basically drinking the tears of a Colombian farmer) and before he can even open his mouth, pulls out his Blackberry to check if anyone has texted him or tagged him in a photo between the door and the counter of the coffee bar. I can say that I hate those guys, and that I've been one of them for a while.

My Blackberry is probably the closest thing I have to a child. I love it unconditionally, even when it has flaws and service outages. I depend on it implicitly, and I defend it to any and all challengers. But I can't deny that it sometimes makes me annoying to hang out with. I'm not proud to say it, but if I am in a group social situation (4 members or more) and the conversation drifts away from a topic I'm interested in, I'll just pull out my phone and start reading the news or texting somebody. I've never been particularly tolerant of people I find boring, but knowing that I have an escape plan tends to worsen the problem. Without question however, the biggest benefit to having my Blackberry around is for these kind of situations:

Friend: What was that movie called that Jennifer Aniston did with Kevin Costner?
Me (20 seconds later): Rumor Has It.

That's not a great example, because when my friend asked me that I didn't have to look it up, but you get my point. I have never been able to stand it when there is a piece of information, no matter how casual the conversation, that is left out or passed aside. I normally just store it in my brain until I can get to a computer and find it out, but now I just do it in front of you, my dinner companion. Even if you're in the middle of a sentence.

Blackberry users are annoying primarily because they divorce themselves from actual interactions with people to maintain virtual interactions, but because I suffer from intense boredom around almost everyone I meet, it saves me on a daily basis. On the plus side, if you see me thumbing away or talking to someone on Blackberry Messenger, ask me some random stuff you want to know and I'll be compelled to Google it for you.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

1968 Redux: If Only Hey Jude Was #1 Again

I've been lingering in the life of a post-graduate for a few weeks now, and I've got to say I really enjoy it. The amount of time I am afforded to read is exceptional and I've been fortunate to experience an breath of subject matter--from Evan Thomas's biography of Robert Kennedy to Vanity Fair's cover story on Robert Kennedy to the book 13 Days, Robert Kennedy's memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. So the subject matter is a bit narrow, but you'd have to forgive me for thinking that Bobby was the nominee. 40 years on, the memory of RFK beats strong in the grassroots side of the Democratic party and for over a year we have heard about the links between Bobby and Barack. Everyone from William Kristol (of a dying breed of conservative columnists who still use phrases like 'beau ideal') to Rolling Stone (better political feature writing than you'd think) to Vermont Senator Pat Leahy (of Dick Cheney's 'Go Fuck Yourself' fame) seem to have drawn this parallel over the past year. It can be said that there are certain merits to it: Kristol put it well when saying that both Obama, like Kennedy, is "running before his time but — supporters think — uniquely suited to the time." I believe that whether or not Obama is the heir to the Kennedy mantle, Edward seems to think so, is less relevant than the idea that young people who were so enamored by Bobby Kennedy express similar, if not more intense adoration for Obama. It's an example of perception being stronger than the reality. The imagery of the Kennedy campaign (Bill Eppridge's photos truly are masterful) is so powerful and is so clearly replicated in the Obama campaign that the link between these two men becomes self-fulfilling.

It will be interesting if the idealism and passion that was so much a part of Bobby Kennedy and his campaign (a campaign that was as close to a politician's personality as one has ever been) will be seen again in Obama's campaign. My hope is that Obama and McCain will run strong, clean campaigns and really try to lift the common discourse and edify the populace to make informed choices about clear and distinct world views. My further hope is that when the candidates or their surrogates inevitably deviate from the high-minded path, that some media outlet will clear aside the obfuscation and correct the distortions--not in a partisan way but in an honest one--so as to fulfill their missions of public service to educate and elevate.

After that breaks down, I hope the one who will screw up less wins.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Trying Something New

If this catches on, this blog will feature a lot more videos and be a lot more fun. For me. I can't decide if it will be any better for you.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

High Crimes and Welsh Crooners

I suppose it is normal for everyone to have a few songs that are considered so cheesy, so impossibly commercially crafted, that it is a bit embarrassing to admit to liking them. I've always hated music snobs, but I can confess to sniffing at people who like American Idol artists before plugging my iPod in to hear the latest Vampire Weekend track or something by We Are Scientists. Guarding against cries of hypocrisy, I always say that I'm not against "commercial" music like most hipster assholes, but rather that I am against "bad" music. This tends to end arguments with my opponents who usually have very narrow trousers and haircuts with a lot of angles to them.

I also don't consider myself a snob because there are a few very uncool bands that I listen to and like. For example, I still frequently listen to the song "Ignition (Remix)" by potentially soon to be convicted R. Kelly. I like Genesis--both Gabriel and Collins. I like a good amount of Elton John and Fleetwood Mac and the Alan Parsons Project. I even like "Bungle in the Jungle" off the 1974 Jethro Tull Album "War Child." If there is something less cool than that, I'd like to hear it. However, there is one cheeseball song I love that I will admit I am not even faintly concerned about people knowing I love. It's a song that everyone has heard, and I know for a fact that over 90% of them love it. Tom Jones's Sex Bomb might be the catchiest tune ever committed to a record. I'm always amazed that the song, for all its suggestive lyrical content, is played at children's parties (hand to God) without the slightest hint of irony. Something about that Welsh Tomcat just lets people's guard down and he's off belting out this magical number. Pump this tune in your iPod next time you're walking the streets or even washing the dishes. I guarantee you'll be singing it by the 1:00 mark--and if you are on the street, make sure that cop knows you're listening to Jonesy and not propositioning someone in Tompkins Square Park.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

The Magnificence of Transience

I vaguely remember about 2 months ago that I had issued a bold decree to post more to this blog as I had just recently been unchained from my old laptop and was in possession of a new sexy one. As with most things I say, that ended up being a lie. But this is America, and we are about nothing if not redemption. So here's what's been going on.

I suppose it would be too precious if I didn't mention that the singularly important event of the past few months is that I graduated from NYU. You could call it a bitter sweet moment to leave college, but I think that's underselling it--it's just plain damn bitter. If there is a just and right God in Heaven, I believe that he created the 4 year undergraduate experience in order to give us mortals the best approximation of what his home is like. I do not think an 18 year old can hope for a better prospect than to go to college (previously established as Heaven on Earth) in Greenwich Village (Heaven in Heaven). I completely, whole-heartedly and unashamedly loved college. I loved college in general and NYU in particular. I even love that because of college I constantly use the rhetorical structure "I like X in general and Y in particular." I did not have a single class that I regretted, because even in those courses that I totally bombed I made good friends who I would meet later in a different class that I would also bomb. My course selection was greatly aided by the fact that because of AP classes and such I placed out of science and math requirements and was thus spared their hellishness. I did not mind taking classes at 9:30 in the morning (telling NYU students that you have a 9:30 class is a sure way to get sympathy from them. Telling people you have "an 8 AM" will almost surely get someone to buy you a drink) because walking down University Place or Broadway at those hours are the best way to see the Walk of Shame being conducted on campus. I could have done without the exams, but those moments of panic were notable as much for their brevity as they were for their intensity. I cannot say enough great things about college, NYU, the intellectual activity, the late night carousing that extended into early morning carousing and, at its best, to mid-afternoon carousing.

As trite as it is, all good things truly must come to an end, and while I am incredibly heart broken that I will never get to live the college life in the same way again, I know that what made it so magical, so almost transcendent was its impermanence. Knowing that we would never be young, carefree and so thoroughly inoculated from consequences is what gave us our splendid defiance. This knowledge does something to comfort me, but it cannot be said too strongly that I write this with a heavy heart: I am no longer an NYU student. I am that oddest of characters now--the alumnus. Here's to hoping that while I've lost the vaccine, I retain the defiance.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Didn't John Wayne Drink Lattes?

This is probably my least favorite commercial on television. There are many reasons why I am embarrassed when Americans stand slack jawed at the prospect of having to pronounce words like "Half Caf Cap." This tone of vague anti-foreign sentiment is always troubling. I mean, how can I expect to order coffee if I have to learn two new words? What's worse, we Americans invented coffee. Did you know that 97% of the world's coffee is grown and consumed in the United States? Look it up. Given that fact, shouldn't we dictate how the words are said? I mean, this trend of Americans needing to know things in order to exist in the world is bad. I mean, if the woman behind the counter tells me that what I thought was a large is a 'deici', I will refuse to patronize such a place. I am not the kind of person who can commit a word to my short term memory and then repeat it back to someone. Moreover, I should not have to when I am ordering that most American of drinks, a latte. Look at the guy at the end of the commercial sipping his latte deep and proud--that's an American drinking our national drink.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Maker's Mark. Up.

On Thursday, I believe I became the last semi-hip urbanite in America to see Juno. The reasons to see Juno include the following:

1. Ellen Page is the most incredibly hyped young actress in the country right now, and she deserves every word of the the praise.
2. My obsession with Arrested Development is well documented, as anyone who knew me freshman year of NYU can attest. To see Jason Bateman being recognized for the comic genius he is past due. Combine this with the inclusion of the King of Awkward Comedy Michael Cera (disregard the fact that Bateman and Cera appear in precisely zero scenes together), and you can close your eyes to imagine David Cross in denim cut-offs.
3. Allison Janney is in the movie--CJ Cregg playing a canine fetishist.
4. Jason Reitman directed Thank You For Smoking, a single film that shattered the idea that Americans can't do irony.

Almost every part of the movie was fantastic. I saw this movie by myself, as I do with most movies. Something about seeing movies with people can be distracting for me, as I feel a need to comment on the action with my companion. There are certain kinds of movies (Superbad, Borat, Wedding Crashers, etc.) that necessitate a group viewing because the visceral experience of holding your sides and screaming at two nude men wrestling in a Chicago Mortgage Brokers conference with an audience is the best part of the viewing. Juno is not that kind of laughing. It is a dry, understated wit that leads to chuckles and broad grins. Diablo Cody's screenplay is touching, not because of the beauty of childbirth or anything so pat, but because of how it subtly portrays the growth of Juno during her pregnancy. Aside from the classic lines ("I am fo shizz up the spout), there is a heartfelt line that Juno's Dad is able to deliver without sounding like a Hallmark card, "All you can do is find someone who loves you for exactly who you are." I think that is a pretty good description of what people should look for in relationships--much easier that changing yourself to fit the capricious whims of a partner.

I read a weird article in The Guardian that talked about how movies like Waitress, Knocked Up, and Juno portray abortion as unthinkable or selfish. The thesis of the article--that these movies are not self-consciously anti-abortion, but reflect a conservatism in America and the generation of women who don't understand the struggle to legalize abortion--is not so radical, but I was a bit bothered at the suggestion that comedies have a social responsibility to promote political agendas. Knocked Up and Juno are not Schindler's List, and do not exist to advance or counteract socio-political trends. Furthermore, from a dramatic standpoint it would dull the story of a slacker guy and a beautiful woman getting pregnant and the attendant comedy of dealing with each other if an abortion was included as a deus ex machina. In the case of Juno, the more relevant scene was how Juno's parents deal with the news of her pregnancy. They don't heap scorn on her and brand her with a scarlet P, but they rarely miss an opportunity to joke about her carelessness. In the pregnancy clinic, Janney (the eccentric but protective step-mom) stomps an ultrasound technician for being a judgmental idiot and I heard a few claps of approval--shocking at a theater in Greenwich Village.

If you have not seen Juno, I cannot advocate it strongly enough. See it with someone you might want to have a child with, and then let a yuppie woman adopt it. Sounds like a good Saturday night to me.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Our Long National Nightmare

Looks like the WGA strike is finally over, and I could not be happier. Colbert Report, Daily Show and Conan cannot brawl forever, although I loved it while it happened. Hopefully, sitcoms and dramas will come back by late March/early April. Let's hope that the quality resumes ASAP.

Monday, February 04, 2008

A Brief Announcement

This post has a small, but nevertheless critical, function. It confirms that I am indeed alive and on this Earth. And that I have a new computer which is glorious and slim and powerful (I haven't a clue where she gets in from). It is a new Dell Inspiron 1525, and I couldn't be happier with it.

Now that I am no longer shackled with a burdensome hag of a laptop, I should hope that I post more frequently, but you never know with these things. Here's hoping.