Anthem - Life & Politics

Asics to Debut the World’s Largest Lite-Brite

nik.mercer — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:21:42 -0700

Guinness, as many of us know, began publishing it's World Records book for the sake of fostering idle bar chitchat. Since its debut, empty claims of grandeur by both the everyman and the superhuman cannot be made: it is fact that the largest motorcycle pyramid comprised of 201 men on ten motorcycles; it is fact that the heaviest car to be balanced on a person's head was 352 pounds.

The book is also there to challenge a particular breed of competitive people to break the records recorded within. Asics, the shoemaker, took the challenge by constructing the world's largest Lite-Brite (as in the Hasbro toy from the 1960s). The final pieces will be put in to the massive 11'X15' structure that was made of over 300,000 pegs at 8 PM on October 7. Assisting Asics in celebrating this monumental event (they're beating the previous title-holders by a stunning 175,000 pegs) is Kid Sister and Flosstradamus.

Now, next time your good mate Terry tells you that it was his second uncle who built the world's biggest Lite-Brite, know that he's drunk and making it up!

"Lush Life" by Richard Price

nik.mercer — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 06:33:21 -0700

Over the last three decades Richard Price has established himself as one of America's greatest living authors. Across books such as The Wanderers, his masterpiece Clockers, and screenplays for movies and T.V. shows like The Wire, he has forged a legacy on his honest and compassionate portrayal of America's gritty urban side. Because of this anything with the writer's name attached to it is a cause for celebration, but with this level of acclaim comes high expectations, something his latest novel, Lush Life, lives up to.

Things start with a literal bang in Lush Life, when Ike Marcus is shot and killed on his way home from a night of drinking in New York. The only reliable (or in this case conscious) witness to the botched robbery attempt, is Marcus' co-worker, a thirty something screw-up. Eric Cash has spent his whole adult life wasting any inkling of talent he had, and now after lying to police about calling 911 directly after crime, he has finds himself the police's number one suspect. The problem is Cash was in shock and mixed up his story, but is about as innocent as can be. After being questioned by Detective Matty Clark for what feels like forever, he is less than willing to cooperate with police unless he is given full immunity. This is something that no one around town, least of all Marcus's suburban dwelling father, Billy,can understand, henceforth Cash becomes maligned public figure. Meanwhile, the real killer, an in-over-his-head teenager named Tristan, realizes that taking someone's life will not earn him the respect or attention he so desperately craves, especially since no one knows it was him.

The first thing anyone notices about a Richard Price novel is the dialogue and Lush Life is no different. In fact it seems as if there are more conversations in the book than actual narrative prose. Normally this would be annoying but Price writes dialogue like no other contemporary writer. It is not that his characters speak realistically, but that it feels natural. Price writes dialog that gets to the point, but makes sure to accent it all with style that sets each character apart, almost rendering speech tags unnecessary. Every person talks differently and Price understands this and uses it to his advantage.

As good as the dialog is, it is not the book strength. From Eric Cash to Ike's father, all of Price's characters are fully developed living entities. Details like how Clark answers his cell phone to Tristan's rhyme book open up the character to the reader. Price's characters also do something that so many literary characters fail to do, they continue to live their lives despite the difficulties they encounter. Things may show no sign of improvement, yet they keep tiredly marching forward in hopes of a better tomorrow, a big break or just a chance to start again. Initially Price's characters come off as defeated, but it eventually becomes clear that they have just learned to adjust, to block things out, to deal in ways that anyone can relate to.

While Price's dialogue and characterization are truly exemplary, they are barely enough to keep the book going during its second act. The novel starts fast, Price introducing the reader to the community and cast of characters, and setting the plot in motion by killing off Marcus. But once detectives start questioning Eric Cash, things slow to a glacial pace. Realistic as it may be it is not all that interesting, especially when it goes on for two hundred pages. It is a chance to get better acquainted with the characters but also allows the reader a chance to focus on some of the books fuzzier―and less developed―aspects. Why the police feel Cash is a suspect and Clark's infatuation with Ike's step-mom are just a few that come to mind. Price spends much of this time sending the detectives off to explore the projects and going off on observations about New York's societal (d)evolution and gentrification. These are all fine and good, except that they take away from the narrative flow. It is almost as if Price forgets how to balance literary worth and entertainment value, which is especially frustrating because he proved with Clockers, that the two do not have to be mutually exclusive. Things pick up for the third act, but it just feels as if Price got bored and decided to bring things to a close.

Despite serious pacing issues, Lush Life is a good book, at times even great. Part of what is enjoyable about any good writer, is that each new novel brings another chance to spend time in that artist's head, and Price's novel is no different. Price creates a living, breathing world for his readers to inhabit. It is a remarkable feat and one that so few writers are able replicate.

Buy Lush Life

Roger Ebert Exposes Ignorance of Archaeology

nik.mercer — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:41:06 -0700

If you're really good at one thing and have essentially fostered your entire career on that one thing, you should probably stick to your guns and not, say... tarnish your reputation and name by venturing into the world of blogging when you're a simple film critic at heart. But alas, this was precisely Roger Ebert managed to do when he typed out a "Q&A" supposed exposing the innate truth of creationism. Whatever the man was doing on September 21 was certainly making him a little loopy!

Prefacing "Creationism: Your Questions Answered" is a hazy "[p]hotograph taken in Nevada in 1917, showing a footprint associated with a fossil claimed to be 200 million years old. Proof that man walked the earth with dinosaurs." Right. It gets worse, though...

Q. When was the earth created?

A. Archbishop James Usher, working out a chronology from the Bible, calculated in 1654 that the earth was created on the night of October 23, 4004 B.C. Other timetables reach back as far as 10,000 years.

Q. Was there a Noah, and did he have an Ark?

A. Certainly. There are many unverified reports of a massive wooden vessel on Mount Ararat. The Arc contained eight people, from whom we are all descended. It also contained two of each kind of animal. Since living species were obviously not created through an evolutionary process, every surviving land-based mammal species (about 5,400) had both ancestors on the Arc.

The Consumption of Context: A Conversation with Author Hillary Raphael

nik.mercer — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 11:01:10 -0700

The shrewd-in-crowd stipulation of "experimental lit" has an isolating effect. (In other news: Yes, there is such thing as ‘experimental lit’). And "experimental fiction"—an inevitable Generic in a 21st century lit world which lives, breathes and shits labeling genres—does little better. Culturally-speaking, the keyword simply suggests fiction "that’s out there," though semantically it really just means: "not what you’d expect from fiction." In other words, experimental really just boils down to a taxonomic of predictability—this is how one transforms creativity into commercialism’s foil. But if experimental is nothing but a stand-in for expect-the-unexpected, then where, really, does this leave us? Well, yes, it leaves us appropriately wondering then just what the hell the opposite of "experimental" literature is, if not expect-the-totally-obvious.

Latest release that might well provoke new label-tantrums from a literary machine on scholastic autopilot? Ximena, author Hillary Raphael’s newest novel (officially out in October, though already available online). The book narrates an improbably beautiful librarian’s struggle to harmonize with a world in which cyberspace is synonymous with extortion, death always questionable, and sex an exchange of mutual foibles. This is the author’s haplessly fetishistic construct of the digital world, delivered on with the motley poetics that define all Raphael’s work to date: An acute understanding of more "technical" literary topoi, and the wherewithal to outmaneuver them by somewhat fatalistically remaining, if you permit, one step ahead of the climactic. But let’s be clear: that literary creativity presently presupposes "capricious out-there-ness" is at least good for one thing: Raphael’s novels and those of envelope-pushers under the same stamp—HP Tinker’s brilliantly progressive fiction comes to mind, likewise authors Andrew Gallix and Tony O’Neill—exist on their own accord, de-contextualized. And if you’re able to nix "experimental lit’s" elitist subterfuge and instead embrace the tabula-rasa, you’ll see they read like any other, er, "non-experimental" book. With pleasure. To prove it, I recently spoke with Ms. Raphael on the subject of her trials on ink and paper, and quite pleasantly, discovered one could gain insight into the author’s work without the abuse of esoterics or hip "postmodern irony." (I promise). Read on.

Ximena's described as your "latest dispatch from the darkest corners of capitalism." In the spirit of things, can we assume the book is then in any way a direct "continuation" of your previous two novels?

All of my work is an attempt (perhaps futile or misguided, but hey) to reconcile the utter spiritual oblivion that is consumer culture with the very real ecstasy of being alive today. In I Love Lord Buddha, this conundrum is dealt with through excess; in Backpacker, through escapism; now Ximena explores a modestly private lifestyle...

And do you feel your characters deliver on this reconciliation?

In my world, death is beautiful and, like all beautiful states, temporary. My characters are fortunate when they fall into that void where all consumption is suspended. For an eternal instant, there's no banality, no boredom, no shopping. Then they'll be reborn, and have to do it all again. Remember, though, that the good part comes again, too: bodies, pleasures, fleeting happinesses.

How about the idea of hedonism pure—highly peppered in throughout your work. How does that figure into the consumption junction for you?

Hedonism is the reward for being human. That's tied in with the good part of incarnation. Yeah, sure, it's hard, horrible even, to possess sophisticated consciousness in the late capitalist culture-- one has to navigate so many symbols and abstractions at every second. One is divorced from reality and wedded to delusion by force. Yet this enslavement comes with a set of privileges. One such privilege is the conscious pursuit of pleasure; the more enslaved to consumerism one is, the more delicately specialized are the pleasures. That's how dominatrices, submistresses, Japanophiles, art collectors, and Buddhist monks always find themselves in my stories.

And sexuality? Also seemingly at the mainstay; does it embody that same reality-versus-delusion duality to you? Or does it play more of mediating role?

Sex is the most human of our preoccupations. Unlike money (that other universal hot-button), it isn't inherently useless. It doesn't require context to acquire value. It feels good and it replicates our genes—double success. This irresistible goodness, combined with cultural hypocrisies governing sexual conduct, make for narrative kindling. Sexual choice [can be] a path to the heart of a fictional character. Who is this character? Well, let's fuck her and find out.

Can you talk a little about your efforts to stimulate reader-writer interactivity, particularly through the Internet?

Yeah, I have asked my readers (with varying degrees of success) to contribute to the narrative process online, either by uploading a backpacker sex story to tokyomonamour.com, or purchasing a pair of used panties (worn by a fictional character) on neogeisha.org. I do this because I hate being the only author of a book. It can feel lonely and masturbatory. It's better when the story evolves post-publication.

Have to ask: Who exactly do you think are these lionhearts buying fictionally used panties? How do you imagine a die-hard Hillary Raphael loyalist?

My top loyalists are writers themselves, so I get mail from them. They're uniformly cool, but wildly disparate types…

And as for the future? What's next for Hillary Raphael?

I've been entertaining the idea of doing a new translation of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, but it isn't clear that I have the wherewithal to complete such a mammoth task. It may be easier to just re-write it from scratch. We'll see…

Purchase Ximena