Not Actually a Black and White FilmI just got back from the Squid and the Whale. As a teenager I loved Noah Baumbach's first film Kicking and Screaming. I even used a monologue from that film in an audition. While the failure of Noah Baumbach's parents' marriage lingers as a ghost through Kicking and Screaming - the Squid and the Whale focuses on the death rattle of that union.

Watching the divorce of the Baumbachs err, Berkmans is certainly not the stuff of casual entertainment. The emotional distress that sets the children to taking sides in the conflict is frankly painful to watch. The way the divorce provokes Walt to become as snotty and distant as his father while his younger brother, Frank's emotional trauma and neglected life spin into alchohol and sexual anarchy at a frightfully young age.

Fascinatingly the generally progressive journal n+1 strikes a particularly reactionary chord in its analysis of Park Slope's perilous for marriage demographics and social attitudes. It is music to my ears:

People over age 50 are signally absent from Park Slope, Brooklyn. It ’s a neighborhood where members of the “creative class” move during their breeding years to mate, spawn, and keep housepets. The elegant brownstones are spacious and just barely affordable, grocery stores and veterinary clinics abound, the streets remain fairly safe, and a majestic park sits atop the hill. What better place to fall in love and raise a family? But here comes the paradox. No zone – besides perhaps a college dormitory – could be more hostile to monogamy. Or as an ex-girlfriend once put it to me, “I ’v e always thought the point of urban areas is variety.” The density of the Slope ’ s educated, attractive, liberal-minded population translates – for the single person, or the wayward spouse – into a practically limitless array of analogous sexual options within walking distance. The lonesomeness of the uncoupled, or the isolation of marital strife, can be assuaged without difficulty. Someone else will always be thirsty too, and chances are he or she is pretty good-looking, attended a respected college, holds a really interesting job, has an intriguing ethnic background, and there ’s always the thrill of seeing the inside of someone else ’ s apartment. -Christian Loretzen

 Very insightful. Though Loretzen finds young Frank's antics to be scenes of "Solondzesque mischief" that tread "perilously close to de rigueur indie transgression".  This is completely at odds with my view stated above - but as a side note - just because Todd Solondz made a movie with a young kid smearing semen on things doesn't mean that there is some filmic motif we can ever after describe as "Solondzesque". It's a cheeky reference that the average reader of n+1 might get - but it really is one of the silliest neologisms I've ever encountered.

My long awaited review of Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke is finally out there for the world to see over at, you guessed it, AFFBrainwash. The book came out last month. I requested a review copy in August and received it at the beginning of September. For a host of reasons (I blame no one but myself) the review didn't emerge until now. I'm supposed to write to the publisher when it appears online - since it's like six weeks later than it should have been - I'm feeling a little odd about it.

 By the way, also noteworthy for Review Monday: see Capote.

So civilization is crumbling. The Camp of the Saints is playing out before our eyes in Paris. It seems only appropriate that here at Surfeited with Dainties we would review a cologne today and talk about cologne more generally.

The design of the bottle for Dunhill Desire is a nod to the tradition of the company itself. Dunhill made it's mark in designing accessories - "everything but the motor" for the earliest car owners. It also became well known for the stylish clothing associated with motoring around England. Dunhill soon moved to tobacco products - known for their pipes even today and their cigarettes as well. The bottle's cap recalls lighter and flask designs from the WWII era.

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New Journalism, Old GamePoker Nation is not a new book. Nor is it a book that teaches you how to play poker - anymore than George Plimpton's Paper Lion would teach you to play football - - a few tips here and there, sprinkled with some theory - but only enough to help you understand the narrative. Plimpton actually played a large part in bringing Andy Bellin to The Paris Review where he remained for several years.  And it is no surprise then that Bellin gives tribute to participatory New Journalism by writing about poker.

Andy's story is one of a New York  undergrad who finds himself spending weekends at the Connecticut Indian Casinos and later the infamous underground poker clubs in NYC famously portrayed in the movie Rounders. Along the way the format resembles the participatory romps of Bellin's mentor Plimpton who sprinkles his foibles with the legends, pranks and horror stories that surround the game he describes.

In this respect Poker Nation feels a bit formulaic. Half the work is compiling tall tales. Andy is no slouch in this. We get Doyle Brunson. We get Amarillo Slim and the history behind the "World series of Poker". We also get the easy titillation of learning the slang in poker: the turn, Siegfried and Roy, the nuts, the stone cold nuts. All of this is easy for the author and easygoing on the reader. But not every drink has to be Miles' elusive and subtle Pinot Noir. Sometimes a few  tumblers of everyday scotch does the trick. Poker Nation does the trick

The addictive aspects of the game are embodied in Dicky and Dolly who try to grind out a life playing poker in Vegas. While ESPN shows alot of the "high life" (cue Miller Beer commercial) and "high stakes" of poker - the subtitle of the book and common sense should alert us that the poker world is low-life and full of low lifes. Think of the endemic corruption that has often spoiled boxing. Now imagine dozens of illegal boxing circuits in each city - in which anyone can participate in a 10 man fight. Poker, outside of the $5- $25 dollar range is just like that - despite the flashy bourgeois aspirations of cable t.v. poker.

But the real pleasure of the book is in Bellin's tales of his own poker misadventures. His bad beats, the bad beats he puts on others. The sweating, askance looks. The dangling cigarettes and bizarre table manners. One moment you are unbeatable, you are pushing money into the pot and putting someone else's wallet into the vice grip. Then the turn comes and the card you did not want to see - the card you knew your opponent needed comes out and he's leaning back in his chair while he's pushing the money in. He's giving you "pot odds". You have to call, the way someone has to shuffle themselves to the noose that hangs them. Then the river comes and everything changes again.  You are all in. Unbeatable again.

Poker Nation is a book nearly anyone who considers themselves " a reader" will enjoy on a Saturday afternoon. It's 250 something pages can go by in just a few hours. New Journalism's appeal runs thin beyond that. Plimpton's Open Net (one of the best books on hockey) is one or two chapters too long. It has a similar page length as Poker Nation but labors with a much smaller font. Bellin succeeds where too few do today - in writing the good "good-book". 

(retroactively posted on Review Monday) 

In the introduction to The Weekly Standard: A Reader 1995-2005, Bill Kristol announces that in his selection he attempts to communicate the magazine’s “essential history and its spirit.” Judged by this standard Kristol has succeeded. This collection does the job admirably. Alternately brilliant and maddening, hungry for blood and glory, funny, obsessed with Israel, provocative and snide, the book, like the Weekly Standard swerves between jocularity and sanctimony with the invincible confidence of a drunk driver. - Michael Brendan Dougherty

 See my review over at Brainwash.

Ben Folds

Originally this appeared in AFF's Brainwash on May 2nd 2005.

In Ben Folds' case, the numbers (most of them fives and threes), tell the story: Ten years ago, Ben Folds formed Ben Folds Five, a Chapel Hill trio he described as "punk rock for sissies." Five years and three studio albums later, they disbanded. They had one unlikely pop hit in 1998, "Brick," which documented the emotional toll of abortion on a young couple. Folds released a truly solo album in 2001, Rockin' the Suburbs, for which he played all the instruments. He produced and wrote the music for William Shatner's shockingly enjoyable album Has Been. And now, after a trio of five-song length E.P's, Songs for Silverman is Ben's first studio album in three and a half years.

Every review will say that this album signifies Ben Folds' transition from a collegiate wiseass with a gift for melody to a mature pop craftsman. They will all say this because it is true. For better or worse, there's a lot less F-bomb-throwing, barrel-house piano stomping here. Despite my reluctance to write knowingly what will become a reviewer's cliché, I will also announce: Folds is dragging his twenty-something audience into adulthood and the mainstream. He may also become America's songwriter along the way.

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The banner decorating the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, when President Bush announced an end to "major combat operations" in Iraq, turns out to have been accurate after all. If only the president himself had taken to heart the banner's proclamation of "Mission Accomplished." For by that date, having deposed Saddam Hussein, the United States had achieved in Iraq just about all that it has the capacity to achieve. The time has come for Bush to dig the banner out of the closet, drape it across the front of the White House and make it the basis for policy instead of continuing under the inglorious banner of "Mission Impossible." Ironically, ever since the presidential victory lap of two years ago, the Bush administration has been in the forefront of those insisting that the U.S. mission in Iraq is not accomplished -- that there is ever so much more that the United States can and must do on behalf of the Iraqi people. Hence the grandiose U.S. promises of reconstruction, economic and political reform, and nation-building...

Will a U.S. withdrawal guarantee a happy outcome for the people of Iraq? Of course not. In sowing the seeds of chaos through his ill-advised invasion, Bush made any such guarantee impossible. If one or more of the Iraqi factions chooses civil war, they will have it. Should the Kurds opt for independence, then modern Iraq will cease to exist. No outside power can prevent such an outcome from occurring anymore than an outside power could have denied Americans their own civil war in 1861. -Andrew Bacevich from the Washington Post

Andrew Bacevich's Sunday article in the Washington post comes just as I was writing my short review of his book in what will hopefully become a regular review feature on Mondays here at SwD.

Andrew Bacevich, professor of International Relations at Boston University. Vietnam Veteran and contributing editor of The American Conservative - has written a concise and intelligent "book about the new American militarism - the misleading and dangerous conceptions of war, soldiers and military institutions that have come to pervade the American consciousness and that have perverted present-day U.S. national security policy."  In short he is not writing a mere brief against Bush for the present state of our foreign policy. In the introduction he produces a wonderful short-version of his argument. :

"The New American militarism made its appearance in reaction to the 1960s and especially to Vietnam. It evolved over a period of decades, rather than being spontaneously induced by a particular event such as the terrorist attack of September 11, 2002. Nor, as mentioned above is present-day American militarism the product of a conspiracy hatched by a small group of fanatics when the American people were distracted or otherwise engaged. Rather it developed in full view and with considerable popular approval. "

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