...AND WIFI FOR ALL
A recent article in the New York Times explored a trend guaranteed to disconcert freelancers and professional loiterers: the practice of banning laptops in coffee shops (something our colleagues at Babbage have considered as well). "By doing away with the comfy seats, roomy tables and working outlets that many customers now seem to believe are included in the price of a macchiato," observed the article's author, Oliver Strand, "the new coffee bars challenge the archetypal American cafe."
While the practice of tossing back an espresso at a counter does have a certain Continental appeal, the archetypal American cafe—whatever that is—couldn't have accounted for laptops. “Tables create a feeling of territorialism,” explained one coffee-shop owner quoted in the article. Another claimed to find it annoying when customers complained about the WiFi at his joint. New Yorkers seeking a clean, well-lighted place to park their computers are finding fewer and fewer options to satisfy their needs. read more »
FIVE THINGS: THE SHEIKH’S BATMOBILE
Libyans sing along to Lionel Richie’s “Hello”, Iranians jam to Django Reinhardt, and Indonesian teenagers favour the post-punk stylings of British cult classic Wire. Who knew? Richard Poplak, for one. Poplak is the author of “The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World”, a tour through 17 Muslim countries in search of local interpretations of American culture, from cheesy reality television to Metallica. The chapters are organised by country—Libya, Indonesia, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, etc—with each section prefaced by religious statistics and venerated local pop-culture icons. The result is packed with surprises, five of which More Intelligent Life has chosen to highlight.
On heavy metal:
Egyptian heavy-metal fans call themselves Metaliens and, like America’s native metalheads, they prefer long hair and black T-shirts. On January 22nd 1997, Egyptian police conducted a series of raids on the homes of Metaliens, confiscating metal posters, CDs and instruments, interrogating about 100 suspects (“Do you participate in pagan rituals?” “Do you spit on graves?”) and jailing many of them for weeks. “Metal is far from an anomaly in the Muslim world,” Poplak points out, citing the massive Dubai Desert Rock Festival.
On video games as propaganda: read more »
TIME TO REVIVE THE LIBRARY?
This week Barnes & Noble announced that it will be closing its Manhattan bookstore at 66th Street and Broadway at the end of January. The space is huge—four storeys right across from Lincoln Centre, and a neighbourhood landmark for nearly 15 years. But the store's lease is ending, and a rise in rent makes it "economically impossible" for the company to stay, according to a spokesperson. A recent story in the New York Times took the temperature of the store's customers, all of whom seemed sad that it would be shuttering despite the fact that they rarely bought books there. "It’s hard to find a place where you can sit down and have a cup of coffee," explained one chap, who often haunts the Starbucks upstairs (and buys audio books online). “Oh, I really am sad,” said another women, a 70-year-old retiree who visits the store at least twice a week, usually heading upstairs to read magazines with a sandwich and a coffee. “I love buying my greeting cards here.”
It's no wonder that the world's largest bookseller, with 720 stores around the country, has been wobbling. As we've reported, bricks-and-mortar bookstores are on the outs, except as spots for leisurely coffee and book signings. Online retailers, with their serious discounts and 24-hour availability, have hurt the hegemony of even the grandest bookstores, and more than half of book sales in America take place at big discount retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target. In August Barnes & Noble announced it was putting itself up for sale. read more »
THE "WOLF HALL" EFFECT
Even by the standards of Man Booker prize winners, “Wolf Hall” is a phenomenon. By Christmas last year, it had become the fastest-selling winner ever. By July it had sold 215,000 copies in hardback, making it Britain’s seventh-highest-selling hardback novel of the decade. When the paperback appeared in the spring, it shot to the top of the general fiction chart—a Man Booker first. Translation rights have been sold in 30 countries, and “Wolf Hall” has been a bestseller in both Canada and America, where it won the National Book Critics Circle award and had a print run of 200,000 copies. In Britain, along with the £50,000 Man Booker, it scooped the new £25,000 Walter Scott prize for historical fiction, as well as being shortlisted for both the Orange and the Costa fiction prizes. read more »
PINA COLADAVILLE
Bookended by a nail salon and a pickle store, a tiki bar makes an unexpected appearance at the storefront of 49 Essex Street in the Lower East Side. A tiki bar, furthermore, is not where you'd expect to find painstakingly composed drinks of transcendent tastiness, not to mention potency and expense. Naturally this place is called Painkiller, which is all of these things at once: a free-form riff on the classic tiki bar, a rare opportunity to order ace versions of bygone cocktail classics (daiquiri, anyone?) and, frankly, a decent place to get sloshed. read more »
THE Q&A: ELIZA GRISWOLD, AUTHOR
Though history tells us that Islam and Christianity were both borne out of a small sliver of the middle east, the world's largest population of Muslims today is in Indonesia. In her new book, "The Tenth Parallel", Eliza Griswold, an award-winning journalist and poet, turns her eye towards Indonesia, as well as Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Malaysia and the Philippines, countries where the war between Islam and Christianity is being waged in full force. These countries all lie along the titular tenth parallel, a latitudinal line 700 miles north of the equator. More than half of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live along this line, as well as 60% of the world's 2 billion Christians.
Griswold spent seven years travelling through the war-torn cities, drought-ravaged fields and the near-empty deserts between the tenth parallel and the equator, encountering poverty, inequality and violent conflict at nearly every turn (indeed, from what she recounts, it seems a miracle she lived to tell the tale). The book is a compilation of painstaking interviews as she parsed, person by person, the conflicts over land, resources and souls. The daughter of a prominent liberal Episcopalian Bishop, Griswold brings to her story a remarkable humility and a deep understanding of the power of faith. Despite the audaciousness of her exploits, Griswold is careful to train the lens of her book on the amazing people she meets along the way. Ultimately, each country presents its own set of tangled problems and predicaments, with no easy answers. read more »
THE FEED: AUG 31ST
What we're reading:
Defining the best
(Guardian): Which is the best free online dictionary?
PhD market share
(Inside Higher Ed): "Ominous clouds on the horizon" for America's dominance of the higher education market
I like it, but what do I do with it?
(Boston Globe): Early books posed similar questions to those that meet today's technological advances
Today's quote:
"It turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue." read more »
WAR UNDER A MICROSCOPE
"High-concept war film" is not a phrase that inspires confidence. If "Restrepo" and "The Hurt Locker" are any indication, critics like war films to come with a minimum of artsy futzing. Both of those efforts, arguably the best war films of the decade, embraced the conventions of their genres as a way to introduce rather thornier subject matter. They were war films, sure, but they were also a straightforward documentary ("Restrepo") and an action thriller ("The Hurt Locker"). Samuel Maoz's debut feature, "Lebanon", is a radical departure from that strategy. It is, to be blunt, an experimental war film. read more »
AN OPIUM FACTORY IN "SEA OF POPPIES"
WHAT is it about novels set in India and their ability to completely transport a reader? Lately I've been reading Amitav Ghosh's "Sea of Poppies", trading New York's mercurial weather for the lush, squalid banks of the Ganges. Set in the 1820s, the novel (an Economist book of the year in 2008) catalogues the adventures of the crew of the Ibis, a slave ship turned able vessel in the opium wars. Ghosh's book has a grand Dickensian feel, encompassing men and women from different walks of life, speaking in different accents and dialects. The places are carefully drawn in dusty Indian technicolour, the characters are so lovingly rendered that when you re-encounter them it feels as though you are meeting old friends.
"Sea of Poppies" is an adventure story, but it is also a book about opium, as the title implies. Though there are references to the seedy dockside haunts in London and Canton that confirm standard perceptions of opium use in the 19th-century, Ghosh also sketches the farming, production and trade of the drug. The images of poverty, violence, corruption and addiction are startling, and also woefully familiar. read more »
A "BADASS" NIGHT WITH FLYING LOTUS
Last year, in a basement club in East London, California's Flying Lotus showed local dubstep fans how elastic the electronic music genre can be. As Flying Lotus subverted its two-step, dub and breakbeat elements with strange space-like noises, abrupt beat shifts and subtle, meditative melodies and samples, the crowd didn't always know how to react.
Back in London recently, this time with Infinity, his touring six-piece band, Flying Lotus, aka Steven Ellison, performed aggressively expansive interpretations of songs from his 2010 album "Cosmogramma". This so-called "space opera" of an album has been described by critics as brilliant but aimless, unique but complicated, scene-defining but hyperactive. These seemingly contradictory descriptions carry some weight: "Cosmogramma" is indeed ambitious and somewhat inaccessible.
Performed with a roster of musicians including Ravi Coltrane (Ellison's cousin, who was signed by Blue Note Records this year), the show in London could be described in similar terms. Bass solos from Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner occasionally veered into fast and slappy territory. Once or twice, Gerry Gibbs's live drumming simplified some of the album's more interesting electronic beats in a way that robbed some songs of their original, glitchy flow. Moments could have passed for jam-band material, which thrilled some audience members and provoked raised eyebrows among others. read more »
Comment of the moment
quote As a resident of Bolivia, I totally agree that travelling by road in Bolivia is terrifying, especially to rural areas in ancient rickety buses which are held together by elastic bands...