Adventures In Awesome: New Thomas Frank Book!

It's Anger Week on the Intarnettz this week, according to my experiences jumping from site to site and message board to message board to see that the humidity of summer has made people go, "Bzzzt furious rage!" at just about anything. Seeing AICN melt down over something as innocuous as The Clone Wars and hearing that Latino Review was being targeted by Microsoft for posting a couple of pictures for a movie that isn't even being made was enough to disturb my equilibrium quite badly, without all of the other random snippiness and bullying that comprises about 56% of internet interaction over the past few days, so I shall attempt to make the online world a happier place with an inconsequential post filled with joy over the release of a new book by my intellectual mancrush Thomas Frank.


I'm all a-dither with excitement. In the past I have railed against the iniquities of The Market, and the peculiar popular belief in its impassive, emotionless benevolence, which is something that has irked me long enough that I can remember being very uncomfortable watching pretty much any movie or TV show from the 80s featuring Michael J. Fox in a shirt (i.e. almost all of them). Maybe that discomfort is why I have such a problem with money, and talking about money, and any kind of economic thinking. Or maybe it's the other way around. It's hard to say. What is obvious to me, though, is that my understanding of what money is and how to make it work is so embarrassingly immature that any kind of balance sheet or bill or bank statement looks to me like this.


In an attempt to get over this I read two books that I have mentioned before; The Lexus and The Olive Tree, by Thomas Friedman, and One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank. The utter worthlessness of the first book was obvious even to someone like myself who once thought that newspaper headlines about the IMF were referring to The Impossible Mission Force (I really really wish that was a joke). One of Friedman's arguments, that The Market is riddled with democracy-germs that rub off on countries that make out with it, is backed up with statements barely more substantial than, "this is what will happen because... because... just because, damn it!", not to mention conjuring up the image of goat-herders in the Middle East giving up on their traditional work in order to sit on a rock with a laptop and trying to eke out a few tiyin here and there by day-trading (an exaggeration, but not much of one).

There was a lot of other unconvincing stuff in there, but don't take my word for it. My man Paul Krugman dishes out an entertaining review of it here. My dislike of Friedman's populist drivel is such that recently I potentially alienated a friend of Canyon's after seeing a copy of The World Is Flat on her shelf, which triggered a ten minute rant from me that scared her cats and made her back away from me while reaching for a baseball bat. If you ever read this post, Friend of Canyon, I apologise profusely. The anger management classes are going well, you'll be glad to hear. The point I was trying to get across, behind all of the "GRAAAAR!" and "Noooooo!" and "Banish him to Uzbekistan!" statements, was that if Lexus was anything to go by, I wouldn't be surprised if Friedman was actually trying to argue that the world really was flat. That's how little I respect him.

One Market Under God, on the other hand, was a revelation; funny, angry, and filled with shocking examples of pro-Market propaganda hurled at we, the people, by those who would benefit most from our mute acceptance of the status quo. It was just the tonic I needed. His next book was called by two names What's The Matter With Kansas? in the US, and, rather uncharitably, What's The Matter With America? in the UK, because we Brits have never heard of Kansas and might think he is talking about some village in Greenland or something. It might be even better than One Market. I don't know. I tend to have internal debates about which book is better, like the comic fans who debate whether Superman or Thor would win in a fight (it's Thor, obviously). That said, while One Market made me angry, What's The Matter just made me depressed. Recently I read Matt Taibbi's disappointingly slender but undeniably hilarious The Great Derangement, and it conjured up similar feelings of desperate misery of a "Hell in a handbasket" kind of way.

The Wrecking Crew might make me feel just as bad, but I can't wait for it anyway. I thought it was coming out next week, but it's out now, and I've already ordered it, though my eagerness for it is so intense it's even made me crave a Kindle so I can immediately download it and read it instead of chunter on about it. Until then, check out Frank's homepage, and watch the interview with Stephen Colbert. As a big fan of both of men and their Amazing Powers of the Brain, it was a treat to see that last night (what? Our PVR is full of old Daily Shows and Dexters and we got behind with watching!).

Ain't Got Time To Read! *

The limp I am currently exhibiting has nothing to do with my triumphant return to the gym after several years of very enjoyable, though enfattening lethargy. It's because I decided to walk around a town centre for about an hour yesterday morning, trying to find cheap copies of The Orange Box (note to bargain hunting gamers; even cheap copies are not that cheap yet), and then pacing around Waterstone's for ages, even though I wasn't going to buy anything. These are the things I do when I'm very very tired and my judgement is as impaired as that of a drunken businessman with haunted eyes trying with manic urgency to buy magnums of champagne for disinterested ladies even though his bank account is empty and his Ermenegildo Zegna shirt is caked in vomit.

With a new interest in health and the very likely possibility of long job searches ahead of me, my reading time is in danger of being severely cut into, with the result that my to-read list may explode in size if I'm not careful. I'm already just plodding through Naomi Novik's Empire of Ivory (which has already been definitively covered here by Canyon), not because I'm not enjoying it (I am, a lot), but just because I keep wanting to grab every other book from my shelves and read them all at the same time just to reduce the size of that list. It's like a multi-book pile-up in my head. Even before I get to the books I have at home, yesterday I strongly considered getting Peter F. Hamilton's The Dreaming Void, John Gray's Black Mass (though it would probably annoy the shit out of me, even taking into account this PWNing by populist philosopher and obviousness-stater A.C. Grayling), Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma, and Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope. Canyon pointed out that I would probably never read it and would just stick it on a shelf somewhere, and I probably would, between my unread copy of My Life by Bill Clinton and my unread copy of this bigass book on Nixon. Nevertheless, it's important to know what he's like, especially now that it seems almost certain it will be him going up against my boys.


Even without buying yet more books (as well as the ones on our Amazon.com list, including Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement and pretty much every book linked by the Worst President Ever tag), my to-read list is already way too big. At the moment I plan to follow Empire of Ivory with Mass Effect: Revelation by Drew Karpyshyn, which could well be a total waste of my time, but I wanted to get through it before I play Bioware's Mass Effect, and by "play" I mean "become obsessive about for about a week and then stop playing due to time constraints, and never go back to, just like I did with Jade Empire". After that, another Naomi book, this time The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, yet another book I got as a hardback (as a very much-appreciated Christmas present) and have yet to read even though it is now out as a paperback. The large amount of unread hardbacks on our shelves drives Canyon into fits of apoplexy, and I really can't argue with that.

So, that's two books right there, and that's not counting the dozens of others I have my eye on right now, such as George Crile's Charlie Wilson's War, James Dallesandro's 1906, Greg Bear's Quantico, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes (another much-appreciated but unread hardback Christmas present that is about to come out in paperback), David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Patrick O' Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, and the Mass Effect Strategy Guide. Yes yes, this is all a lie. I'll most probably read the large amounts of comics I have filling our spare room. Even ones by Brian Michael Bendis, though hopefully they won't involve semi-naked women being humiliated by supervillains, or pissy, defensive, insulting jokes about the justified criticism just because he knows the blogosphere really are onto something.

Why am I blithering on about this here? Because while reading today's newspapers I found a couple more to add to the pile, and I've not yet bought them, though I really must. Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott, and Dan Atkinson, have written a book on the illusory magic of The Market, called The Gods That Failed. It sounds like a nice companion piece to Thomas Frank's One Market Under God, which I have talked about before, and think is essential reading for everyone, be they right-wing, left-wing, fiscal conservatives, blinkered laissez-faire obsessives, chrometophobic Socialists, Scrooge McDucks, or sentient coins of the realm. The Elliott/Atkinson could be as good. Here are two extracts from the book, if you're curious.

The other book I discovered tonight is Joseph Lanza's Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films, partially because that's an awesome title, but mostly because it sounds very entertaining. Ken Russell discussed it in this column in The Times, and this section definitely appeals to me:

[The] chapter revealing stories behind the scenes on Altered States is nothing short of revelatory - I appreciate the eye-opening account, now that the other side has had its say. It was with the stocky New Yorker and respected novelist Paddy Chayefsky that I had my heavyweight bout. He was the impossible-to-please writer-producer of the sci-fi epic about the effect of mind-bending drugs on a Harvard scientist, Dr Jessup. We sparred from the start, over the high-falutin' hi-sci dialogue, the colour of the set, the luncheon script sessions, the meetings over Sanka (a brand of decaffeinated coffee) and pressed turkey sandwiches, camera angles, tracking shots and over Paddy taking the actors aside for private chats on how to play the scene.

We slugged it out round after round, as Lanza details with quotes from all sides. And it all came to a head when I lost it on the phone and gave Paddy a final tongue-lashing. “Why don't you take your turkey sandwiches and your Sanka and stuff it up your ass and let me get on with the f***ing film!” Now, that's literature.

Awesome. Altered States is one of my all-time favourite movies, and there isn't enough literature on the making of it, so this is automatically an essential purchase. Still, how will I fit all of this in? Life is filled with distractions, both better than reading and far far worse than reading, and they're not going away any time soon. If I was even more misanthropic than I sometimes can be when under large amounts of stress, I could wish for a similar situation to that in Time Enough At Last, but that Rod Serling would probably screw me but good.


Guess I'll just have to clear time by not watching TV instead.

* As the title suggests, this post is dedicated to the memory of Sgt. Blain Cooper, brave soldier and sexual Tyrannosaurus, regrettably killed by a Predator armed with a plasmacaster, whatever the hell that is.


He, and his chawin' tabaccy, shall be missed.

Adventures In Awesome: Want! Now! (1)

Note the (1) after the title of this post. I get the feeling I'm going to be doing this a lot, so totally plugged into the consumerist mindset am I. Every so often I rail against it, that ever-present unblinking pyramid eye that represents The Market, a monolithic soul-crushing generator of injustice every bit as invisible and dependent upon blind, unquestioning belief as all the myriad Sky-Gods of religion, and I worry that I'm nothing more than a brain-washed lever-pusher whose interaction with the economic machine amounts to little more than me chipping away at my own soul and handing over fragments of myself in exchange for fleeting moments of joy. It makes me sick to my guts. And then Activision announce (a month ago, but hey, I've been busy) they're releasing Guitar Hero for the DS, and look at the plastic rhythm-game pretty! ::enthusiastically pushes lever::


So purty! It will also include a special stylus pick to strum the screen, and other features include autograph signing in mid-song and using the mic to blow out onstage fires. And yes, it's all gimmicky surface stylings on a simple rhythm game, but it's the inventive use of the unique features of the DS that make it such a desirable object. The track line-up isn't announced yet (Nirvana and OK Go have been suggested, but that might be misreporting), and there will only be 20 songs, but I'm happy. I just hope the Guitar Grip peripheral fits into the clunky old non-Lite DS I have.

One thing I especially love about this is that it could be released at about the same time MTV Games finally releases the European version of Rock Band. Now, I'm angry that Activision have cynically blocked the patch that allows Guitar Hero peripherals to be used with Rock Band, and it's often little shitty manouevres like that that make me doubt the logic of allowing The Market to do what it wants. I mean, if the Market is the democracy-generating, self-regulating, benevolent and incorruptible God of Love that credulous evangelists like Thomas Friedman want you to think it is, how can Activision's mean-spirited anti-consumer move be good for anyone other than Activision's shareholders? Consumers get shafted, and somewhere in the world some corporate butt-nubbin gets to buy himself a brand new golf bag. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo. Here is an accurate visual representation of the actual relationship between The Market and the consumer.


And yet, I can't help but congratulate Activision on possibly spoiling MTV Games' rollout by bringing out a sensibly priced mini-alternative to Rock Band Europe, which is sickeningly, prohibitively, unfairly expensive. Even with Amazon knocking the price down, it's £40 for the game, and £100 for the peripherals (without Amazon's reductions, that's an RRP of £180!). That was the game I've been looking forward to most. Even more so than Lego Indiana Jones, Gears of War 2, Ninja Gaiden 2, Okami for Wii, and Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution put together. Even more so than the summer cinema releases that make me so crazy with anticipation. However, I think I'll pass. In the US the same game costs $148 (Amazon price). Convert the bucks to quids, and you're looking at £75.14 (£86.31 if you go by the RRP). Here is an accurate visual representation of the actual relationship between MTV Games and my soul's finger.


Thanks for the assist, Johnny! I will say this, though. Harmonix, thank you a million times over for inventing these magnificent games that have given me and Canyon and many guests to our home so much joy (and yeah, your interpretations of the game are more fluid and intuitive than Neversoft's commendable but slightly inferior adaptation), but why, how, why, why, why, how, why?!??!!!?! Is it just VAT? Is that responsible for a £100 mark-up? How can that be possible? I tell you, if there was a computer game made where the player has to throw rattles out of prams, I would buy that instead as a protest. Instead, Activision get a few more of my pounds. Guitar Hero On Tour FTW!

(P.S. Sorry about linking to that appalling book earlier. If you followed that link and were tempted to buy that inept pamphlet, ignore that, go here and do your brain a favour by buying Thomas Frank's One Market Under God.


It'll change your perception of the world for the better.)