Category: Religion

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Unrequired Reading

Stuff I meant to post about in the past week:

Writing about restaurants in New Orleans (with a go-to mention of Finis Shelnutt):

“When people are still mucking out their houses, chefs are living in FEMA trailers, and others are finding out they are going to get screwed by their insurance company, I don’t want to be the guy who is writing about how the foie gras is not quite up to snuff,” he said.

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Why bashing Wal-Mart is not a good strategy for the Dems:

By restraining inflation, intense competition of the sort that Wal-Mart provides eases pressure on the Federal Reserve to do the job with higher interest rates. Note the paradox: At one level, intense competition destroys jobs, as some companies can’t compete, but the larger effect is to increase total job creation by fostering favorable economic conditions.

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Get your picture taken with Jesus.

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NO,LA: It’s the civil engineering, stupid!

Why didn’t the Corps design a consistent, redundant system? In large part, the reason was foot dragging — or worse — by pols on the state, local, and federal levels. In some cases, political opposition prevented the Corps from seizing land to build sturdier foundations. Plus, Louisiana’s local levee boards were lousy stewards. Levee officials were political animals, not engineering experts, and sometimes proved more interested in running ancillary “economic development” projects than working with the Corps to make sure the levees were up to their task. (It’s not because New Orleans is poor and black: the levees protect New Orleans’s richer, whiter suburbs too.) In addition, the Corps warned that many of New Orleans’s manmade canals, obsolete for years, should be closed or at least gated -— to no avail. Moreover, when the Corps, along with state officials, came to understand that wetlands restoration is a vital part of the flood protection system, not a tree-hugger’s afterthought, Congress balked at spending the required $14 billion over several decades for coastal restoration.

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The Chinese village of Dafen is like the opposite of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions:

In just a few years, Dafen has become the leading production center for cheap oil paintings. An estimated 60 percent of the world’s cheap oil paintings are produced within Dafen’s four square kilometers (1.5 square miles). Last year, the local art factories exported paintings worth €28 million ($36 million). Foreign art dealers travel to the factory in the south of the communist country from as far away as Europe and the United States, ordering copies of famous paintings by the container. [. . .]

Some five million oil paintings are produced in Dafen every year. Between 8,000 and 10,000 painters toil in the workshops. The numbers are estimates: No one knows the exact figure, which increases by about 100 new painters every year. But it’s not just professional copy painters who are drawn to Dafen — graduates of China’s most renowned art academy also come here. They complete only a small number of paintings a month and earn as much as €1,000 ($1,282).

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A guy used the graphics engine of the computer game Half Life to make a video tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house.

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Go see Little Miss Sunshine when you get the chance. We caught it yesterday. So did a couple of children sitting in the row behind us. They were less than 10 years old, and I’m sorta wondering if their mom noticed the “R” rating on the movie, or just thought it would be a fun flick about children’s beauty pageants, with that guy from The Daily Show. She may’ve been a little surprised when Alan Arkin was snorting heroin in one of the opening scenes. Anyway, it was a really wonderful flick, with a punchline that almost had us crying with laughter.

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And have a good holiday.

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Rainy Saturday

It’s some godawful weather here in the northeast. We’re expecting a pair of Amy’s friends this afternoon for an early dinner. She’s been cooking and cleaning all day while I’ve been cleaning and trying to stay out of her way. It seems to have worked out okay, provided her friends are on the right bus out here from NYC.

We spent yesterday at this giant-ass outlet mall in New York state. I’ve written about this place a few times before, including one of the first posts I ever wrote. No Hugo Boss clothing this time around, but I found a couple of pairs of decent pants for the fall/winter.

Our routine for visiting this mall is that we

a) go on Saturday

b) leave a half-hour before the place opens

The latter enables us to get together before buses from NYC start showing up and the parking lot becomes jammed with rental cars carrying The Axis: German and Japanese tourists who have come to buy luxury goods on the cheap.

We got a late start yesterday, since Amy had to handle a work-emergency in the morning. When we reached the place, it was around noon, and it was a Friday.

That’s when Amy discovered the importance of going only on Saturdays: Hasidic Jews won’t be there.

As it is, there were enough Hasidim present yesterday to populate Samaria. The place was overrun with head-covered moms pushing multiple baby carriages, two or three more children in tow, while sections of the parking lot looked like a reunion for Country Squire station wagons.

This led Amy to ask, “What exactly are they all here to buy?”

I replied that we should open a headscarf and wig store up there: “And the best thing is, we could take Saturdays off!”

Anyway, we spent a bunch of hours up there, with Amy searching pretty much in vain for fall clothes. On the plus side, we swung by my office on the way home and picked up my new Amazon delivery: a couple of 1gb SD cards for our digital cameras, a gravy separator, and a pair of books, My Horizontal Life, by Chelsea Handler (whose show on E! is a hoot), and Lost Girls, Alan Moore’s pornographic comic book about Alice (of Wonderland), Dorothy (of Oz) and Wendy (of Neverland) meeting in a hotel in Austria shortly before WWI.

I read the first few installments of the comic years ago, and, um, enjoyed it a lot. I’ll let you know how the collected edition (three books in a slipcase) works out.

Once we finally got home, we busted out the gin and our most recent Netflix choice: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. It’s one of the most entertaining movies I’ve watched in a while. Robert Downey, Jr. is typically fantastic, but Val Kilmer’s also pretty fun to watch as Gay Perry, the private eye. Run, don’t walk.

Anyway, our guests swear they’re on the right bus, and oughtta be here in half an hour. Amy’s made a cassoulet; I’ll let you know how it goes (she also picked up some neat cheeses for hors d’oeuvres, and made a chocolate cake for dessert). If it weren’t typhooning out, we’d take her friends on a nice tour of the gardens out here.

That’s the skinny. I hope everyone else is having a drier holiday weekend.

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Outta touch

Sorry it’s been a quiet week, dear readers. I’ve been busy at work, but I’ve also found myself falling into one of my wheels-within-wheels paranoiac phases. It’s centered on trying to get at an understanding of the power-relations at play in the current Gulf War.

Anyway, I gotta write an article on the benefits of RFID in the pharma supply chain, so I’m gonna get to that.

I leave you with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon / sushi axis.

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On the DL

Dennis Leary goofs on Mel Gibson while he sings the praises of Jewish ballplayers during a Red Sox broadcast.

(Some of you may wonder why, as a Yankees fan, I keep a link to a Red Sox blog in my blogroll. It’s because Mnookin’s an awfully good writer, isn’t prone to flying off the handle, and needs all the pity he can get, since he cheers for a team whose fans I witnessed perform The Wave five times during the June 19 game against the Nationals)

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Showtime!

We spent Tuesday “down the shore” with my brother, his wife, and their two daughters. Ostensibly, the trip was about introducing my nieces to the ocean and having a little vacation-within-a-vacation. But there were vital issues of man’s relation to the infinite that needed to be settled. So we went to the boardwalk and found that Addams Family pinball machine.

As I wrote last month,

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and pinball.”

My brother and I both love to play pinball–and this particular machine–but we play in very different ways. Like the brothers in Maclean’s sublime story, our methods say something about how we each achieve grace in this world.

You can go back and reread that post to learn what I wrote about our two styles (mine: fast and loose; Boaz’s: controlled and precise) and what they allegedly say about our ways of apprehending the world.

What’s important is that we lied to our wives and said, “You get some lunch for the kids; we’ll be over at the arcade for a little while.” Other women could have been nervous that their husbands would be heading over to a bar, or ogling teenagers in bikinis. Of course, any woman who would consent to marry me or Boaz knows what she’s in for: the NBA playoffs and occasional stops at comic stores (me), the NCAA tournament and occasional trips to see Springsteen (Boaz), and pinball (both of us).

So we walked into the arcade, headed to the overheated retro-game room (“Flashbacks”) in back, where John Hughes movie-posters adorned the walls and ’80s music played over the speakers, and we played.

It’s been years since we played pinball together, and I’d like to tell you that it was a glorious reunion, a moment when two brothers could put aside their differences and experience the joy they shared in years past.

Unfortunately, we stunk up the joint.

We were flat-out terrible in our first game. I’m talking Special Olympics bad. We kept looking at each other with that “we’re just working the bad bounces out” look that pinball players have. Both our final scores were under 10 million; a free game was at 56 million. We were embarrassed.

After that first disastrous game, Boaz said, “It’ll be interesting to see which of our styles of play comes around first.”

(Now, I don’t want that to sound like we were trying to beat each other. In fact, we’ve never played against each other. Sure, we both had final scores up on the board, but we never played with any sense of rivalry. It was all about beating the machine, not each other. If anything, we would cheer each other on when one of us would get into a groove.)

We wouldn’t have to wait long for an answer. It was on the second ball of that next game that It All Clicked for me. I got on a run where I hit target after target, sequences falling in line like dominoes. About 140 million points later, I said, “I wish that top right flipper wouldn’t stick.”

Bo agreed that it was holding me back.

It turned out that that game was only a warmup. In the third game, as my brother put it in yesterday’s comments, “Gil absolutely demolished the machine; he managed to make a life-affirming activity absolutely banal.” It was like those rare occasions at basketball when the rim feels as wide as a hula-hoop. (Okay, “THAT rare occasion.” I didn’t have too many of them, to be honest.) Every shot fell, and every bounce that could have lost a ball went my way. Afterward, we joked that the machine was saving the bad bounces for him.

At one point, I had a play that lasted so long, Boaz could’ve left for pizza, strolled over to the “Shoot Bin Laden” paintball booth, and taken the ski-lift back before I was done. But he wouldn’t have missed this run for the world.

This room in the arcade was hot, as I said, and we were both sweating pretty badly (it’s genetic). Any time the ball was held by the machine–like when Thing’s hand comes out and picks the ball up during the Greed sequence–I would quickly pat my palms against my nylon shorts. That was about it for the individual flare. Generally, it was like that feedback loop I described last month: hands on the flippers, and the rest of the body just a scaffold. A pinball machine.

I knocked out every “mansion room” and posted a final score of 450 million: second best on the machine, and probably the highest score I ever got. Jane, Amy & the kids showed up while I was finishing that game. I left the free games on the machine. “Libation to the pinball gods,” I told Boaz.

He stayed to play one or two more games, to show his older daughter what that machine is like. We all enjoyed the first Addams Family movie, and this machine has plenty of great sound-clips from it.

Me? I headed out for some pizza; it was 3 o’clock or so, and I hadn’t eaten lunch yet. (The lightheadedness of hunger probably helped me clean out my mind for that zen-ball run.) Jane walked out with me, shaking her head and sighing at the general goofiness of her husband and her brother-in-law.

I told her, “I’m sorry we took so long in there. If it’s any consolation, Bo’s never going to play pinball again.”

Postscript: Half an hour later, my wife flat-out destroyed me at Skee-Ball.

Postpostscript: When we got back to Boaz & Jane’s car, there was a parking ticket on it. I said, “I’ll pay that one. It’s my fault we were gone so long.”

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C’est Levy

Bernhard-Henri Levy wrote an excellent essay from and about Israel in the NYTimes last Sunday:

Zivit Seri is a tiny woman, a mother, who speaks with clumsy, defenseless gestures as she guides me through the destroyed buildings of Bat Galim — literally “daughter of the waves,” the Haifa neighborhood that has suffered most from the shellings. The problem, she explains, is not just the people killed: Israel is used to that. It’s not even the fact that here the enemy is aiming not at military objectives but deliberately at civilian targets — that, too, is no surprise. No, the problem, the real one, is that these incoming rockets make us see what will happen on the day — not necessarily far off — when the rockets are ones with new capabilities: first, they will become more accurate and be able to threaten, for example, the petrochemical facilities you see there, on the harbor, down below; second, they may come equipped with chemical weapons that can create a desolation compared with which Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like a mild prelude. For that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what is at stake in the operation in southern Lebanon.

Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice anymore. We should listen to Zivit Seri tell us, in front of a crushed building whose concrete slabs are balancing on tips of twisted metal, that, for Israel, it was five minutes to midnight.

As a bonus, he also manages to bring kaballah and rocketry together (a little easier at that permeable border than Pynchon’s merkabah mysticism).

There’s also a neat article by Barry Rubin in the current ish of Foreign Affairs about Israel’s security strategy (reg. required), written before the kidnappings by Hamas and Hezbollah. While it doesn’t predict the very current events, it does help explain the political and military evolution of Israel’s strategy of withdrawing from southern Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.