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The Hebrew Hammer

I haven’t written about the war that broke out between Israel and Lebanon this weekend because I don’t know what to say.

I feel like I did in the months after 9/11: tracking all the wheels-within-wheels, trying to understand who stands the most to gain from which actions, whose decisions may backfire, which groups will break from their traditional responses.

As you can guess, I’m paralyzed. All I can do is hope for the safety of my family and friends (including my buddy Mitch, who’s reporting from Beirut), and for a quick, decisive end to hostilities.

I don’t think that’s going to happen, but the status quo hasn’t been around for years.

With all the heaviness out of the way, I offer you proof that I’m still a retard who goes for cheap laughs.

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Pynched

When I was a wee paranoiac, I heard that Vineland was soon to be released. At that point, I’d only read V., and Lot 49, but I’d made a stab at The Big One (it took 4 attempts before I finally made it through).

I read the notice in Pynchon Notes that the long-awaited new book from was soon to be released. As it turns out, the book wasn’t very good, and I’m convinced he put it out to keep his publisher off his back while he completed Mason & Dixon. But at the time, it felt like a bit of literary history was going to occur.

In fact, I actually had a dream about Vineland before it came out. I was in a bookstore, and there was a large “dump” of the new hardcover, several months early! I picked up a copy and thumbed through it. When I woke, all I could remember of that dream-book was the back cover flap. It had an author bio that read, “Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow. He lives in New York City.”

Below the text was a beautiful black-and-white photograph of an empty loft. Even as a teenager, my subconscious liked to mess with me.

All of which gets me to the following question: Wouldn’t it be great if the book actually kept this title?

(Update: Slate contends that Pynchon may have spammed his own book’s Amazon page)

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It’s the end of the world and all of western civilization

I got my breakfast (black coffee and a blueberry muffin) at a truck-stop Dunkin Donuts on the way to my office. As I was walking out, I passed a woman. She was in her early 40s, not quite haggardly thin, with dark hair and a face pockmarked like Sadie Burke. She carried a canvas purse and a pack of cigarettes.

She stepped past me to a man sitting at a table and asked in a thin voice, “Are you going west?”

“No,” he said. “Where you headed?”

“California.”

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The Hit Factory

Since I’ve been writing about the drug industry (our magazine bowed in October 1999) I’ve been hearing that we’re heading toward The Era of Personalized Medicine. This means that, as we develop more knowledge of the genome, proteome, and metabolome (you think I’m making this stuff up?), drugs will be tailored to generate greater efficacy or fewer side effects in smaller population groups.

The drug that gets touted as the advance guard in this wave is Herceptin, which can be very effective in treating breast cancer, but only in tumors that over-express the HER2 protein. Around 20% of breast cancer cases fall into this category; Herceptin isn’t effective against other tumors.

Some pharmacoeconomists contend that personalized medicine will lead to The End of the Blockbusters, as smaller patient groups translate to a cap on your “customer” base. On the other side of the spectrum is a “mass appeal” drug like Lipitor, the cholesterol treatment that sells more than twice the dollar amount of any other drug in the world and is now being tested for benefits in treating Alzheimer’s disease.

I bring this up not because I just finished that Top Companies report, but because of N’Sync.

This morning, I read a funny article adapted from the book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson (not this guy). It examines how the entertainment industry faces The Death of the Blockbuster, citing diminishing CD and movie sales figures and TV and radio ratings as indicators that the niche is where it’s at.

It’s altogether possible that NSync’s first-week record [2.4 million CDs sold] may never be broken. The band could go down in history [. . .] for marking the peak of the hit bubble — the last bit of manufactured pop to use the 20th century’s fine-tuned marketing machine to its fullest before the gears were stripped and the wheels fell off.

Music itself hasn’t gone out of favor — just the opposite. There has never been a better time to be an artist or a fan, and there has never been more music made or listened to. But the traditional model of marketing and selling music no longer works. The big players in the distribution system — major record labels, retail giants — depend on huge, platinum hits. These days, though, there are not nearly enough of those to support the industry in the style to which it has become accustomed. We are witnessing the end of an era.

His long-term economic arguments and his moralizing (near the end) are bizarrely off-kilter. For one thing, News Corp. owns MySpace. The site may offer massive “niche” opportunities, but it’s going to make cash hand over first for Murdoch & Co., both little (user fees) and big (as a promotional tool for its properties).

For another, in this era where every entertainment option is allegedly losing its hit-making power, Anderson manages to avoid any mention of the Harry Potter books and The Da Vinci Code. Both of these are such impossibly massive hits — despite the fact that more individual titles get published now than ever — that they blow a sizeable hole in the concept that we’re all moving to the margins.

It’s my contention that, while there a whole lot of factors at play in the decline of hits in the last five years, I think the biggest is that almost every blockbuster movie is crap, contemporary pop and dance music is so dull that radio stations needed to be bribed into playing it, and the current generation of TV executives were raised on the awful television of the late 1970s and 1980s.

Hits might not be as big as they once were, but they’re even more important to the entertainment industry now, given the high price of failure. I’m not saying it’s right, as it tends to lead to “safe” committee-designed projects, but in the pharmaceutical business, as in Hollywood, the big hits help defray the costs of a bazillion failures.

(The Agitator has some reflections on Anderson’s book.)

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Highways, Byways, etc.

On Sunday, George Will offered a tribute to the Interstate Highway System, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this summer:

Eisenhower’s message to Congress advocating the interstate system began, “Our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods.”

No legislator more ardently supported the IHS than the Tennessee Democrat who was chairman of the Senate Public Works subcommittee on roads. His state had benefited handsomely from the greatest federal public works project of the prewar period, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which, by bringing electrification to a large swath of the South, accelerated the closing of the regional development gap that had stubbornly persisted since the Civil War. This senator who did so much to put postwar America on roads suitable to bigger, more powerful cars was Al Gore Sr. His son may consider this marriage of concrete and the internal combustion engine sinful, but Tennessee’s per capita income, which was just 70 percent of the national average in 1956, today is 90 percent.

Meanwhile, a 3-ton slab of concrete fell inside Boston’s Big Dig tunnel, killing a passenger in a car. Evidently, this is not connected to the Big Dig concrete fraud case. But after going $12 billion over budget, you can imagine that corners had to be cut somewhere, right?

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Mile Low?

Witold Rybczynski has a new slideshow up at Slate, examining the architecture of Denver’s art museum, on the occasion of Liebeskind’s new addition, to be completed in September.

Whether you like this sort of mannered architecture is a matter of taste. Frank Gehry’s swirlings and churnings have always seemed lighthearted and whimsical, buoyed by an endearing take-it-or-leave-it quality. Libeskind’s forms strike me as aggressive. Standing in front of his building is like being buttonholed by someone shouting insistently in your face: And this! And this! And this!

I hope my “Denver correspondent” (that means you, Craig) will provide some comments on this.

(I really need to get around to reading his City Life sometime this summer, but it’s The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril for me right now, followed by Gilead.)

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The Music of the Spheres

Sorry to be out of touch, dear readers. I was busy finishing up the last stages of the Top Companies issue, plus dealing with our annual conference. For some reason, whenever I finish up this issue, I get sorta down. Maybe all that writing and research leaves me drained, but I think it might be that I don’t feel it was good enough, and that triggers a bit of a depression. If I only had more time, resources, expertise, etc., I could make the report that much better.

But it’s off to the printer, and now I have a little while to breathe.

Some of you have e-mailed to ask about the new header-picture for this site. It’s from a postcard I bought in Budapest, at a park devoted to old Soviet-era statues. I posted a bunch about my trip in July 2004 (look it up in the archives), and also put the pictures up on Flickr. That guy’s around 35 feet tall, and mighty imposing, so I laughed when he got recontextualized in that postcard.

And I went to the beach!

To use the local parlance, Amy & I “went down the shore” this weekend, staying at her friend’s place in Lavallette, NJ. It was only a 27-hour getaway (so as to avoid traffic), but refreshing. We lounged on the front porch, lounged out on the beach and read while listening to guys who made Gino the Ginny sound tame, cooked up fajitas, watched Sexy Beast, and meandered down the Seaside Heights boardwalk on a Saturday night.

It’s that last one that I know you want to hear about, and I’m peeved that I forgot to bring my camera with me on that journey, since it was filled with awesome sights.

Starting with the tattoo/piercing shop that had two studios with big windows facing out onto the boardwalk. That’s right; you can stand outside and gawk as knuckleheads get inked with “tribal bands” for tribes they don’t belong to. It’s captivating. When we passed the shop, a woman was getting something tattooed on her ankle while her underaged kids sat in the studio. We started to wonder if the windows were actually two-way mirrors, and they had no idea we were watching.

The people-watching vibe held up; they just weren’t behind glass. The Saturday night attire was fantastic, what with the boardwalk’s cosmopolitan mix of gaudy Italians, gaudy Puerto Ricans and gaudy black people, all dressed to the, um, fours. Maybe to the fives, but definitely not to the nines.

There was the obligatory “Jersey Girl” stamped across the ass of a girl’s sweat-shorts, the combo of “wife-beaters” and Italian horn necklaces, the throwback basketball jerseys (and a Utah Jazz DeShawn Stevenson authentic: what’s up with that?), the generally short (except when way short) skirts, and the families with baby carriages, just taking an evening out on the promenade.

We stopped in front of some T-shirt places, where we considered buying several novelties:

“Two tickets to the gun show” (with arrows pointing at the arms)

“Free hand lotion” (with an arrow pointing straight down)

I (Heart) My Italian Stallion

I (Heart) Black Guys

I (Heart) Puerto Rican Guys

(but no I (Heart) Jewish Guys, sad to say)

Later, we walked by a video arcade where a pair of teens were playing Percussion Master, a drum-based game. You have three different drums to hit, and you have to follow the symbols scrolling down the screen to get the sequence right.

Scott, who loves this sorta stuff (he was playing Guitar Heroes on his PS2 earlier in the afternoon), waited for them to finish and then popped in his coins.

He selected the Easy level, which I cruelly hoped would consist solely of Def Leppard songs, but in fact contained some goofy dance tracks. No Underworld or Chemical Brothers, unfortunately; I guess those come in the later rounds. Scott drummed pretty well, even though his avatar in the game was a Japanese schoolgirl.

But the video arcade actually brings us to the real reason we hit the Boardwalk that night: reconnaissance!

See, my brother and his family are planning to come out to NJ next month, and it’s my mission to find a boardwalk that has our favorite pastime: a functioning Addams Family pinball machine. And Scott knew exactly where we could find one.

Strangely, it seems that I’ve never written about pinball on this blog. I’m amazed by this fact, because it’s actually a subject I can ramble on about at length (and am about to).

To paraphrase A River Runs Through It, “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.

Why does the Addams Family machine enthrall us? It’s a combination of the tricky-but-not-tortured layout of the playing-field, the “mission” aspect of the 13 mansion rooms (you want rules?), and all those great Raul Julia and Anjelica Houston soundclips that it plays.

About those clips: I hadn’t played a machine about three or four years, until Saturday night, but it all came back to me as I played my first game:

“Quicksand, fumes, toxic waste . . . It’s all ours!”

“Good show, old man!”

“Raise the dead! Out to the cemetery! Come on, everybody!”

“Dirty pool, old man . . . I like it!”

And, during the apocalyptic buildup to the multiball sequence, “SHOWTIME!”

(What’s great is that my wife was watching me play this, as Scott and I called out these lines in the loud arcade (“The Mamushka!” “It’s Cousin It!”). I say “great” insofar as I mean “pathetic.” I have an impression of what I look like when I’m playing, actually, and it’s not pretty. Because I tend to lean on my palms, middle fingers on the flippers, the rest of my body is sorta slack while the tension runs between my shoulders, as if I’m on braces. It’s like a feedback loop, in which I’ve simply extended the circuit of the machine, and I’m afraid it makes me look like a zombie slave of the machine. Which would be so different than how I usually look.)

To my brother, the game is a matter of precision, of slowing down the field of play and making every shot count. For example, when the ball kicks out of The Swamp, he traps it on the lower right flipper so he can size up his shot toward the Electric Chair, the Bear Kick Ramp, or the Thing Ramp. He’s awfully accurate in that scenario.

Me? Most times, I’m in the “Mark McGwire vs. Randy Johnson” school, where I take the momentum of the kickout and connect it to a well-timed hit from the flipper. It’s done on instinct, and a quick twitch (who just finished re-reading All The King’s Men?) that fires the ball (pretty much) where I want it. And it’s not as embarrassing as missing the shot when you’ve got the ball trapped on your flipper.

These styles carry throughout the game: my brother tries to slow the game down, while I try to speed it up. It’s most obvious during a multiball sequence, when three balls are in play at once. That’s when I give up on any semblance of control, instead chasing all three in their dance, influenced though they are by the fluctuating magnet near the center of play (“The Power”). I jokingly call it “The Music of the Spheres,” but I find a beauty in it, melding physics, chaos (lousy Power), and Hollywood (“Jackpot!”).

It’s interesting to note that, while I’m much more into the speed of the game, I’m much less into putting english on it. I rarely bump the machine, except very subtly. My brother tends to tilt more than I do. If a bad bounce leads to the ball going down an outlane, I tend to punch my palm, and let it go. I also like to leave a free game on the machine: libation to the pinball gods.

None of this is to sneer at my brother’s style of play. It mirrors the way we learned Attic Greek together (because that’s how we spent the summer of 1992). I had a natural facility for it, while Boaz had to bust his butt night in and night out. I never had to, and subsequently never developed a deep understanding of it. He’s now teaching ancient Greek, while I’m the editor of a pharmaceutical trade magazine.

He admits to some awe when I really get my speed-game on, and I admire the patience he has to make it play his game. But neither of us can function well using the other’s style.

It probably also mirrors the way we approach religion. My brother’s an observant Jew, while I favor physics, chaos and Hollywood. Okay, it’s not that simple, but my view of the universe–when I have one–is one of intuition, of constantly shifting patterns and speed. We both have ineffable visions of what This is about, and I’m hoping he uses the Comments section to offer his.

The great thing is that our top scores on the machine are just about equal, and we both enjoy the heck out of playing.

The best news from the weekend is that the pinball machine in Seaside Heights was in pretty good repair (a couple of mansion room lights were out, and the upper right flipper isn’t strong enough to finish the left ramp). I’m hoping we can make a trip down there next month, even if our wives give up on us and take Bo & Jane’s kids out to the beach for a while.