Trip to Hot Chicken

Three weeks ago, when my fiancee and I were in Nashville, we drove to the city's outskirts to eat at Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, inspired by the liner notes of one of my favorite records. We arrived to find it closed on Sundays, a disappointing turn of events, especially considering we cajoled two much-less-interested relatives in driving us there. At least I compensated with spicy catfish and fried chicken for my two meals later that day.

Downtown Nashville is a strange combination, though not that atypical for an American city: There's the tourist stretch, this time with lots of country-music bars and country-music clothes (I certainly made sure to buy a cowboy shirt, my first non-faux, non-used one), the convention center and hockey arena that interrupt the city's fabric, the poorly sited football stadium, an underused riverfront park, and a Central Business District totally underused on weekends, with unfortunate architecture, namely the AT&T tower shaped like a circa 1994 cell phone. There's a clear and interesting tension between the city's desire to preserve its prewar architecture, for the sake of maintaining its identity as a charismatic Southern music hub, and opening parcels to the large floor plates needed for the contemporary professional services that generate the most tax revenue. Not that I didn't enjoy walking around, especially to the Southern Festival of Books.

The best part of the weekend, aside from the wedding that brought me to town, was a trip to the Family Wash, a restaurant and bar in a residential neighborhood that was zonked-out in all the right ways. The decor was a grab bag, the country music was from outer space, and the beer was relatively inexpensive. It all made me sad I couldn't be there on a Tuesday for the $10 deal for shepherd's pie and a pint. The place may be better than any in Cambridge. In one of my courses this semester, one of the main themes is how cities typically crash ashore while chasing grand schemes when the talent they need to produce incremental, organic, worthwhile, exciting growth is already living there, right in front of their eyes. The Family Wash might be further proof of that.

Thanks to Yo La Tengo for the post's title. I can hear the opening strains of "Return to Hot Chicken" now: "Bum bum ba da da ba, da bum da." (It's meant to be played on guitar.)

Damn Straight, Mario Vargas Llosa

The criticism of the Nobel Prize in Literature is tired but true: The committee really does bestow the award on overly obscure, undeserving writers. From 2007 to 2009 the winners were Doris Lessing, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, and Herta Muller. Huh? So it was with great joy earlier this month when I opened the Times on my stoop and read this year's winner is Mario Vargas Llosa, the scholarly Peruvian novelist and essayist.

Vargas Llosa is surprisingly quite the conservative -- as Alma Guillermoprieto tartly summarized in her review of his memoir of his failed 1990 presidential run, "A Fish in the Water," he "had campaigned as if Peru were already Switzerland," which she dismisses as quite the folly -- for how piercing his writing is. In his more political novels, he fiercely takes down the excesses of power, suggesting he would associate more with the common man than the business class, which he actually does. In his romantic novels, he champions the life of emotion, fancy and the pen over that of masculinity, both of which would seem to fit the profile of a romantic liberal at the barricades, not the well-coiffed man on the Upper East Side (as he is these days, while teaching at Princeton).

That he straddles both and understands them so well is perhaps his biggest accomplishment. He has written one of the most bitter but exquisite opening lines to a novel -- "En que momento se ha jodido el Peru?", at the start of "Conversation in the Cathedral," which roughly translates as "When did Peru fuck itself over so completely?" But he also lovingly captures the madcap adventures of a fictionalized version of his young self in "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," falling in love with his older aunt and holding together a Lima radio station by a shoestring as its soap opera's scriptwriter confuses reality, drama and dreams. Few do it quite like him, with such a deep knowledge of language.

Perhaps it's that extreme talent with language that makes Vargas Llosa's conservatism quite palatable. In a 1994 column for El Pais, the Spanish daily in his adopted hometown of Madrid, he swiftly takes down the first Berlusconi administration, which haughtily tried to assert its superiority over Bolivia. Not so fast, Vargas Llosa protested: "What surprised me most about Ferrerra's [a spokesman's] misinformation is that a good number of Latin American countries have already accomplished (and without making too much of a fuss about it) what his own government -- headed by Berlusconi -- has been trying to accomplish in Italy, without success," -- free-market reforms that unlock foreign investment and entrepreneurial potential, leading to economic and income growth.

I wonder what Vargas Llosa would say about Latin America today, when most of the countries that followed the free market's path didn't make out as well as it appeared they would in 1994. But his approach is always eloquent and rational, and perhaps closer to the center than he's typically given credit for, which is at least worth engaging. And even if one disagrees, there are always all those excellent novels.

Next year, for Roth, please.

My Mainstream Moment

On my Facebook page I like to have the "Favorite Music" and "Favorite Books" section of my profile reflect what I'm listening to at the moment, rather than my all-time bests. My tastes and fits of swooning shift too frequently for the latter. During my most recent update several days ago, when I substituted Blackstreet's "No Diggity," Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" and Bruce Springsteen's "My Hometown" for Real Estate, Stars and the Dismemberment Plan, I looked up and realized more than half of my favorite music were multiplatinum, ultra-mainstream musicians. Shock of all shocks! What happened to annoyingly elitist standards?

I think this shift happened because I increasingly like production standards. In "Landslide," the bass notes are so crisp and wonderful and in "No Diggity," the piano chords sway so fluidly, as though they're not piano keys, that they're impossible not to appreciate. There's something wonderful to be said for hearing each note exactly as it's meant to be heard, lo-fi production be damned. There's no reason to ignore a hook when it's staring you in the face, especially when it's those piano chords of "No Diggity," which no one can resist, even the most reticent of dancers.

Pop songs aren't inherently vapid because they're pop songs, either. In "You Can Call Me Al," from Paul Simon's "Graceland," also listed on my Facebook page these days because of its sheer brilliance as an album, the verses' lyrics are genuinely moving. They're just hidden by a non-sequitur of a rhyming chorus ("If you be my bodyguard / I can be your long-lost pal..."), a simple horn part that lends itself well to a harmony, a needlessly showy bass breakdown and a catchy music video starring Chevy Chase (which is above). A friend tells me that Jens Lenkman sometimes covers the song live, sans chorus, because he also appreciates the song's words and thinks the chorus only interferes. Lenkman knows what he's talking about. When Simon ends the song, singing about the lost tourist who "sees angels in the architecture / spinning in infinity / hallelujah," his melody jumps a few notes on "Hallelujah," as though the beauty of the world is sometimes too much bear. Simon's right about that.

Update: And my Facebook page's musical preferences are now all snobbish again.

Gary Shteyngart Gets It

In an interview on "Fresh Air" this past summer, the writer Gary Shteyngart said he chose to set his new, semi-apolcalyptic, fully satiric novel, "Super Sad True Love Story," in the near future because society develops so quickly in the early 21st century that if he had chosen the present, the book would've become outdated during the year between when he finished writing it and when it arrived in bookstores.

After finishing about two-thirds of "Super Sad True Love Story," I find its circa 2020 setting eerily similar to present day. The U.S. hasn't crumbled to the point that it's ruled by the Bipartisan Party's military regime, pegged its dollar to the yuan, and had its military kill homeless people living in Central Park to clear the city in anticipation of the Chinese prime minister's visit, as Shteyngart imagines. Even two years into national economic morass, I can't foresee that scenario happening -- nor does Shteyngart, I suspect -- but it does strike a very raw chord as we grapple with questions about America's long-term preeminence.

More relevant is Shteyngart's slashing into modern techno-culture. Over the past month, I've experienced a series of moments that I once thought were improbable but make me think he's right on target. The "Suk Dik" bodysuit that one of the protagonist's nemeses at work wears? Well, I walked past a girl on Cambridge Street wearing an "Adorable Bitch" T-shirt. The acronyms that make the protagonist's head spin? Well, I hung out with an old friend recently who used three in two sentences that I just couldn't follow, making me feel old. The distaste for books, which are generally accepted as smelly and unreadable? (People instead major in Scanning. The protagonist actually reads, making him an oddity.) Well, the University of Central Florida's new medical school does not have a library. Instead, students are given iPods, "with access to online databases," the Times recently reported.

It may be hyperbolic to directly connect a society's downfall with its increasing love of the digital and its ignorance of the printed word. But as wonderful as the 21st century's connectivity is, there's a certain level of illiteracy that develops from always staring into one's iPhone. (And, boy, do I detest how people hold them -- delicately cupped in their palms so they can quickly run their pointer finger across the screen without smearing it.) Shteyngart gets it perfectly. When people care less about complexity, intimacy, the slow road and articulation, in favor of reductionism, superficiality, warp speed, and indifferent conversation, society is diminished.

Online Comment Boards' Political Moment

Since Carl Paladino vaulted from a wealthy real estate developer in Buffalo to the Republican gubernatorial candidate in New York one month ago, the endless stream of his missteps has been nothing short of befuddling. He has a vindictive, irascible personality. He bullies his way forward. He doesn't seem to have much going for him except for his frank opinions. And he captured the thick strand of national voter discontent so well that he zoomed past the state party's preferred candidate, Rick Lazio, a former congressman, to crush him in the primary.

Paladino's politics resemble the cacophony of the online comment boards at the bottom of news stories. There are the cute word games with opponents' names, such as "Status Cuomo" for his Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, which Paladino's campaign manager coined. (This is actually mildly funny.) There are the promises of physical violence and name-calling, such as promising "to take a bat" to Albany and describing Sheldon Silver, New York's Assembly Speaker and a devout Jew, as the anti-Christ. There are the homophobic comments and e-mails forwarding racist jokes. And there's the hypocrisy of railing against insiderism and government spending while using his campaign donations to curry favor for project approvals, using state subsidies to help finance development, and using his campaign account to pay companies directly connected to him. (None of this is remotely funny, particularly the homophobic comments, considering the past month's wave of antigay crimes in metro New York.)

Comment boards, which never do anything more than insult, love to vent, kick and scream, as does Paladino, but rarely offer anything productive beyond that. There are no ideas, no alternatives and no solutions. Paladino rarely talks about anything substantive on the campaign trail, and when he does, he often can't help but scream mean things over it, so that's all the press writes about. He's little more than a cranky, bitter man, like so many of the people who comment on articles, but somehow he's riding a political wave.

On his political journey, Paladino has tapped into the same vein of unhappiness as the Tea Party has nationally, though he isn't quite a Tea Party darling in the way Rand Paul or Christine O'Donnell are. Also, some people who pledge allegiance to the Tea Party have articulated ideas about the nonexistent, fiscally conservative role they believe all government should have, unlike Paladino, who doesn't seem to have ideas. But the Tea Party is similar to online comment boards' writers because both have a fundamental desire to blow up the whole system and watch where the shards fall -- without seriously thinking about what that means and why those shards, when glued together, might serve some valid purposes.

Now that the Tea Party and online comment boards are having their political moment, it will be interesting to see if the voting public will be comfortable, six or 24 months down the road, with the contempt and incivility it's chosen to breed.

Grey Lady, Rainy Weather: The Missing Element Of The Times' Fall Foliage Map

For those who obsessively follow the Times like me, the change in its Weather Report's fall foliage report is most unwelcome. The map of the Northeast, with its color scheme of "still green" to "past peak," is still there, but the accompanying caption is disappointingly different. Instead of the romantic prose about the range of oranges, crimsons and yellow draped across the area, there's now rather drab commentary about the region's weather. From today's page:

"Cloudy, wet weather will span much of the Northeast and Middle Atlantic States and reach west into Ohio. The weather will improve from south to north over the next couple of days. By the weekend, the entire region will be dry, save for a few showers and some winds across northernmost sections."

Who cares about the conditions for viewing leaves? It's what the leaves look like that's truly important, especially for those of us stuck in urban settings and unable to drive into the rolling hills and valleys of interior New England. Above is a photo from Cheshire, Mass., in the Berkshires.

Farewell, Jerry Manuel and Omar Minaya

No one is surprised Jerry Manuel and Omar Minaya were fired yesterday as the Mets' manager and general manager, respectively. Manuel seemed to draw the most displeasure through the season because he couldn't dial up his relaxed attitude to respond to the team's disintegration after the All-Star Break and its subsequent two-month-long sleepwalk after that. But Minaya really was the one whose time had expired.

The roster is now full of his questionable signings, including closer Francisco Rodriguez, who combines circa 2001 Armando Benitez's unreliability with domestic abuse; second-baseman Luis Castillo, who has become indifferent to running, hitting and fielding, yet complains about being replaced; and Oliver Perez, who makes Castillo's play look inspired. Carlos Beltran is also close to jumping in this muck, considering his contract's size, his production the past two years, and his defining moment as a Met is watching Adam Wainwright's curveball for the last out of the 2006 NLCS. My uncle, however, is right to point out Beltran was superb between 2006 and 2008. Pedro Martinez gets a pass, I suppose, because while he only had one good year out of four, he had to be signed to revive the Mets' relevance (which sounds like the typical argument used to argue for massive public subsidy for sports stadiums; just replace "Martinez" with "tax dollars" and "Mets" with "city").

But Minaya had also proven by this point he isn't good at being an executive. He fired Willie Randolph in 2008 at about 4 a.m. EST so it wouldn't make the next day's papers. He allowed his friend and former fellow executive Tony Bernazard to challenge players to fights on the team bus. He strangely embarrassed reporters who asked tough questions during press conferences. He didn't know Beltran was having knee surgery last winter until after Beltran had it. The Wilpons, the team owners, had essentially stopped allowing him to give press conferences and be the team's public voice, which isn't a good sign.

A general manager first has to judge athletic talent well, but second, has to know how to run a team responsibly, and that slipped past Minaya. As it is with any mess, there's plenty of responsibility for lots to share, but Minaya probably deserves to be at the line's front. It's tough to see where the Mets go from here, but they've been here before and recovered, so I know they will again. To know peaks one must know valleys. A cliche, but a true cliche.