In Which Florence And The Machine Instagram Their Way From Los Angeles To Las Vegas To New Orleans And All Is Delightful

Coney Island Is Where September Is Born

Look, I know perfectly well that Coney Island is really a much dingier, less romantic place than this beautiful video makes it out to be, but I also know that Coney Island still resonates as a semi-mythic American place positively throbbing with Septembral Americana. And I know that this video captures that perfectly.

 

Believe Everything

Finished Neil Gaiman's charming book American Gods a couple of nights ago.

It's going to be the next big HBO show apparently and that was enough to finally get me to pull it down from the shelf where it has been sitting for some time and give it a read.

So; thumbnail synopsis, thumbnail review:

All of the gods and folk heroes and mythological creatures are real and they all of them live in America, where they have been forgotten, have withered from a lack of worship, and now haunt the truckstops and diners and motels and roadside attractions of the bleakest portions of the Midwest.

Our protagonist, a man called Shadow, gets out of jail, finds out his wife has died (well, she has sort of died) and promptly gets a job offer from Mr. Wednesday (get it? get it? it's all about as obscure as that) to work as a kind of personal assistant while he prepares for a war between the old diminished gods and the new gods of technology and consumerism.

Mostly the book is a roadtrip book. Really, what other narrative shape could a novel about America take? Anyway, on this roadtrip we get introduced to scores of different gods, some famous, others obscure. All are a bit down on their heels and threadbare and all have the stink of desperation on them. Their war against modernity and its idols seems doomed.

And really that's the long and the short of it. It's a very winning sort of decay and stagnation presented with the patina of mythic import. And It's a breeze of a read and you can't help but feel that it is an obvious candidate for the HBO treatment.

I liked it very much; I shouldn't have put it off as long as I did. Neither should you.

America: SWAG II

America: SWAG

Know Your American History

Obamamerica, Day One

Eight years ago, the Onion ran an article about Bush's inauguration. The headline, a quote from the Onionverse's Bush inauguration speech, read "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over."

Who knew then how prophetic the little satiric newspaper would be?

After Obama's inauguration, I think the entire globe let out its breath for the first time in years. We barely got out alive.

In any case, Obama's speech seemed, at times, a thinly veiled rebuke of the Bush years and an only lightly coded message to America and the world that that whole nonsense - the anti-science, the fanaticism, the extra-legality, the unilateralism, the arrogance, the warmongering, the anti-environmentalism, and the anti-regulatory attitude - were all in the past and an aberration at that. Add to this the subtle charge that it was time for America to grow up and leave behind its reckless teenage years and the speech seemed to cover the next four years like a blanket. The rhetoric was not high flying most of the time, but the sentiment was intense and grounded in a way that felt reassuring, even in its sobriety.

I, for one, feel, for the first time in years and years, in awe of my country and civilization. Nothing will come off quite as well as I might dream it will, I'm sure, but everything is going to be better (it would have a hard time being worse).

I've never been so close to buying a flagpole.

America on, bitches.

p.s. how cool is Barack Obama? check out the new Whitehouse website, where you can, among other unprecedented transparencies, read the actual text of any and all executive orders, see the name and appointment of every single person nominated for a job by the executive branch, and read the actual text of the agenda the pres. plans to pursue while in office. I know it makes me a nerd and a wonk, but I get all curfluffled over ethics and civics. Oprah can have her grand love stories and tales of overcoming hardship - give me the simpler and deeper pleasures of an open and responsive democracy any day to get me all misty eyed.