September 8, 2008 reviews

Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions

Christian Lander
Random House

Hipster Navel Gazing through a tattered Vintage T.

(This article originally appeared in a July edition of The Globe & Mail and can serve as a primer for those of you following the Democratic Party campaign to elect Barack Obama and Joe Biden)

Stuff White People Like would certainly make the podium if there were a Book Olympics for Controversial Titles. Along with bronze and silver medalists The Trouble with Islam and The God Delusion, SWPL remained affixed to my lap whenever I ventured outside my apartment or onto public transit (incidentally, trying to find a comfortable spot to read on a crowded bus in rush hour will shake the foundations of anyone’s core beliefs).

Stuff White People Like the book, came hot on the heels of LA-based Canadian author and former copywriter Christian Lander’s 33 million-visited website of the same name (a figure that I, a fellow blogger, would reach if my children’s children’s children were to upload content five times a week as stipulated by my will).

‘Whitey’ Lander, a Ph.D. drop-out, (in exactly what, the book jacket doesn’t say, but a safe bet would be critical theory) takes us on a solipsistic blue state urban safari of sorts here. Dinner Parties, Public Radio, Authenticity, Whole Foods, Having Gay Friends, Microbreweries, Co-ed Sports and my personal favorites, ‘Standing Still at Concerts’ and ‘Public Transportation That is Not a Bus’ coming under his thorough, squinty eyed (with glasses, natch) hipster analysis and self flagellation.

Stuff White People Like is very droll navel-gazing, where a vintage T would be hiked up to remove the lint, and when it’s spot on, it’s very funny indeed: “White people don’t like stuff that’s easy to acquire’, or ‘White People like to live in these [up and coming] neighborhoods because they get credibility and respect from other white people for living in a more ‘authentic’ neighborhood, where they are exposed to ‘true culture’ every day….they are like modern day Lewis and Clarks, except that instead of searching for the ocean, they are searching for old houses to renovate.”

Graphical charts are especially inspired, with a ‘Gentrification Timeline’ that seems particularly Hog Town Toronto-influenced and includes ‘Announcement of Planned Starbucks Opening’, ‘Protest of Planned Starbucks Opening’, ‘Starbucks Opens’, a ‘White Career Guidance’ trajectory that includes ‘producer of organic dog food/vegan caterer’ and an uproarious fill-in-the-blanks White Globetrotter mass email from a fictional, but all too real, backpacker abroad.

Lander’s muted Canadian roots are also present in an entry entitled ‘Assists’, which references both The Great One Wayne Gretzky and Canuck MVP baller Steve Nash. Lander writes ‘In basketball, passing is a must, so that white guys can carve out a niche’.

Much like stand up comic Jeff Foxworthy did for ‘Red’ states with his ‘Redneck Dictionary’, Lander does for ‘Blue’ with this Caucasian nomenclature, albeit with a more satirical bent than Foxworthy’s ‘Climbing up a water tower with a paint brush and a bucket of paint to defend your sister’s honor’ backwoods shtick. Faux reactionary Stephen Colbert thrives on similarly racially charged material as well and the Comedy Central host is always on the lookout for ‘a new black friend’.

Working equally contentious territory was www.blackpeopleloveus.com, a site run by a hopelessly melanin-deficient mock yuppie duo ‘Sally and Johnny’, varsity sweater-clad chardonnay aficionados who pose for pictures with black friends and have fake testimonials from them, like “I work with Johnny, and sometimes he stops in the middle of our corporate hallways, but instead of shaking my hands he gives me a fist pound and says “what up.” He’s so in touch with the street, it’s astonishing.”
In the entry on raunchy comic Sarah Silverman, Lander says:

“Her whole shtick is about saying really offensive things! But it’s OK because she’s pretty and has a small voice so it all sounds so cute! Get it? It’s not offensive, because when she says racist or sexist things she knows they are offensive. So it’s OK.”

No doubt that many will find this offensive too as Lander’s blog and now book, have become lightning rods for controversy. His SWPL blog entries are inundated with hundreds of reader comments, many of which are from frenzied anti-Semites and raging bigots of all stripes from the bowels of the blogosphere. Straw Man ‘Well, what about black people who…?’ rejoinders also come from Angry White Males, none of whom, ironically (yes, there is a section for ‘Irony’ too) are targets of this book, but who would enjoy a whole barbecue of this liberal skewering.

Even copycat sites have sprung up such as Stuff Asian People Like and Stuff Black People Like, using taxonomy once reserved for stereotyping them, reflected back at the white majority—unsettling to a Caucasian reader, not only due to white guilt, but because the targets of their send-ups are not of the dominant elite/majority (or at the their inane, skinny-jeaned, modern-furniture buying, studying abroad, coffee-drinking offspring).

Therein lies the problem with Stuff White People Like. Unlike the tumultuous online debate, none of these issues is addressed either in either chapter essays (there are none of each) or in an introductory one. It would be interesting to have been provided some context rather than a giant list the publisher deemed worthy of standing on its own, or maybe that’s just my inner ‘grad school’ guy seeking endless explication instead of just kicking back and enjoying.

Christopher Lombardo is the co-author of The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery (Penguin) and one half of www.thesharkguys.com. He also scored a ‘40%’ in the ‘how white are you?’ survey

September 5, 2008 reviews

Shark Bite Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona **½ / 5

Those of you looking for the old Woody Allen will find an old Woody Allen

Uprooting from the Five Boroughs overseas, far from giving him a creative spark he so likely sought, finds Allen revisiting past themes with decidedly mixed results.

With Match Point, it was infidelity and murder again, without the comedy and gravitas of Crimes and Misdemeanors while Cassandra’s Dream, similarly explored fraternal relations set against the backdrop of a murder-for-hire. This time, a trek to continental Europe sees infidelity the theme again, though without conspiracy to commit murder, unless you count this reviewer’s criminal intent toward the cast.

Spain is the setting for this recent Allen misfire, an Italian-made rifle aimed from a grassy knoll misfire, with current muse the vacant Scarlett Johnansson as the eponymous Cristina, on a care-free trip to Spain with friend Vicky (Rebecca Hall) whose cares are much less free—trying to remain faithful to a stockbroker New York city fiancé who is duller than a PBS pledge drive, while she secretly yearns to be a free spirit like her friend. Cristina is a wanna-be actress and in this instance the casting of Johansson is spot-on, while Vicky is a verbose grad student consumed with Catalan culture.

As flamenco guitar strings are plucked in the background, the two become infatuated with a tormented, passionate artist, Juan Antonio, played by Javier Bardem, who’s been involved in a violent relationship with ex, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz)—a key point touched upon briefly and then abandoned—as the two girls accept an offer to join him for a weekend getaway upon first meeting at a restaurant (and aren’t put off by his offer of a threesome, casually brought up in their first conservation before he’d even sat down to join them for drinks).

Generally, an offer of this sort from an abusive creep would have the waiter calling for the prep cooks to toss the guy out on his ear; but not here as Vicky, (the grad student who should know better and knows it), abandoning thoughts of her guy back home, is sweet talked by his brush strokes, while Cristina, who was much more receptive to his backward advances, is laid up with food poisoning. Not telling Cristina about how she slept with a guy she was really interested in (or as it’s known in male circles, mowing your buddy’s grass) and gradually having second thoughts about her pending nuptials, even as the dull as dishwater hubby-to-be flies to Spain–are the twin duplicities Allen works with here, with minimal comic/dramatic impact (unless you count the audience tittering at the sweatered, braggart bore that is the fiancé, or the ridiculous and obvious voice-overs: ‘The two walked the streets of Barcelona, enjoying the works of Gaudi’)

Vardem’s tortured artist, assured there’s a walk-in clinic nearby, then beds Cristina, though not at the same time as initially intended—and after co-habitating with her, a suicide attempt by the ex-wife,brings Cruz’ Maria Elena into the picture: and not a moment too soon as Cruz injects some much need passion.

Artist Juan Antonio apparently cannot abandon feelings for his ex-wife and suggests that she stays with the new couple until she recuperates—just like it would happen in real life. [Editor's note: it's at this point where an entirely un-erotic, nudity-free triad is hinted at, and Cruz and Johansson exchange dark room smooches]

Cruz, a fellow artist, naturally, as Allen has been incapable lately, of portraying people with average occupations, looks gorgeous, yells a lot in Spanish, gets yelled at repeatedly in return for not speaking English in the presence of Cristina and argues with him about who stole whose artistic vision, as a gun goes off, attempted seductions take place and a few choice zingers are uttered.

A tortured artist, a garrulous grad student, a would-be actress who couldn’t cut it in a 12-minute student film (played by Johansson who can’t cut it in any 90 minute feature) and another tortured artist, get mixed up in something that they thought would offer fulfilment but ultimately leaves them wanting more. Exactly.

August 23, 2008 reviews

****/5

Bob Dylan, Copps Coliseum, Hamilton Ontario August 20, 2008

“Every day your memory grows dimmer
It doesn’t haunt me like it did before”

Dylan might be haunted by his musical past, but as he nears closer to the Heaven in the song, (or its counterpart, reserved for musicians, even those who’ve given us Time out of Mind) he’s embraced it—though not warmly. Continuing to delight in undermining his audience’s expectations, he forges ahead on this long and lonesome road, playing to packed houses of fans, the majority of whom, by all accounts, haven’t made the musical journey with him beyond Highway 61 Revisited.

Those who have though, were the sizable contingent of those (mostly younger) who warmly welcomed newer material with which their parents were less than familiar like Thunder on the Mountain, a rollicking stand-out, or the stunning When the Deal Goes Down (“More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours. That keep us so tightly bound”), maintaining a generation gap that went beyond the choice of intoxicants and demonstrating that the true measure of any performer is a multi-generational legacy that isn’t a chaperoned minivan accompaniment to a Jonas Brothers scream-fest.

Dylan and his entirely capable matching Zorro-chapeau (and confederate army doppelganger) backing band, was positively energized with this newer material, with Bob even doing a half-jig, or stretching out one leg, than the other, depending on how you look at it, as they blew a hole through Rollin’ and Tumblin’, transferring kinetic energy into stand-outs Highway 61 and Stuck Inside of Mobile.

Nashville Skyline’s Girl from the North Country, was virtually unrecognizable without Johnny Cash’s canyon baritone, as were other muddled classics reverberating in the home of the Hamilton Bulldogs hockey team, where some songs were only decipherable by snippets of chorus. Just Like a Woman, with her ‘fog, her amphetamine and her pearls’ became a peppy, creepy crowd sing-a-long, with a Copps Coliseum capacity breaking into song as she broke like a little girl. A set list heavily weighted toward the gorgeous Modern Times, Ain’t Talkin’ was less moody than the album version, (carryin’ a dead man’s shield), probably not a bad thing in a Blackberry-back lit stadium setting and clocking in at nearly 10 minutes.
A considerable increase in volume accompanied the twin crowd pleasing encores Like a Rolling Stone and a heavily staccato keyboard All Along the Watchtower, which closed the show, one could say in Dylanesque fashion—with the house lights coming up after a significant delay, and much second guessing about whether another song was forthcoming.

August 22, 2008 reviews

For those of us who grew up in the West, ping-pong occupies a place somewhere below darts and above foosball and seems fit mostly for suburban basements and the rec-rooms of rehab centers. It is the kind of sport that causes us to use our hands to make air quotation marks when we use the term “sport” to refer to it.

But, of course, these perceptions are cultural. Soccer, or football, which people across huge parts of the world follow like a religion (the kind where attendance is not falling off and you can gamble on the outcome of the service) barely registers a blip on the radar in North America compared to other major league sports and is most enthusiastically enjoyed by pubescent teens, most likely because all of that endless running back and forth over a mile-long field is a needed distraction from the raging hormones that would otherwise win the day. Baseball, referred to as America’s national past-time, likewise is called rounders (or a form close enough to it is) in Britain and it really isn’t taken seriously outside the schoolyard.

And so it is with ping-pong. While we in the West might think little of the game, with a ping-pong table serving as a convenient shelf for a pack-rat’s junk in a cluttered basement, it is the national sport in China and is popular throughout much of East Asia (though this popularity doesn’t seem to have spread to Bangkok, where “ping-pong” carries an entirely different connotation altogether). So, “Balls of Fury” is not absurd because it treats ping-pong as a sport of consequence. In almost every other respect, however, “Balls of Fury” is completely absurd.

The central character is Randy Dayton (Dan Fogler), a table-tennis prodigy at the age of 12, who loses a showdown in the ’88 Olympics, which were actually the first games to feature ping-pong as an official sport – one nod to reality from the film-makers. He loses to Karl Wolfschtagg who, as you can no doubt ascertain from the name, is a crazed East German stereotype. (Incidentally, this character is played by the film’s co-writer Tom Lennon, making “Balls of Fury” the first movie to my knowledge to be co-written by someone playing an ethnic stereotype.)

Randy’s loss is bad news for his degenerate gambler of a father (Robert Patrick of “Terminator 2”) who bet heavily on the game with the Chinese triad, is unable to make good on the debt and is killed so quickly that neither the audience nor his own son really seems to give too much of a hoot about him after that; when Randy delivers the line “You killed my father” later in the movie, those words could have been replaced by “I was saving that doughnut” and have had the same emotional impact. The man who did the dirty on his father, a criminal mastermind called “Feng” played by Christopher Walken, is the film’s main villain and this no-expense-outlaid setup “makes it personal”.

Knowing Randy’s history with Feng, an FBI agent looking to break into a secret ping-pong tournament that Feng is holding, and also somehow disband an illegal gun-running ring, (or was it a panda-smuggling operation, or a gigolo circuit? This is the kind of movie where such details fade from memory as soon as you learn them) and of course he wants Randy to serve as his ticket into this criminal underworld by playing ping-pong till he’s so good that no underground ping-pong championship would be worth the price of the paddles without him.

When digesting this utterly ludicrous plot, it helps if you’ve seen “Enter the Dragon”, and recognize that all major plot points derive from that film (the title of course is a play on another Bruce Lee film “Fists of Fury”). Robert Ben Garant who wrote and directed the film, admitted as much to KungFuMagazine.com, saying film-makers “took all the kung fu out of a kung fu movie and replaced it with ping-pong”.

And whether or not “The Karate Kid” is considered by anyone to be a classic or even a part of the Kung Fu genre, it too is parodied here, with James Hong (an accomplished character actor, though I recognized him immediately as the unhelpful host in the classic “Seinfeld” Chinese restaurant episode. Cartwright! Cartwright!) in the Mister Miyagi role as “Blind Master Wong”, passing on the secrets of ping pong and acting as the foil for about five more gags involving blindness than would have been advisable.

The makers of this one seemed to have been operating on a few basics. They liked kung fu movies, rock and roll and attractive Asian women (they would, no doubt, feel at home among the ex-pat population of Bangkok). The plot and a couple of rocking interludes involving ‘80s rock band, and suspected “This is Spinal Tap” inspiration, Def Leppard, take care of the first two. Maggie Q, who plays Wong’s niece and Randy’s romantic interest in an unbelievable development that comes out of the clear blue sky, takes care of the third. She provides the movie’s main Kung Fu scene and also makes the best use out of ping-pong’s infamous short-shorts, last seen on the big screen in the opening scenes of the “Borat” movie.

And there’s a conclusion to all of this that involves a ping-pong tournament, male sex slaves, a panda and Christopher Walken in what might have been an offensive portrayal of a Chinese man, had it not been placed in this absurd context. It is the film’s sheer absurdity, and general good natured feel that puts it in the company of movies like “Death Race 2000” (thought that was a better “B”), where to critique it too heavily for its shortcomings seems to miss the entire point and spoil the fun.

Noel, Bangkok