A weird week, a weird season. I've come to accept what goes on at work through some form of ersatz Zen and the help of two very cool co-workers. Life itself seems to be going relatively well--for me, anyway; a number of my friends are going through rough times and I feel for them.

 Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005): During my time in Akron, I began to notice pop culture-fixated columns in the Akron Beacon-Journal written by one Chuck Klosterman, who I later encountered in the pages of SPIN and Esquire. Hearing overwhelmingly favorable reviews of his Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Pop Culture Manifesto, I was struck in a Google search to run across the most ad hominem diatribe I'd encountered in some time, delivered by one Mark Ames.  Ames had much the same problem as Christopher Hitchens did in Slate when reviewing Fahrenheit 9/11: a great many valid criticisms of the work (in one example from Hitchens' case, is it really legal for congressmen--or anyone, for that matter--to "sign up" their kids for military service?) slid beneath the sheer volume of vituperation. In Ames' case, I shared much of his irritation--though at modern pop culture, not Klosterman himself (until I read his book--it really did suck) and found myself intrigued at the kind of person who could write such a review. A co-founder of the eXile, a journal for American expatriates in Moscow (!), Ames' wrote one book that I could find, and that was Going Postal. It's a fairly straightforward analysis of "rage shootings" at workplaces and schools, identifying such patterns of behavior with earlier phenomena of American history and culture such as slave rebellions. In this reading, random violence is the only weapon the downtrodden and dispossessed of post-Reagan America have (the "rage killing" being a largely post-Reagan phenomenon is a fact with which Ames understandably comes close to obsessing, especially at the end). It's an original (and, one might hardly deign to mention, controversial) idea, which I'm surprised hasn't been raked over the coals on FOX NEWS--or, for that matter, NBC. I suspect the book didn't get much airtime (being originally completed before 9/11, almost not getting published at all). He examines the history of slave rebellions in America and then that of workplace/school shootings--based on newspaper reports and several of his own interviews--zeroing in on a number of specific cases in an admirably pacey manner--I never got the impression that much detail was being sacrificed, or that the discussion was too exhaustive. The study widens into an offhand condemnation of modern American society, as one can see the corrosive effects of the 24-hour media cycle, with its militant purges of the inconvenient (the lack of a useful profile for such shooters, the surprising sympathy shown by many of the actual and potential victims for the shooters, etc.), and the now decades-long national celebration of bullying as embodied in "heroes" like Jack Welch, Al Dunlap, and Donald Trump. Stylistically, Ames is a little schizophrenic, seesawing between slang and stately academic prose with distracting frequency. He can be a very fluent writer, and this probably helps his case more than it should (which, of course, in some ways would be fitting--Ames seems to regard the typically remote tone of most sociological or academic works as selling out their subjects). I'm not entirely sold on his fundamental thesis, but then maybe I'm just too scared of the idea. The very fact that he's brought it up makes me think, especially since other assertions are much more believable, in particular the similarity of modern American parents' and officials' faith in drugs like Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac to control children and malcontents with the treatment of political dissidence as a psychiatric disorder in Soviet Russia. While many may not agree with Ames' arguments, they're undeniably compelling, and this is probably one of the most original and passionate books written on American history and culture in some time.

 Furstenberg Park Days (2007)--I've only been to one thus far, but it was a lot of fun. Furstenberg Park is probably the most diverse of the various Ann Arbor parks, taking in meadows, forests, and marshland, pretty much all of the natural palette this stretch of the Huron River valley has to offer. It's a lovely place, one I stumbled on almost by accident about a year ago while wandering through the much bigger and easier-seen Gallup Park. At Sara's birthday cleanup a month ago, our team leader Billy suggested these as a fun way to spend a Saturday, and I decided to check it out. For four hours about six or seven of us cleared invasive weeds and shrubs--sweet clover and glossy buckthorn ("the porn star shrub")--which was curiously relaxing. There's nothing to work off stress like sawing down shrubs which you can pretend are sassing you back. In the end, we managed to clear a view from the parking lot to the "lagoon"--which, with the increasing silt, has come to more resemble a cattail marsh--tour the park, and get down and dirty in the then-mild sunshine of June in Michigan.

 The Sweeney: First Series (1974-75):

"I don't think there's anything wrong... with harnessing revenge to justice."

 "Maybe not. But you're talking about harnessing it to Jack Regan!!!" 

There are some who would doubtless, given the use of a time machine or other such device, enjoy a frolic through the splendors of Augustan Rome, or perhaps Renaissance Florence. For me, it would be hard to avoid the grimy neon glory of post-Swinging 1970s Britain, as apparently enshrined in my love of vintage Doctor Who, British cinematic horror cheapies, the music of David Bowie, Roxy Music, Nick Drake, Family, T.Rex, Brian Eno, The Faces, Ronnie Lane... Part of it, I suspect, is the fascination with an imperial society having its appendages wither away and unsure what to do with the rest of itself. This may serve a cautionary tale for us, but still, the cultural stuff was and always will be the initial sell. The Sweeney is one particular grail I was never able to see until a couple of weeks ago, as the first series is out on Region 1. The adventures of the London police's elite "Flying Squad" (in the traditions of Cockney rhyming slang, dubbed "the Sweeney" after Sweeney Todd), The Sweeney was one of the most influential shows on British TV, bringing a new realism to the tired old police procedural (then as now, apparently, whichever side of the Atlantic you live on), with (relatively) extreme violence, (relatively) harsh language, and a terrific sense of the hilariously seedy place the UK had become by that time. "Don't you ever stop eating??" John Thaw and Dennis Waterman are fantastic as headman Jack Regan and sidekick George Carter, sniffing out bank robberies, mail thefts, prison breakouts, and tangling with a delectable assortment of sleazy villains. "The world doesn't revolve around your body, Iris--this bloke Galileo proved it, goes round the sun!" The chemistry between the two leads is palpable, and the series' realistic attitude towards issues like police brutality, corruption, and the plain fact that all too often the bad guys get away with it. "Yeah, she's got a good bit o' lunch on her, doesn't she?" I don't know what it is about me, but I just ate this stuff up and can't wait to see more. "I'm gonna drown you in your own sweat if I find out you were involved." Classic.

 Once (2006): A sweet, deceptively slight movie from director John Carney about two down-and-out musicians in Dublin--one a raffish type played by the Frames' Glen Hansard, and the other a squirrelly, breathtakingly adorable Czech immigrant played by Marketa Irglova. The two meet, begin to play music together, but never quite get together. An excellent little essay on the power of music and the impermanence of relationships, Once succeeds in bringing the kind of revelation that most indie flicks can only dream of--an unusually fulfilling choice by the Michigan theater. Hansard and Irglova are charming and believable, and the music is remarkable in that it dominates the movie to the extent that half an hour passes and really nothing much happens, but it doesn't matter. It almost seems to double as the plot, a brilliant marriage of music and cinema.