Sarah Palin Doesn't Use Teleprompters

She just reads off her hand.

     posted 2 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Berlin Bei Nacht

     posted 5 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Meeting Jon Stewart

Ethan Watters, author of Crazy Like Us, gives us Ten Things You Should Know Before Going on the Daily Show.

Ethan was just on the Daily Show last week — much to my surprise — and he knocked it outta the park. I had to read his top-ten list to figure out he was nervous.

UPDATE: Oh and now he’s on Gawker.

     posted 6 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Time to Pre-Order the Surf Book!

Mike’s new book, Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, With Some Unexpected Results is now available for pre-order from a few web sites — including Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Amazon Deutschland — even if it won’t be published until late spring.

We’re all pretty excited here at Radio Free Mike.

More soon.

     posted 7 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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"Duke Kahanamoko"

Claire Danes and David Letterman chat about surfing in 1995. She explains to Dave that, yes, there is surfing in Delaware — maybe not good surfing — and he tells her the “first surfer” was Duke Kahanamoko.

Wrong in so many ways, Dave, but nice try.

     posted 9 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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O Berlin, What Could You Mean?

     posted 10 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Headline Writing FAIL

In case the Daily News changes it, I wanted to save this headline for posterity. It reads in full: “Skater Nancy Kerrigan’s brother, Mark Kerrigan, tells police he fatally attacked father over phone.”

If that prompts a number of strange reflections about the startling advance of phone technology, the lead clarifies:

The loser brother of Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan told cops he attacked their dad because he wouldn’t let him use the phone, a shocking police report revealed Monday.

Oh.

     posted 15 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Berlin Idyll 2

     posted 17 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Maria in Winter

This is what a Mexican restaurant in Berlin looks like off-season. One night not long ago I went in and one of the owners was about to close up. He said, “Is it a lot colder out there than before? ’Cause it seems like there are fewer people on the street.”

“It’s pretty cold.”

But their business isn’t just about the weather. I went in Friday, when the Maria Bonita guys were busy across town opening a whole new restaurant in Kreuzberg called Maria Peligro. And the place shown above was hopping. I said to the waitress, “You’re opening a new restaurant, and now this place is crowded?” She just said “Yeeeaah!” and sort of danced behind the register. I never figured out why so many people were in the (five-month-) old restaurant when the new one had all the attention. But there was music, tequila, fresh tacos, jubilation. It’s one way to get through winter, I guess.

     posted 22 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Gravity's Rainbow

The aerospace century in Southern California is about to end, writes a guest commentator on LA Observed. Northrop Grumman plans to move to Washington DC, which will be the last pullout of a major aerospace concern from greater LA. One reason is that land is no longer cheap; it also makes more sense these days for aerospace firms to be closer to politicians than airfields. The news chills me a little. I grew up in that industry, never felt drawn to it, but still prefer to think of it as part of the old bedrock.

Aerospace technologies affected local activities from the movie business to hot-rod cars and surfing. Aerospace shifted the demographic balance between white-collar engineering jobs and blue-collar manufacturing, and hence L.A.’s socioeconomic makeup. It reflected the local labor pool through the presence of Latinos and Asians and through what Ernie Pyle called the “Aviation Okies” who gave Los Angeles a Dust-Bowl inflection.

That’s right. But I suppose LA hasn’t been that LA for a number of years.

     posted 32 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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The Annual War Zone

The first minute or so of 2010 from Torstraße, Berlin.

     posted 38 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Don't Try This at Home

The latest American thrillseeking fad has led to a predictable holiday headline: Christmas Tree Surfing Teen Sustains Head Injury.

Whether the kid tried to stand — crucial question — isn’t yet clear.

Thanks to Steve.

     posted 41 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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From Coney Island to the Sunset Strip

So, dig
Santa comes on big…

     posted 50 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Legends of the Fall

I’ve been watching a Russian miniseries on World War II called Seventeen Moments of Spring alongside Ken Burns’ documentary, The War. The miniseries is excellent Communist camp — truculent Russian actors trying to play senior Nazis — as well as a gripping spy thriller. The documentary is about as unsurprising as it is stirring and tasteful. But the versions of the war are completely different. Watching the Ken Burns film you can forget that until D-Day it was Russia’s land war, Russia’s epic sacrifice. Watching the Soviet miniseries you can forget the Holocaust had anything to do with the Jews. This weird omission comes in spite of the program’s otherwise detailed sense of history. Over graphic archival footage of the concentration camps the narrator says, in one scene, “It was near Karinhall [Göring’s palatial hunting lodge near Berlin] that a concentration camp was built, where at Göring’s sanction experiments were conducted on sick old people and children.”

     posted 52 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Winter Surf

Highlights from the Eddie.

     posted 60 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Too Much of Nothing on Facebook

That’s right, we’re joining the 21st century here at Radio Free Mike, and you can join a Facebook group for the novel, if you’re so inclined. I’m not sure exactly where this is all headed, but it may have been worth it already just for the blog-post title above.

     posted 63 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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In the Beginning

Harold Bloom’s review of R. Crumb’s illustrated Genesis has something deeply honest about it, and something deeply dishonest. Bloom’s a brilliant Shakespearean, not the most obvious candidate to criticize (or appreciate) a book of Biblical comix by a tacky countercultural icon. But since Crumb took Genesis seriously — he says he failed to draw even one successful chapter in snarky comix mode, so he approached the whole book as a straight illustration job — the NYRB took Crumb seriously enough to assign Bloom as a critic.

The result is stodgy but interesting. Bloom doesn’t like Crumb and gets away from him as quickly as possible. “Staring at the women and men of Crumb’s Genesis,” he writes, “I dimly recall someone showing me an issue of Mad magazine.” He goes on to recall his ongoing reverence for both the Bible and for Thomas Mann, who wrote his own version of Old Testament events in Joseph and His Brothers.

He says the “central literary character in Genesis” is Yahweh, a character as believable and rich as Falstaff, Hamlet, or Don Quixote. He names the Old Testament’s nameless narrator the “Yahwist,” and goes on to explain what other interpreters of the Bible got right. “Mann’s triumph is his Jacob, who is very close to the Yahwist’s original and in Mann as in Genesis rather close to Yahweh himself.” He spends almost the whole review not mentioning Crumb. But he says the women in the Crumb book “are so dreadful that I am made unhappy.”

The Yahwist and Mann alike emphasize the beauty of Rachel and her son Joseph, which clashes with Crumb’s visual imagination, but disarmingly Crumb says: ‘I’m not very good at drawing attractive women actually.’

I’ll believe that Crumb’s women are a problem in this whole Genesis project. I also believe Bloom when he says Crumb hasn’t immersed himself enough in Genesis to interpret it half as profoundly as other artists, like Mann. But it is a strange criticism from a man who barely immerses himself in the book he was asked to review.

Apart from this dishonesty, Bloom writes one paragraph of praise that will strike most Crumb fans as the whole reason to have the book:

... his position toward the story is very refreshing. He is free of stale pieties and he properly has no use for the Priestly sentiments preserved in Genesis. The moral insanity of making divine justice an excuse for human suffering is alien to Crumb. Whatever aesthetic unease I feel in regard to his women is more than answered by his healthy wariness of Yahweh, a sanity I attribute to his graphic exuberance.

     posted 67 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Surfer's Glory

From My Parents Were Awesome. Thanks to B.

     posted 73 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Assigned Reading

Obama liked one health care article so much, he (or Rahm Emmanuel ) apparently ordered all White House staffers to read it over the weekend. It’s an Atlantic blog post by Ronald Brownstein, who reports that the Senate bill does everything mortally possible to lower the overall cost of American medical care over the next several years. “The bottom line,” says another expert, “is the legislation is sending a signal that business as usual [in the medical system] is going to end.”

Cost control matters more than anything, even a public option, because, as Brownstein writes, “The public competitor to private insurance companies championed by the Left would affect who writes the checks in the medical system, but not what the checks are written to pay for.”

Interessant. Now if someone can only order Joe Lieberman to read it.

     posted 76 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Georgism Comes Home to California. (Maybe.)

A Georgist tax-reform measure hopes to gather signatures for a referendum in California, which — you may have heard — is broke.

It’s a progressive and radical idea: Abolish income tax for people making under $150,000, cap income tax at 8 percent, and raise money through a 75 percent tax on the “fair-market monthly rental value” of plots of land, regardless of improvements on top. I don’t have an opinion on the details yet, but commenters at Daily Kos seem unaware of how powerful the plan could be. For a start, in theory it would: 1) cut taxes for most people, 2) shift the tax base to its natural center, which is the value of land itself, and 3) deflate any current or future real-estate bubbles in California.

Real-estate speculation was — you may have heard — the root of the current financial crisis.

UPDATE: More on Georgism here, here, and here.

     posted 78 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Ladiiiiies and Gentlemen...

That’s right, live from Television City — it’s The Edsel Show!

     posted 81 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Top-Notch Coverage

UPDATE: The reporter might have done a good job — we don’t know! — but the folks in the studio need help. “This is the second time that the Maersk Alabama has been taken captive by pirates,” the anchor says, his Teleprompter apparently failing to mention that this time it was only attacked, not taken.

     posted 83 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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