audiobook

Sudhir and Barack Go to Chicago

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ Leave a comment

I had not planned it this way, but these past couple of weeks I was listening to the good president Obama narrate Dreams From My Father during my commute, and reading Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gangleader For a Day as I fell asleep.

I recommend both books– especially Dreams to understand the incredibleness of what we’ve wrought here by electing Barack Obama president. Talk about the audacity of hope. And hearing him narrate it is quite a pleasure, doing voices, Kenyan accents, f’words and all.

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If you’ve read Freakonomics, you’ve read Sudhir Venkatesh‘s work. The chapter about why drug dealers live with their mothers was based on his research. This guy is a son of Indian immigrants, raised in protected suburbs of California, studying sociology in the worst neighborhoods of Chicago the only way that seems logical to him. By hanging out with the drug dealers, the hustlers, the prostitutes and average folk in the Robert Taylor Homes, projects in the south side of Chicago. By hanging out with them for more than half a decade.

It is quite a story, and it smashes all kinds of stereotypes about people who live in these circumstances.

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And it was chance that I was reading both of these books at the same time, but they have a common thread. Poor black communities in Chicago, their communities, community leadership, the futility and the hopefulness.

Obama was there in the mid-80s (in this book, obviously he comes back to Chicago later in life), working as a community organizer to help people. Venkatesh was there in the early ’90s, seeing things from the other side, among the poor, the hustled, the hustlers. Where Obama is hopeful, Venkatesh starts out naive and ends up cynical. To be fair, in the time-frames that these books cover, Venkatesh has actually spent more time among the poor black community than Obama.

But I wonder if their paths ever crossed? Venkatesh was a graduate student in the University of Chicago while he was hanging out in Robert Taylor. Obama was a professor there at the same time. There are only two references I can find. The first is that Obama is in Venkatesh’s documentary Transformation. And this Forbes article:

(Venkatesh) heartily approves of the proposal by Barack Obama–a fellow pickup basketball player at the University of Chicago when Venkatesh studied there–to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to give a bigger break to low-income parents.

So did they play basketball with each other, or did they both happen to play basketball in the same university around the same time? It’s like saying I played basketball in Chicago when Jordan played for the Bulls. I did. In a suburban driveway.

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The governor of my state, Deval Patrick, lived in the Robert Taylor Homes. So did Mr. T. I wonder if their paths ever crossed?

A Scanner Darkly

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ Leave a comment

ascannerdarkly_giamattiI’ve been meaning to read Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly for a long, long time. It is my second PKD book,  the first being Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted as Blade Runner). With that book, I felt burnt by the ending (I prefer the director’s cut movie ending). I’ve read both books after having seen the movie.

Of course, I say read when I mean heard. A Scanner Darkly was also my second audiobook, the first being Choke. This was a far better experience. It benefits from being a far superior book, but also a far superior audio book. A Scanner Darkly is read by Paul Giamatti. Need I say more? He does different voices for each of the characters, and is a joy to listen to.

This is a great book, about the science of the brain and addiction, about addicts, about the relationship between the user and the narc, the pusher and the pushed, often in the same person. It has a science fiction facade– in that it is set in the “future” (written in ’77 about the 1990s) and people have scramble suits that preserve their anonymity. Otherwise, it’s a story about any post-60s time.

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This book was adapted for the screen by Richard Linklater in 2006. It is a good movie, with especially great casting (Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr., Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, each perfect for their part). The movie was done with rotoscoped animation, like Linklater’s earlier Waking Life (2001), and it is the correct technique for this movie, where everything is either hyper-real or only slightly real, but never obvious.

The movie is quite faithful to the original material– in fact, more than it could have been if it was not rotoscoped.

Continue reading →

Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ Leave a comment

Chuck Palahniuk's booksChoke was my first audiobook. I finished it last week (now I’m on to A Scanner Darkly).

The book is good– not great– but you can decide if you want to read it or not based on this: it’s a book about a sex addict who fakes choking in restaurants by the author of Fight Club. It’s deliberately subversive, like other Palahniuk stuff, and it’s fun. It’s better than his Lullaby, but not as good as Fight Club.

Choke was made in to a movie last year with Sam Rockwell, but I haven’t seen that yet.

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Listening to a book as opposed to reading it was a new experience, but not as different as I had imagined. You’re forced to pay more attention to nuance, and even now I can hear Palahniuk’s voice in my head when I think about the book. I’ll write my thoughts about that in the future. I wonder if my impression of the book would have been better, worse or different if I had actually read it– words on page or words on Kindle screen.

Yeah, the Kindle-like devices are worth a lot of thought too. Doubly so, if I actually owned one. Continue reading →