Administrative Note

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ Leave a comment

For all the people who read this blog, here’s some additional information:

Enjoy and thanks for reading! Leave a comment once in a while, so I know who is reading.

Music Pick: Flying Solo

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ Leave a comment

Radiohead and The Strokes are two of my favorite bands in the world, so when their leads put out solo work this fall I was anxious. I don’t want to see the bands to break up, but in absence of the real thing, I’ll take a solo. The Strokes has been on a hiatus for a few years now, and all of their members have worked on other projects in the interim.

Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead, put out two singles– a double-A side single— called “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses / The Hollow Earth“. It’s an uneven effort, The Hollow Earth is better than Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses, but neither is worth my money. But it’s Thom Yorke, and there isn’t a new Radiohead album this year, so-

Julian Casablancas’ (of The Strokes) solo is actually a full length album, called Phrazes for the Young and is a lot of fun. Especially for someone who is at this moment wearing his Is This It? hoodie. A couple of the songs have The Strokes’ sound, but the rest are a different direction. Obviously the songs with the familiar sound, like Out of the Blue, stood out the most for me but ask me after I’ve had a few more listens. This album has a lot more variety in instruments than The Strokes would normally have. Continue reading →

Julie & Julia & the Prawns

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I did a District 9 and Julie & Julia double feature at home today. The scene where Amy Adams (Julie) boils a lobster is about all I can find in common between them. Ebert even mentions boiling lobsters in his review of District 9:

In appearance, [the prawns a]re loathsome, in behavior disgusting and evoke so little sympathy that killing one is like — why, like dropping a 7-foot lobster into boiling water.

Both are highly recommended– which one I recommend more would depend on the audience– but I enjoyed District 9 more. It’s unique, represents a writer and director (Neil Blomkamp) thinking on their feet. I look forward to what Blomkamp will do next.

∞

If you’ve seen District 9 and Avatar, did you notice a similarity between the two? Both have a human becoming an alien that ends up helping the aliens defeat the humans. In District 9, it’s an accident and Wikus has no way out. In Avatar, Jake volunteers but enjoys it more than he had expected. Wikus is almost single-mindedly selfish in his motives until the very end, while Jake gradually assumes the role of savior after falling in love.

∞

In her article titled “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’?”, Annalee Newitz went off on a fantastic rant, but also made comparisons between both films as movies about white guilt.

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

I don’t agree with it all, but it is a magnificent rant.

Sudhir and Barack Go to Chicago

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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.

∞

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.

∞

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.

∞

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