Burnin’

Rocky Mountain News asked Ralph Nader, an independent candidate for President, if Barack Obama is any different than Democrats he has criticized in the past, considering Obama’s pledge to reject campaign contributions from registered lobbyists.

Nader’s response is on the shocking side, which makes sense as a media strategy. Although I suspect this is how Nader really thinks and really talks, no matter who might be listening.

“There’s only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He’s half African-American,” Nader said. “Whether that will make any difference, I don’t know. I haven’t heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What’s keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn’t want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We’ll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.”

“I mean, first of all, the number one thing that a black American politician aspiring to the presidency should be is to candidly describe the plight of the poor, especially in the inner cities and the rural areas, and have a very detailed platform about how the poor is going to be defended by the law, is going to be protected by the law, and is going to be liberated by the law,” Nader said. “Haven’t heard a thing.”

“He wants to show that he is not a threatening . . . another politically threatening African-American politician,” Nader said. “He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically he’s coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it’s corporate or whether it’s simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up.”

I love that we have someone, anyone, willing to speak truth to power. Doing so is heroic in these times. It might not be welcome, or even all that smart, politically or otherwise, but still I respect that Nader is doing it. He’s a man of action and he would like to see some people in D.C. snap to attention, as improbable as that eventuality seems.

On a totally unrelated note, I wish Nader had some sharper looking creative. Obama really has the graphic designers in his camp.

Poster courtesy of Changethethought

Speaking at a fundraiser in Jacksonville, Florida yesterday, Barack Obama said, “It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid.”

“They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

If we’re lucky, the establishment has a right to be afraid. But not of Obama’s blackness, or his age. His message of change is positive for the people, but it could mean an upset apple cart for arms dealers, oil companies and their ilk. We all know they’re going to fight tooth and nail to protect their interests. It’s the American way, as sure as exposing the bastards is the American way.

[via Reuters]

We had a nice time exploring the country outside of Atlanta this weekend, first at Etowah Mounds State Historic Site and Red Top State Park, both near Cartersville. Then on Sunday, we checked out the LEED Platinum visitor’s center at Sweetwater Creek State Conservation Park, before taking back roads to the outer reaches of Fulton County, where the people of Serenbe Inn–a beautiful organic farm off Hutcheson Ferry Road–welcomed us in.

When it was time for dinner, we strolled through the farm, passing donkeys, goats, llamas, sheep, rabbits and chickens before coming to an expansive wildflower meadow. The sun was beating down as we emerged from the shaded woods into the open expanse. On the other side we entered the Hamlet, a new urbanism project rising from the ground half a mile from The Inn. We strolled by retail shops and sharp looking homes, before reaching The Hil. Named for chef, Hillary White, who runs the restaurant with her husband Jim, The Hil is a refined, yet informal, neighborhood restaurant, with a dedication to serving simple, farm-fresh cuisine.

I ordered Pan-Roasted All Natural Chicken with Smashed Potatoes and Shiitake Mushroom Gravy. Every bite was delicious. Darby had Wood Grilled Harris Ranch Hangar Steak with Sernebe Farm Crispy Onions. I ordered a side of Serenbe Farm Broccoli and was glad I did. We started out in the bar with Hornitos Margs on the rocks, no salt and an order of Carmelized Vidalia Onion Dip with Potato Chips. For dessert—Riccotta Fritters with Strawberry Jam.

In our bathroom at Magnolia Cottage I found the Nov. 2007 issue of Atlanta Magazine, wherein a feature on nearby community, Rico, describes Serenbe as irrelevant to members of the local community.

“I’m not sure if I can say this right,” Donna Bailey, a pastor at the United Methodist Church in Rico said, “but people with large or unlimited incomes envision community different than the rest of us. For the people who’ve lived here a long time, they don’t have much of an interest in living in condos, or eating fancy desserts. That’s not community to them. [Serenbe] is an urban concept brought to the country. There’s no question, what you have here is tasteful, it’s sculpted, and in places it’s even beautiful. But somehow it seems irrelevant.”

I find it interesting that this is bathroom reading the The Inn. I love the concept of new urbanism on paper, but I have to admit seeing it up close as I’ve done at Serenbe Hamlet and also closer to home at Palmetto Bluff and Habersham, I do tend to stand back a little, pause and ask, “Is this some kind of Stepford?” These places do have a dreamy quality to them.

Serenbe, though, strikes a unique balance thanks to being grounded by the historic farmhouse and the animal husbandry and food production that makes for a real farm. Maybe not as real as some, but real in its own right.

We went to see Sex and the City yesterday afternoon. It sucked. Royally.

The film was poorly acted, the writing was shoddy and it was much too long. But the thing that bothered me most was the glorification of excessive consumption. Calling this film a “film” is a stretch. It’s really an ad for luxury products that 99% of viewers will never be able to afford. I’m sorry but $525 shoes aren’t aspirational. They’re a waste of money (and I say this as a fan of shoes and the TV series).

Today I stumbled upon criticism that helps me feel justified in my opinions.

Anthony Lane writing in The New Yorker:

Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (“I got it”), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. “I can build you a better closet,” he says, as if that were a binding condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come. The creepiest aspect of this sequence was the sound that rose from the audience as he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women applauding. The tactic here is basically pornographic—arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach—and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in.

Better yet, Jezebel’s Maureen Tkacik reprints an email from her Marxist sister.

The characters are slaves to their own fetishization of commodities. This fetishization is responsible for the failure of Carrie’s wedding to Big. Dressed in their billowing designer costumes like unwitting circus clowns, she and her friends fuss around the limousine to carry Carrie to her wedding. “It’s like trying to push a cream-puff through a keyhole,” comments the token homosexual figure (who serves as the Jester) regarding the difficulty of fitting Carrie’s extravagant Vivienne Westwood gown within the limousine. Here, Carrie is quite literally overwhelmed by her own materialism.

A lot of this reaction might have to do with timing. Americans can’t afford gasoline, or food, and we can’t sell our homes in this climate. There are only dark clouds on the economic horizon; yet, we are confronted with Big and Carrie’s 5th Avenue penthouse, Carrie’s haute couture wardrobe, Samantha’s beach front Mailbu digs, first class airline travel and a five star Mexican resort, all of which serve to remind the viewer how far out this fantasy is.

Here’s another, funnier, critique:

[via Katie Spence]

[UPDATE] For the inverse of the argument above, see Marketing Daily.

Faith Popcorn, a trend spotter and founder of marketing consultancy BrainReserve, believes the “Sex and the City” movie comes at the perfect time for a nation exhausted politically, emotionally and financially. Marketers can use the good feeling gained from the movie to their advantage, she says, helping consumers temporarily escape tough times. The movie joins “My Man Godfrey,” “The Women” and other Depression Era classics that provided weary audiences with high-style fantasy relief.

Here’s an idea…let’s change the “American Way of Life” for the better.

According to Wikipedia, the concept of clean coal is said to be a solution to climate change and global warming by coal industry groups, while environmental groups believe it is greenwash. Greenpeace is a major opponent of the concept because emissions and wastes are not avoided, but are transferred from one waste stream to another.

As for the ad itself, the argument is built on fear and that’s not what we need to move forward as a nation. Does fear motivate? Certainly, but it’s an unethical tactic. Why not tout the strengths of coal industry’s claims? Why not convince people with irrefutable facts? I’m inclined to believe the coal industry doesn’t have those facts. If they did their ad agency would have mined them.

[via Gristmill]

A good friend described his time in Chile like this: California 100 years ago. That is, it’s uncrowded and it’s natural beauty is unspoiled. I’ve wanted to go for an extended visit ever since.

Now, I’m reading Yvon Chouinard’s classic business book, Let My People Go Surfing. In it, he mentions that his good friend and fellow adventurer Doug Tompkins married former Patagonia CEO Kris McDivitt and moved to Chile, where the couple is using their money to buy up vast stretches of wild land in effort to create national parks. That piqued my curiosity, so I Googled them to learn more.

Turns out San Francisco Chronicle did a lengthy piece on Doug and Kris in 2006.

Over the past decade and a half, the Tompkinses have spent about $150 million to buy two dozen properties covering 2.2 million acres of Chile and Argentina, in what collectively amounts to the world’s largest privately run land conservation project.

At stake throughout the region is a historic opportunity much like the North American West in the 19th century — an underpopulated vastness of prairie, glacier-capped mountains and majestic forests that can still be grabbed by anyone with money and ambition.

“In the States, we can only protect small areas, but here, for $10 million you can buy a million-acre ranch,” said Chouinard, chairman of Patagonia Inc., who purchased 8,000 acres next to Valle Chacabuco and has donated funds to the park project. “There are tons of opportunities for creating parks, and now is the time,” Chouinard said. “Everything’s for sale. Sheep ranching is finished.”

The Tompkinses are among the most prominent individual donors to ecological and anti-globalization groups. Last year, two Sausalito foundations that they fund and control — Foundation for Deep Ecology and Conservation Land Trust — spent $15.7 million on conservation projects and grants to environmental and anti-free-trade groups.

Ken Brociner, writing in In These Times, claims an Obama presidency would look a little too much like Bill Clinton’s to please progressives.

The Democratic presidential candidate who can most help progressives bring our vision of transformative change into sharper focus is a man who ran for president 36 years ago. By looking back to the unfulfilled promise of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, we can learn some valuable lessons for the long journey ahead.

For starters, we can see what a genuinely transformative political program looks like. McGovern’s platform was nothing less than visionary. In fact, McGovern was the most progressive major party candidate for president in American history.

In 1972 McGovern ran on a platform that not only called for an immediate end to U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam (on Inauguration Day!), the senator from South Dakota also proposed an “alternative military budget” that included deep cuts in military spending - with the bulk of the savings going toward efforts to end poverty and fund programs that would guarantee a decent paying job to every American who wanted to work.

Nixon also handed McGovern his backside. Maybe Obama is a more practical candidate. Clinton, as we know now, was too practical. His desire to win at all costs pushed the Dems too far to the right, a move the party is still struggling to come to grips with.

Hillary’s offering keeps the Dems in the middle. Obama moves them to the left and the nation with it. But not far enough left too motivate transformative change. When you look at the world today, could it be any clearer that transformative change is exactly what’s needed, and quick? Perhaps, Obama intends to pull a “W”. Maybe once elected, he will let his more radical self out to play.

I’m interested in what a writer can do with Twitter, the micro-blogging service that only allows 140 characters per post. I’ve seen a few people use it for posting short poems. Last weekend I decided to see what might be done in prose.

Here are four tweets I put up:

• Henry Hassler has a stack of unopened bills in his hand. The new Escalade exacts a stiff toll. A bead of sweat rolls off his broken nose.
• “It’s sold, that’s all you need to know,” says Hassler, with forced finality. He squints at the Creative Director. Silence empties the room.
• It’s Saturday, aka putt for money day. But will Hassler’s custom-fitted clubs be enough against scratch-golfer/drinking buddy, Rowan Perry?
• Emerging from the 19th hole, our heroes head straight for their lap dances. “Here’s to Saturday night in America,” says a happy Hassler.

I don’t know that I’ll stick with it. But it seems to me there’s the possibility here for a new literary form. However, there are some issues to think through. One, the posts won’t be read in sequence (in fact, I flipped the order above so they would be in sequence). To me, this means each post has to stand alone; yet add value to the whole. I’m thinking there might be 200 or more narrative bursts in any one story, and that ideally they could all be reshuffled like magnetic poetry.

[UPDATE 6/23/08] I picked up the narrative thread on a Twitter page dedicated to this story.

I love writing that gets inside a place, whatever place that might be. In today’s Sunday Styles section, New York Times writer Lynn Harris gets inside Park Slope, the fast-changing Brooklyn neighborhood that’s become a point of derision for some.

When I moved to the neighborhood in 1994, I promise you, Manhattanites did not think about Park Slope any longer than it took them to blow off a party invitation. But today, you mention Park Slope on a blog or even in conversation and, especially if the reference involves the word “stroller,” the haters lunge like sharks at chum.

“Park Slope is a perfect storm of stereotypes that provoke derision,” said Steven Johnson, a local writer and a father of three. “Since Park Slope is the neighborhood most explicitly associated with urban parenting, it attracts the wrath of people who think parents have gone way overboard.”

How did it come to this? Most of the above could be said of just about any other neighborhood in our tidied-up, child-rearing-friendly New York City. Doesn’t the East Village have a Whole Foods? Hasn’t the Upper West Side become Short Hills?

How did Slope Rage become a meme unto itself, even among people who won’t take the F train below East Broadway?

Near the end of the article, Harris lets Jose Sanchez, chairman of urban studies at Long Island University, Brooklyn explains the tension. “There’s the feeling that yuppies in Park Slope are washing away Brooklyn’s grittiness and making it more like Manhattan. Brooklyn was supposed to be different. Park Slope, to some, now represents everything that Brooklyn was not supposed to be.”

At a time when books, like records, are becoming endangered objects, it’s nice to see people push things to the other extreme. Lloyd and Lenore Dickman of Princeton, Wisconsin are doing just that–the couple warehouses over one million titles in 12 not exactly retail buildings on their farm. Their bookstore is open on Saturday’s and by appointment or happenstance.

[via The Obvious?]