#49

Yet if the yellowing of America signifies the rising self-consciousness of Asian-Americans, it also promises, paradoxically, to undermine their identity. For what becomes clear in browsing Eastern Standard Time is that many Asian cultural memes are arriving here directly from Asia, bypassing the Asian-American middleman altogether. Steadily, Asian-American culture is becoming Asian/American culture--defined less by the local experiences of immigrants and their offspring than by the churn of global capitalism and the transnational feedback loop of style and aesthetics.

Feng Shui America: The Asianization of popular culture.

#48

Written sex also has the distinction of being the only erotic art one can indulge in on public transport without fear of arrest. This is a truth well known by schoolgirls, who from the age of 13 onwards pass round dog-eared paperbacks, the good bits underlined for easy reference, as if they held the secret to life itself. Schoolboys, by contrast, are slaves to images, while we girls knew that in just a few years’ time we’d have our own three-dimensional versions of what the lads spent so much effort trying to catch a photographic glimpse of. Though some at least try the pictorial version of pornography: one girl at my school smuggled in a copy of Knave but the headmistress caught wind of her plan to unveil the illicit images to a paying audience in the first-floor toilets after last period. Those of us who didn’t get our 20p back learnt our lesson. Stick to the books.

Hot off the page

#47

There are two William Shakespeares. The first is the man born in Stratford, who never seemed to spell his name the same way twice, who was deeply interested in minor financial transactions and the accumulation of property, and who left his wife his second-best bed; the other is the man who left the world the greatest literary legacy ever known. A considerable body of scholarship, the work principally of enthusiastic and learned amateurs, seeks to establish that William Shakespeare in the first sense was not William Shakespeare in the second sense.

Truth vs. Theory

#46

If I were in the Darkness, playing drums (my instrument), I think I would have to be an addict of some kind — an alcoholic, probably. How else to anæsthetize the psyche-splitting agony of being funny and not funny at the same time? Of being in a parodic ha-ha hard-rock band who actually and seriously rock? Of being, as it were, simultaneously post-modern and pre-modern? With absurdity draped over every power chord, and a smirk in every lyric, still there’s headbanging in the front row. Perhaps it’s ha-ha headbanging — who can tell? Yep, bring down the booze curtain, lower the heavy velvet on this torment of sophistication.

Substance abuse: The Darkness’s unblinking voyage into the preposterous

#45

The truth is that Joel was born at the wrong time. Were he a decade older, he might have wound up in the Brill Building crafting perfect little pop songs and gone down in history with Burt Bacharach, Carole King, and company. But Joel came of age in the post-Beatles era, when songwriters grew self-conscious about rock's aesthetic and social significance, and felt compelled to make statements. Alas, Joel is a leaden lyricist with nothing to say; the result is songs like the 1989 hit "We Didn't Start the Fire," a laundry list of historical events—"Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge on the River Kwai"—that Joel tried to pass off as a panorama of postwar American life, or a portrait of baby boomer ennui, or something. Joel's self-seriousness has been painfully evident on his recent co-headlining tours with Elton John, who never lets artistic pretension stop him from donning a feather boa and throwing a party. Which Lite FM legend would you rather have over to dinner?

Billy Joel: Oh, the squandered genius!

#44

Charlotte’s experiences at the fictional Dupont University shed light on these questions, as the ambitious girl from backwater North Carolina is transformed by her sophisticated and salacious surroundings. Far from being the path to higher civilization and refinement of character, Dupont is a toxic impediment to the yearning for higher things, built on a dogmatic denial that higher civilization and refinement of character are even possible. Where, in a former age, the impressionable young student might have aspired to religious salvation or genuine wisdom, today’s typical college student lives more for entertainment, sensation, and release, all the while demanding and largely getting immediate gratification. The individual still seeks status and recognition. But the marks of distinction are all too often inebriation, “hooking up,” expertise at sarcasm (“sarc one,” “sarc two,” and “sarc three”), and insouciance toward matters intellectual and moral. As students learn about and fall into this new ethic, the university not only fails to stand in opposition, it accelerates the process. Dupont, that composite of Duke, Stanford, Yale, and the University of Michigan, corrupts the promising young Charlotte. For revealing this disturbing truth, the author has been reviled by those who are thereby revealed.

Love in the Age of Neuroscience

#43

It used to be said that the moral arc of a Washington career could be divided into four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition, and corruption. You arrive with a passion for a cause, determined to challenge the system. Then you learn to work for your cause within the system. Then rising in the system becomes your cause. Then finally you exploit the system—your connections in it, and your understanding of it—for personal profit.

Corrupt Intentions

#42

Above all, though, Heath and Potter are as dismissive of the modern Left's worldview as P.J. O'Rourke is. "You can't even organize a commune, much less an entire society, based upon the assumption that people will behave like saints," they tell us. "Consumerism…always seems to be a critique of what other people buy…. [The] so-called critique of consumerism is just thinly veiled snobbery or, worse, Puritanism." They sum up aptly the countercultural message of the film, American Beauty: "[It] is simply not possible to be a well-adjusted adult in our society…. The alternative [to perpetual adolescence] is to 'sell out,' to play by the rules, and thereby to become a neurotic, superficial conformist, incapable of experiencing true pleasure." To which they respond: "The greatest weakness of countercultural thinking has always been its inability to produce a coherent vision of a free society, much less a practical political program for changing the one we live in."

Rebels Without a Clue

#41

People always search for meaning. But in our confused and ever changing world we feel particularly perplexed when it comes to making sense of the problems that confront us. One of the most important ways in which an absence of meaning is experienced is the feeling that the individual is manipulated and influenced by hidden powerful forces - not just by spin-doctors, subliminal advertising, and the media, but also by powers that have no name. That is why we frequently attribute unexplained physical and psychological symptoms to unspecific forces caused by the food we eat, the water we drink, an extending variety of pollutants and substances transmitted by new technologies and other invisible processes. As a result, global warming is not simply a climatic phenomenon but an all-purpose evil that can account for a bewildering variety of destructive events.

On the hunt for a conspiracy theory