57th Street

Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer for fiction. Despite a mediocre array of winners in the other categories this one definitely deserved it.

The famous newspaper editor and politician Horace Greeley once called for the American people to “Go West!” I have a few thoughts on that.
Perhaps a cryptic message from the gods above, I’ve simultaneously found a new favorite columnist/correspondent and also discovered a contempt for the West. They’re connected. First meet Timothy Egan, Northwest Pacific Correspondent for The New York Times and casual op-ed columnist, and author of the Times‘ Outposts blog. He writes exactly the kind of journalism that I want to write. Although he currently counts himself as one of the millions of pundits sharing his two cents on the 2008 Presidential election, he also explores the Northwest and West. When we have a new president he says he’ll focus less on national politics. Many of his pieces consider the history of western cities and locations, like this one recognizing St. Patrick’s Day:

For a time, Gaelic was the common language in the mining warrens beneath Butte, Mont., and by the dawn of the 20th century the city had a higher percentage of Irish than any other in America – including Boston.Butte was a hard-edged, dirty, dangerous town on the crest of the Continental Divide, and if a single man lived to his 30th birthday he was considered lucky. Yet entire parishes left the emerald desperation of County Cork for the copper mines of Butte, fleeing a land where British occupiers had once refused to let mothers educate their children, and where famine had killed a million people in seven years’ time.

That alone strikes my history fancy, and there’s more! He loves reading and will take down anybody who says that medium is dying, even if it’s the technological visionary Steve Jobs:

Asked about Kindle, the electronic book reader from Amazon.com, Jobs was dismissive. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” he told John Markoff of The Times, “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”This is nonsense on several levels. But before we get to reading, let’s stipulate that Jobs is deserving of his 2007 ranking by Fortune Magazine as the most powerful person in business. Anyone who can cause revolutions in five industries, as Fortune noted, is a titan — capable of touching a billion lives.

My hero. As Northwest Pacific Correspondent, he lives in Seattle and speaks reverently for the city and the rest of the region. Egan is a skilled journalist and because his passion is so great, it spills over into a readers’ interest. Reading his writing and hearing him speak (note, you have to skip to the second half of the podcast of the previous link to hear him) makes me want to learn more about the West.
But then I read Leigh Novak’s entertaining piece on The Beachwood Reporter about her move from her Chicago homeland to Seattle. Hilarity and perhaps fewer kind words about Seattle follow.

Because by the time the train passes through the downtown streets, it is 5 minutes to 6, and I get to the parking spots only to wait for Dipshits A through E to figure out how to back their cars into slots at at passable interpretations of perpendicular angles (they are artsy here – nothing is logical). Then my walk is that much longer, and there are that many more slow-walking Seattleans that I need to breeze by on the sidewalk because, in the city from where I come, people know how to pick up their feet. It’s a survival skill. Seattleans would be stampeded if they approached Chicago with the same head-up-my-ass assertiveness to foot transportation.

Seattle is about as edgy and diverse as a Death Cab For Cutie concert in Naperville. Most people have an image that they are striving to perfect – that Seattle cool.

Not too long ago (like a week) at the very mention of Seattle I’d almost mechanically chirp that it was the Chicago of the West. Now I’m not so sure.

Let me first say that this not a comparison of Persepolis, the books, and Persepolis the film. That comes later, once somebody hires me and starts paying me enough money to afford the books.

In our most recent, and to date only, live meeting of the contributors to 57th Street, I had the opportunity to talk to Ben about the film Persepolis. While both of us agreed that it was an excellent film, and brilliantly animated, he voiced something like displeasure about the film’s central “coming of age story.” For him, it didn’t seem like anything new. And that’s got me thinking: what about this film made it seem so different? What was it that really captivated me when I was in theatres?

To be clear: the film is charming, and beautifully animated. If I had wanted to talk about how great it looks, and how you should go see it, I would have published this weeks ago. Instead, I want to take a moment to figure out why it affected me.

First off, Marjane, the protagonist, is completely likable. It’s rare in film, at least in my experience, for a character to completely outshine the plot and really own the movie. Also, Marjane spends most of the movie as a very young girl. Typically, “coming of age” movies use childhood as a backdrop and do not dwell on it for any length of time. Instead, Marjane’s childhood is central the story as it establishes not only the core of her character — imaginative, free-spirited, and fiery — but also key events in the film, namely the Iranian Revolution.

Aside from Marjane, the setting and scope of the film was something truly refreshing for these American eyes. As one who grew up hearing about the strife in the middle east, I have only recently taken the time to investigate the countries so often talked about in the news. With this upbringing, it is unfortunately hard to not think of the middle east without first thinking of Kalashnikovs, sand, religious extremism, backward-ness, and violence. This is very ignorant thinking, I know. But it can hardly be helped with how the region as a whole is portrayed in the news. Which is why seeing a portrait of Iran featuring people who look and act and live just like me was so refreshing. I have to admit that I didn’t ever think that there would be high-rises in Tehran. It may not be enough to justify loving a movie, but a unique perspective goes a long way.

What I think I enjoyed most about the film was the sense of freedom that I felt at the end of the film. Marjane showed her life as tumultuous and ever changing. It ends bittersweet, and incomplete — truer to life than most movies are willing to admit. It would have been so easy to just end the film with her struggles behind her. But that’s not how life works. Marjane experiences so much through the course of the film. She is a child, an expatriate, a smoker, a partier, an intellectual, a rebel, a wife. In a time of my life when it seems like I might spend the rest of my breathing days with one career doing one task over and over again, the reminder that humans are infinitely capable brings so much hope and stands out in full color in a black and white world.

I have no motivation to post anything. My brain is fried and I really have been trying to get our staff writers here to write something, obviously to no avail. Anyway, check out an online news and culture magazine that I write for! The Beachwood Reporter. It’s Chicago based! I love it. It may seem a little strange at first but it’s really cool.

Wallace and Gromit fans have likely gone into hibernation since the release of “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” in 2005. Like them, I recently got itchy for some news and started to poke around. That’swhere I found out about Aardman Animation’s new hit children’s show, “Shaun The Sheep.” Fans will remember Shaun as the mute, besweatered sheep from the Wallace and Gromit short-ish film “A Close Shave.” He’s since moved on to greener pastures, in a quite literal sense.

The premise of “Shaun the Sheep,” is simple. Shaun lives on a rural European farm, complete with dry stone buildings, with the other sheep in The Flock. Their keeper, The Farmer, lives in ignorance of the fact that Shaun and his friends behave quite like humans — lounging, ordering pizza, playing soccer (sorry, “football”), and getting into mischief. The episodes are completely self-contained stories that operate under one basic rule: that The Farmer can never know about what his animals are getting up to behind his back.

While the premise seems fairly boiler plate the show has a lot of unique features which separate from the flock of mediocrity which is children’s programming. First off, it is done with all of Aardman’s standards for quality in animation. There’s not many cartoons animated with stop motion animation (robot chicken and the excellent Pingu spring to mind) and the look is quite refreshing. The show looks fantastic, and as a result is more satisfying to watch.

It’s also completely silent, at least in terms of intelligible words. The Farmer often grumbles, Bitzer, the sheepdog, barks, and the sheep bleat. This allows the show to neatly side-step that fatal pitfall of children’s entertainment: insipid dialog. The show looses nothing from the lack of dialog, it’s fun to let the faces and exasperated bleats of sheep say what words simply can’t convey. (It also means that it is easily transferable, and is currently running in 73 countries — from Iceland to India.)

The quality of animation in the show, coupled with the cleverness of silent comedy makes for a terrific fusion in Shaun The Sheep. Like a haiku, the restrictions of the show — seven-minute episodes, no dialog, etc. — seem to have created fertile creative ground in which the show has flourished. At times it can be witty and clever, and other times juvenile and silly, but at no time does it ever stop being entertaining. It has become the highest form of children’s entertainment: one that adults aren’t ashamed to watch, and might even enjoy.

Bright, light, and utterly charming, Shaun the Sheep is the kind of show that everyone, regardless of age or nationality, simply must see.

Unfortunately, the powers that be have seen fit to remove all the episodes of the show from YouTube — which is most unfortunate for anyone in North America. Thankfully, there are some clips available from Shaunthehseep.com, though they are woefully truncated. A good ol’ Google Video should turn up a few more.

Watch Shaun The Sheep At MetaCafe