Riff - November, 2009

Thanks Oprah, we've all heard. Sarah Palin kicks off her book tour in earnest this week, endlessly plugging Going Rogue: An American Life, her account of what really happened with John McCain's mean spindoctor-people and bad boy Levi Johnston and other scandals we were only mildly interested in six months ago, before Mad Men got started.

What you may not have heard is that another book, by Michael Stinson and Julie Sigwart, also hits bookstores today. It's called Going Rouge: The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring & Activity Book, and it has already earned mentions in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

So it's time for a showdown. Memoir vs. Coloring Book. No one's done it yet, so I'll break it down for you: Five reasons to go Rouge rather than Rogue this year.

Dave Rawlings Machine
A Friend of a Friend
Acony Records

"Dave's gone and done it," was roughly what Gillian Welch announced a couple of months ago to 50,000 bluegrass fans in Golden Gate Park. "He's put out an album." Well, now he has. This week, Rawlings—that ephemeral, soft-toned siren who appears on all four of Welch's albums and accompanies her on stage—finally comes out with his debut CD, a jaunt through old-time, folk, country, and bluegrass. Raised in Rhode Island, Rawlings  picked up the guitar when he was 15. Somewhere along the way, string-band country music became his muse, and in the early '90s, Rawlings and Welch moved to Tennesee, where they've carried on the Nashville tradition.

A Friend of a Friend features Welch (she's also cowriter on some of the songs), members of bluegrass favorites Old Crow Medicine Show, Benmont Tench from the Heartbreakers, and Nate Walcott of Bright Eyes, but the Dave Rawlings Machine is front and center. Rawlings' confident picking seems to emanate from a deep understanding of Americana roots. But like any great storyteller, he filters all that knowledge into something even an uninformed listener can get.

Here's an experiment: Ask someone of my generation (I'm 23) to name a few jazz artists they like. If they're not fans, ask them to name any jazz artist at all—good or bad, older or more recent, doesn't matter the instrument. Expect to hear responses like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, possibly Wynton Marsalis, maybe Louis Armstrong or Thelonious Monk, and—well, that's about it.

Mention the names Art Farmer or Jimmy Smith or Art Blakey, or any of the other stars on the latest installment in the Jazz Icons DVD series, and you'll cue up shrugs and blank stares. But rather than bemoan the fact, let's instead stress the importance of the latest Jazz Icons set—fourth in this series—which preserves a collection of timeless, masterful 1960s concerts featuring some of the best damn playing (on drums, piano, hollow-body guitar, flugelhorn, you name it) audiences had ever heard.

The US Chamber of Commerce, the massive business organization that's taken a shellacking in the media lately for its climate-change stance (among other things), apparently can't take a joke. Last month, prompted in part by Mother Jones' coverage of the Chamber's shenanigans, the Yes Men held a phony press conference purporting to be the Chamber and announcing the group's about-face on climate matters; now, the Yes Men-turned-PR-flacks said, the Chamber would be eagerly supporting climate legislation on Capitol Hill. The real Chamber, however, was far from pleased—so much that they're suing the Yes Men for the stunt.

While the ensuing legal action may be novel, the spectacle of political prankery has a rich history. From Joey Skaggs' infamous New York "Cathouse for Dogs" to the phony pundit Martin Eisenstadt of the 2008 election, there's no shortage of memorable pranks in this country, as Dave Gilson describes in his new story "Jumping the Snark" in Mother Jones' November/December print issue. But more importantly, Gilson asks, are these kinds of clever hoaxes a dying art?

Gone are the days of Skaggs and cultural icon Abbie Hoffman; now we have the CollegeHumor "prank war" and Bruno and Borat—funny, but lacking the weight of the hoaxes of yore. Pranks, Gilson writes, "have morphed from an outlet for political and artistic outsiders into another form of popular amusement," where everyone can try to be a prankster and the better organized gags are used to peddle Taco Bell.

Which isn't to say the prank is dead; it's just evolving, Gilson says. "Just as Sacha Baron Cohen's first three personas have gotten stale and the Yes Men are searching for a new gig," he writes, "so will the current crop of predictable pranksters be pushed aside by a new batch of jokers who've concluded that it’s better to light a stink bomb than curse the darkness."

Find Mother Jones' ongoing coverage of the Chamber of Commerce here.

Read about how climate activist prankster Tim DeChristopher put one over on the Bureau of Land Management here.

We're officially in Day 4 of the Maclaren stroller recall, and it's abundantly clear that far too few parents have gotten the message. In case you haven't heard (or are not a multitasking metro-mommy or -daddy) fancy pants British baby-stuff maker Maclaren has recalled every single stroller it has sold since 1999 for this compelling reason: Their hinges amputate little baby fingers. Twelve little baby fingers in America so far, to be exact. In fact, the New York Post (guardian of truth that it is) reported today that Maclaren knew of the defect for five years—five—before issuing a recall. Parents have been surprisingly nonchalant, while nonparents (like me, for instance) seem to have been gripped by news that the decade's must-have child accessory is actually evil. Brooklyn alone is swimming in schadenfreude. 

But back to the parents for a second: What's wrong with you people? The New York Times' City Room blog reported on Wednesday that pram-pushers in Park Slope, the Big Apple's de facto Maclaren capital, were utterly uninterested in the recall and the easy-to-install safety kits that render their pricey strollers harmless. We know the risks, they blithely told the Times. I'll take my chances. But that's New York for you, right? 

When food writer (How to Cook Everything, Food Matters) and New York Times columnist Mark Bittman read our March/April "Let's Grow America!" special report on food security, he was so jazzed by it that he got in touch to offer his services to raise money for Mother Jones. How could we say no?

That's how a group of toque-hatted Mother Jones friends ended up at New York's Institute for Culinary Education last week, slicing, dicing, and eating dinner built off of a low-impact but immensely tasty menu that Mark prepared especially for the evening. From the first bite of chick pea fries to the last slurp of chocolate soy pudding with vanilla cream on top, our taste buds were in food heaven. You can view the photos of the evening on Flickr or in the slideshow below (see, anyone can look goofy in a paper hat).

Mark also took a few minutes to talk about his most recent book, Food Matters, which makes the connection between a healthy diet (less meat, more plants) and a healthy planet (less carbon, more icepack).

You can check out Mark's work here. And if you'd like to try your hand at the menu he prepared for Mother Jones, email us at bittmanrecipes@motherjones.com. We'll send you a PDF of the recipes.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Lordy, lordy, Sesame Street is turning 40. To celebrate four decades of educational muppet fun, this year its producers are introducing a curriculum called "My World is Green and Growing" designed to "create a love and understanding of the natural world." Below, Michelle Obama helps kids and Elmo plant a vegetable garden (pesticide free, natch):

HT Sierra Club.

Tori Amos
Midwinter Graces
Universal Republic

A Tori Amos Christmas album? Seriously?

That was my first thought when I opened Midwinter Graces, a new album out this week from the indie queen. The quirky, moody crooner seems like a strange fit for the wholesome, fuzzy holiday season. Plus, Christmas albums are usually crap (a fact MoJo staffers recently lamented at length).

But I should have known better than to to doubt the seditious songstress. Rather than recording syrupy holiday tunes, Amos has crafted a collection of covers and originals filled with whimsy and melancholy—the musical equivalent of spiked eggnog.

Reinhard Kleist's brand-new graphic novel, Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness (Abrams Books), opens with a vintage Caddy (license plate "HELL") barreling past a neon sign on the outskirts of Reno. Without a word, its surly driver—the Man in Black himself—makes his way to the strip, where he spots a short, wealthy, sleazy-looking man walking into an alley with a prostitute and proceeds to fill him with lead. In the scene's final panel, the killer is inside an armored bus, pulling up to the gates of Folsom Prison. Get it? I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die.

The Berlin-based artist has fun with this concept in his well-researched biography of the late country star, segueing into pen-and-ink depictions of Cash hits like "Big River," "Cocaine Blues," and "A Boy Named Sue" (which unbeknownst to me was penned by Shel Silverstein). Kleist uses a different, faux-tribal drawing style for "The Ballad of Ira Hayes"—a choice that reflects his interest in Cash's views on soldiers and war, an interest that also emerges in a studio scene with Bob Dylan.

If you caught the 2005 Cash biopic Walk the Line, with Joaquin Phoenix (the wrong actor as far as I'm concerned), you'll recognize the basic outline: The Depression-era upbringing amid cotton fields in Arkansas, where a neighbor kid teaches young J.R. Cash to play guitar. The horrible mishap that befalls his brother Jack. The Air Force service in Germany. The courtship and marriage to Vivian Liberto. The settling down in Memphis and forming a band. The record deal, tours with Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, leading to a devastating addiction to uppers. The public disgraces. And, of course, the forbidden love with June Carter, whom he eventually marries.

This story first appeared at Miller-McCune.

Metacritic.com is an acclaimed Web site that combines thousands of media reviews of entertainment offerings — movies, games, books and albums — into a Metascore, a sort of weighted average of critics' reviews that ranges from zero to 100. Analysis of just a small subset of the site's information shows the power of numbers to confirm — or defy — expectation.

The Actors
The colored horizontal bars on this chart present a graphical representation of the distribution of scores given to movies in which each of the listed actors appear. The numbers inside the bars represent the average of review scores for those movies; the actors listed are the top 50 and the bottom 10, in terms of those averages. Note that the reviews are primarily from the last decade; no consideration is given to the magnitude of the actor's role; and a high average rating could indicate acting skill, the ability to pick good projects (or good trilogies), reviewer bias or just luck. To the extent that the ordering of the actors appears generally reasonable, some unexpected placements may inspire a rethinking of subjective assessments (or, in the case of Viggo Mortensen's rating above Clint Eastwood, a good long laugh).

The Critics
This scatterplot shows 25 prolific movie critics in terms of the favorability with which they rate films, and the degree to which their reviews tend to agree with those of other critics, scaled to reflect their volume of reviews written. If you want to get a sense of the zeitgeist but can only read one review, you might prefer Rene Rodriguez, whose low standard deviation from the mean review score makes him very nearly a living critical average. If you are interested in an alternative perspective, Mick LaSalle's high standard deviation places him further from the critical pack than any of these peers. Reviews from both Michael Wilmington and Marc Savlov are so regularly and respectively positive and negative that they should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.

The Movies
A "smoothed" plot of movie scores over time is depicted, highlighting the expected seasonal peaks in mid-summer and at the end of the year, along with the mid-winter and early autumn doldrums. Also listed are some of the more influential movies of their eras, in terms of number of reviews, along with their mean scores. Might the poorly reviewed summer of 2002 be attributed to releases delayed in the wake of 9/11? Does the relative lack of troughs from 2003 to 2006 reflect a real or imagined streak of high-quality films?