Dear Downton Abby

“Of course, there’s one place where everyone behaves properly — and everyone has terrible personal problems. Perhaps they need an advice columnist.” Bill Madison steps in: Dear Downton Abby.

Detropia

[Piano to the left. Click for a larger view.]

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's documentary film Detropia (2012) is everything that Michael Moore's Roger & Me (1989) is not. There is no tidy, ironic narrative of decline here: Ewing and Grady explore the wreckage of a city that has already failed. (Moore's narrative plays fast and loose with chronology.) No one is on camera to be laughed at: the men and women we hear speaking are angry, dignified, and, often, wise. And Ewing and Grady (makers of the 2006 film Jesus Camp) are present only as unheard, unseen observers and editors. The know that the story is not about them.

Detropia juxtaposes scenes of unimaginable blight with scenes of resourceful citizenship and entrepreneurship. We see residents who refuse to resign themselves to the absence of police in their neighborhood. We see other residents who are determined to keep the Detroit Opera House alive. (One man chooses to stay in the city because he sings in the chorus.) We see the workings of a (sometimes literally) underground economy: a man who cuts hair in the basement of his house, another who fashions barbecue pits from storage drums and bedrails, a woman who plans to set up a cart selling eighty-proof snowcones. And everywhere, there are small groups scavenging metal from abandoned buildings. The cruel twist is that China is a principal market for American scrap, so the scrappers are feeding the very forces that have led to lower wages and massive unemployment in their city. Perhaps the strangest development in this surreal landscape: the presence of immigrant hipsters, attracted by the prospect of living in what one calls, without irony, a “dead city.”

In the theater of my imagination, Detropia and The Queen of Versailles (dir. Lauren Greenfield, 2012) would make a perfect double-bill.

The films’ websites
Detropia
The Queen of Versailles

Inauguration Day

I thought it was an excellent inaugural address. I hoped to hear the president speak of climate change, equal marriage, gun violence, immigration reform, and poverty: he did. He even made reference to the struggling city of Detroit.

The most remarkable moment for me was the reference to Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall, joining three movements into one ongoing struggle for human rights and the widening we of “we the people” — the phrase that served as the kernel of the president’s address.

Now it’s time for Beyoncé.

[Having just seen Detropia, I wondered: would the city’s name be heard on Inauguration Day? And yes, I’ve been typing through Richard Blanco’s poem.]

MLK

CBC correspondent Eleanor Fischer interviewed Martin Luther King Jr. in 1961, 1966, and 1967. Now WNYC has made available for the first time the unedited recordings of these interviews. Here is a passage from the final interview, from February 1967. If you know King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam” (April 4, 1967), you’ll recognize some of its language here:

I think our country, which, I must say, is the richest, most powerful country in the world, has at points become enamored of its power. I think we do suffer from a kind of pride of power, an arrogance of power that can bring the curtain down on the whole of American civilization. We are arrogant in our assertion that we have everything to teach other nations and nothing to learn from them. We are arrogant in our feeling that we have some divine, messianic mission to police the whole world. And I think we are arrogant in our failure to move progressively and forthrightly toward bridging the gulf between the haves and the have-nots of the world. . . . I do feel that we are on the wrong side of a world revolution. I feel that because we have too often identified ourselves with the wealthy and secure and we have ignored the poor and the insecure.

King goes on to warn that if the United States kept to its current course, it would find itself in more Vietnams — in Latin America, Africa, and “many other Asian countries.” Forty-five years later, as we see the wreckage that neo-conservative foreign policy hath wrought, these words sound painfully prophetic.

Lance Armstrong cheats with cheat

I haven’t seen anyone else point it out, so I will: Lance Armstrong’s definition of cheat is pure nonsense. In other words, he cheated even when offering what he claimed to be a dictionary definition of cheat. Here is the relevant exchange, from the BBC transcript of his interview with Oprah Winfrey:

Did you feel in any way that you were cheating? You did not feel you were cheating taking banned drugs?

At the time, no. I kept hearing I’m a drug cheat, I’m a cheat, I’m a cheater. I went in and just looked up the definition of cheat, and the definition of cheat is to gain an advantage on a rival or foe that they don’t have. I didn’t view it that way. I viewed it as a level playing field.

To cheat is not necessarily to gain an advantage over an opponent: one can cheat at solitaire. And one can gain an advantage over an opponent with a killer move on a gameboard, with a skillful choice of words, with a wicked backhand, none of which is a matter of cheating. What Armstrong fails to mention is the element of dishonesty that any dictionary’s entry for cheat will include. Here for instance is the New Oxford American Dictionary’s entry for cheat:



Try some Google searches with the words of Armstrong’s definition of cheat. Try searches that exclude lance and armstrong too. The only references to this pseudo-definition that you’ll find will be references to Armstrong’s interview.

Someone who cheats even when it comes to defining what it means to cheat is, well, a real cheater.

[I’ve added a comma to the interview excerpt for clarity and italicized Winfrey’s question and the word cheat (used as a word).]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, January 19, 2013.]

Sigh. Today’s Hi and Lois just doesn’t make good sense. In the first panel, we see Hi and his dissolute neighbor Thirsty Thurston talking. Says Hi, “The election is over. Aren’t you going to take the bumper sticker off your car?” “No,” says Thirsty. And behold the punchline, such as it is. But Hi lives next to Thirsty. He has seen Thirsty’s car. He knows that it bears a Romney sticker. Hi must also know that the car bears stickers from forty years of presidential elections. Why then would he wonder about the newest one? And why doesn’t it occur to him to wonder why his neighbor is driving a forty-year-old car?

Thirsty’s chronic intoxication might explain his crazily veering political allegiances. Two states still restrict alcohol sales on Election Day, but there appear to be no restrictions on voting while drunk.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Robert Frost mug

[Only $15.95. Good grief.]

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” has the distinction of being celebrated by large numbers of people who have no idea what it’s saying. Why does an elementary school have its students sign and sing the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” at a spring concert? Cluelessness. Why do people want Frost’s poem on a mug or poster or plaque? See answer to previous question.

Reading “The Road Not Taken” with even modest attention reveals the poem to be more complicated and compelling than any platitude about going one’s own way and never looking back:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Beginning with its title, the poem is about nothing but looking back: its speaker even begins to rehearse his story once again in the final stanza before breaking off to offer the evidence-defying declaration that he “took the one less traveled by.” Look back at what he’s told us: the two roads looked equally appealing; one looked grassier than the other; they looked equally worn; that morning they were both covered in leaves than no one had walked on. Where there is no difference, there is no basis for a meaningful choice. And the difference a choice makes cannot be gauged when one has no idea of where an alternative may have led. If “way leads on to way,” the two roads might even meet again in the future: and who would know?

What the poem shows us is a traveler who would have preferred not to have to choose, who retells his story (like the Ancient Mariner), who travels to an unknown end (“somewhere ages and ages hence”), and who is determined to impose meaning on one moment of experience. If the speaker will be retelling his story with a “sigh,” it’s far from clear that the difference he claims for his choice — if there was a choice, if there is a difference — is for the better. But in Frost’s universe, any meaning is better than none. Or as another Frost poem puts it:

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

And speaking of things boughten, you can also buy the poem’s first stanza as a poster ending with a semicolon. Good grief.

[Elaine and I heard “Y.M.C.A.” sung by elementary-school kids some years ago. Not wanting to embarrass anyone, we kept our mouths shut.]

Shine on, nvALT and Simplenote

I read what Brett Terpstra wrote:

The combination of Simplenote and nvALT has become deadly and my interest in continuing to support it is waning.

Please use Dropbox sync.

And then I read what Michael Schecter wrote:

Now that Brett Terpstra, one of the developers of nvALT, has made it clear that there are issues between Simplenote and nvALT that are unlikely to get resolved (in addition to the issues I was having with the Simplenote iOS app), I wanted to give those who need it a walkthrough for making the move from Simplenote Sync to Dropbox Sync.

Yipes, and yipes again. But then I read what Shawn Blanc wrote:

In the end, I’ve come back full circle and am sticking with Simplenote and nvALT. Though the syncing can hiccup at times, I still consider it to be the best. And, of course, now that I know more about the cause behind the syncing hiccups I no longer fear losing my data.

That sounds like sufficient reason to save myself some tedium and time. I’m sticking with nvALT and Simplenote for now.

[nvALT (OS X) and Simplenote (iOS and online) are free apps for note-taking and (better still) note-keeping. Using them together lets you sync your notes across several machines. Dropbox (iOS, OS X, Windows, and others) gives you access to your files from any computer. I recommend all three with enthusiasm. If you’d like to try Dropbox, use this referral code: it means 500 MB extra storage for each of us.]

Good advice for married people

Jane Brody writes about marriage and happiness: That Loving Feeling Takes a Lot of Work. It’s true.

[Work: not drudgery but giving.]

Aaron Draplin’s memo books

“Some guy actually lived out of this thing”: Aaron Draplin talks about old memo books.