Bookninja has been running a contest for the past few weeks, using photoshop to rebrand books as a different genre. Here’s a list of all the entries, and here’s a list of the winners. Maybe it would have made more sense for me to link to this when the contest was still going on, but this way you get to see the whole thing at once. So there.

Fark has begun selling t-shirts of their headlines, which makes sense because the headlines are halfway witty, and usually have the kind of double meaning fit for t-shirt irony. But then I saw where CNN is selling t-shirts of their headlines, which is just stupid. Their headlines are ordinary, and wearing a t-shirt with one of their ordinary slogans makes no sense. There’s no humor, there’s no proclamation of being hip: “Look at me! I’m cool! I read CNN!” Just doesn’t sound as good as, “That’s right, I’m a Farker,” or, even better, “I’m a Sportsracer.”

Fark linked up this editorial about the decline of the manual transmission. The author concludes that nostalgia might be the only genuine advantage of a straight shift anymore:

Sure, learning to drive a stick was a rite of passage, handed down for generations. Mastering a manual said not only that you knew your way around a car, but that you were becoming a man. But 20 years from now, young drivers may wonder what the fuss was about. Like kids who’ve never heard of the Beatles, they’ll give us a pitying look when we start going on about the days when “real” cars had three foot-pedals and something called a “shift knob.”

I’m a nostalgic guy, I guess. I’m working on a book set in 1932, I drive a stick, I change my own oil, and I’m even trying to get transferred over to car install at Circuit City so I can learn about the mechanics of car wiring.

I will say this, though: I recently watched Coal Miner’s Daughter, and I think one of the most powerful shots in that film was Tommy Lee Jones driving a bulldozer away from Loretta’s father’s grave. It was one of those dozers that you turned by pulling a lever that braked one side or another lever that braked the other. Jones had to learn how to drive one of those things, and it’s a useless and amazingly cool thing to know how to do. Kind of like writing a novel.

David Sedaris has an amusing essay in The New Yorker:

Then you’ll see this man or woman— someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. “Well, Charlie,” they say, “I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!” Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

Emily and I saw Appaloosa the other day, and she suggested I write an essay about westerns. I don’t have time to write an essay, and I’m not sure I have that much to say, but here’s what I’m thinking about: other than jazz, westerns are the quintessential American art form, and couldn’t have emerged anywhere else. Westerns have gone through phases–the clear good and evil of cowboys and indians and John Wayne, the obsession with violence of The Wild Bunch and Sergio Leone, the moral uncertainty of Unforgiven. Then it seems like westerns went out of fashion somewhere in the nineties–we became an urban culture. The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie were replaced by The Hills and Grey’s Anatomy. But in the past couple of years, it seems like westerns have come back–Deadwood, Brokeback Mountain, There Will be Blood, Appaloosa. If I’m right, why are they popular again, and how are they doing something different (or are they doing something different)?

A few observations:
1) Some current westerns are essentially genre pieces–3:10 to Yuma, Appaloosa. Fun, but they don’t seem to do much that hasn’t already been done. But it is refreshing to have old-fashioned gun and knife fights without all the special effects and explosions of current-time action movies.
2) Some are set recently–I’d argue Brokeback Mountain and No Country for Old Men are westerns, even though they don’t follow all the old tropes. They’re interesting because they are still somewhat historical, even if it is recent history, so part of their draw, I think, is how much things have changed so quickly in the 21st century.
3) There’s an element of privacy to these westerns. Characters have nuance, and, like the old tropes, these characters are stony and silent. They hold their emotions to themselves. The opening twenty minutes of There Will be Blood with no dialogue, for example, or Ennis Del Mar’s monosyllabic dialogue. Maybe that’s what has changed so drastically in the past fifteen years: we’ve given up our privacy and signed onto Facebook, so there’s something interesting about characters who don’t give all of themselves away.

My sense is that people that dislike Bush are interested in this movie, and that people who like Bush aren’t interested. I’ve never liked Bush, and I liked this movie, so I’m in no position to comment, but what I can say is that it wasn’t what I expected. Oliver Stone has almost ruined his credibility with me for taking big historical liberties with his work, so I’m disinclined to treat this as a biopic so much as a work of complete fiction. That said, the narrative, aided by Josh Brolin’s fine acting, made Bush a sympathetic, even likable character. Stone shows his rise to the presidency as a well-meaning everyman with everyday problems–a father-and-social-class conflict that echoes Prince Hal, alcoholism, religious conversion. The film falls a bit flat in the presidency narrative, partly because the portrayal of Condoleeza Rice was so satirical, and the sole focus was invading Iraq. Perhaps Stone figured people wouldn’t be interested in rehashing the minutia of Bush’s term, but I was interested in seeing how the character Stone and Brolin created would respond to other things–9/11, for instance, declining approval ratings, all of his people either turning against him or getting put on trial.