“What I do is minimum effort, but maximum pleasure. That’s part of being Hawaiian, brah.”
— Israel Kamakawiwo’ole

“ [...] its delicate beauty, its guileless reimagining of the standards, and its 4 a.m. willingness to go over the top in search of the sublime.”
— Dan Kois, describing the medley “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What A Wonderful World”

********************

If you are reading this there is a good chance that the name Israel Kamakawiwo’ole and the album Facing Future mean nothing to you. In fact, there is a good chance that if I were to ask you who the artist is or if you had ever heard of the album you would look back at me with a puzzled physiognomy. And if that were the case I would say that Israel Kamakawiwo’ole is the Hawaiian man who performed a cover of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with just his vocals and a ‘ukulele, and Facing Future is the album on which said cover was originally released on. And to us Mainlanders that would be the end of the story, for the most part. We Mainlanders would mostly agree that Israel’s version of that song is the very definition of the words delicate and beautiful, and probably even the phrase delicately beautiful—even in spite of its lyrical missteps. His version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is the prototypical great cover song: a recognizable and transcendent version of a song which has a uniqueness that instantly conveys timelessness. A song that a gigantic Hawaiian man performed in a small studio at four o’clock in the morning, five years before it was to be released on Facing Future and many years before it would generate word-of-mouth buzz when being used in commercials and movies, this is the song that could very well replace Judy Garland’s iconic version with many people in future generations. It is the very definition of timeless.

But what are we, the Mainlanders, to make of Kamakawiwo’ole, his legacy, and his most popular album? Dan Kois (last name rhymes with Joyce) aims to break this down and provide answers to this in his 33 1/3 entry.^[1] To us, Kamakawiwo’ole is a curiosity not unlike that of a circus freak variety: when he died, he weighed 1,000 pounds; his voice didn’t match the image of him in the slightest sense. Upon hearing of Israel’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—whether it be on the commercial for the now-defunct eToys or during the closing scenes of Finding Forrester—many people bought Facing Future (it’s the highest-selling Hawaiian album ever produced) and were probably alarmed that every other song didn’t sound like it. It wouldn’t be outlandish to assume that most people thought of him as a novelty.

Kois, who lived in Hawaii for a couple years, goes back to the islands and attempts to put in perspective what Israel (or Iz, as he’s known amongst many of his bruddahs) means to Hawaii and what Facing Future means to the American island state that has always had a strong sense of nationalism, and disaffection with the Mainland. Kois not only breaks down the songs themselves into categories (Hapa Haole Songs and Hawaiian/Jawaiian Songs^[2]) but he also delves into the history of Iz himself and the history of Hawaii.

The end result is a book that any piece of music criticism and literature aspires to: when you are done reading it you will want to buy this album. I will purposely leave out the details of what Kois writes about Iz, the people associated with him, and the history of Hawaiian nationalism (most notably tied to the song “Hawaii ’78″) because they are things that should be read and appreciated first-hand. This book not only does the artist and the album an immense amount of justice but it is, most importantly, a poignant portrait of everything that is connected to Iz—a man who is like an amalgam of Elvis, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon to the citizens of Hawaii. Multi-faceted and insightful, Kois’s book about Facing Future is a must-read for anyone that loves this album, wants to read great music criticism, or is simply curious about the artist and our (arguably) most misunderstood state.

[1] If you have never heard of the 33 1/3 series, they are pocket-sized paperbacks about albums written by a wide variety of writers (no writer has ever written two books). You can go the official 33 1/3 page and browse their catalog. I highly recommend this series (especially the entry on Harvest by Neil Young, if you like/love that album).

[2] Hapa Haole means “English-language songs played Hawaiian style”. Jawaiian is slang for Hawaiian reggae.

Six years ago this month my wife and I went and saw Million Dollar Baby at the theater. Amongst a myriad of other things that I thought about after seeing that film, one of them was that I needed to read some boxing nonfiction if for no other reason that boxing seems like such a profound metaphor for life. (It is funny how boxing movies and essays can be such visceral things to see/read and, yet, to watch an actual match is typically banal and uninteresting.) To me, Million Dollar Baby is a beautifully painful movie and when I found out that it was partly inspired by and adapted from Rope Burns, a collection of short stories by Jerry Boyd (pen name, F.X. Toole), I was going to buy that book. But it was out of print. And so I looked for other boxing-related books and found that Joyce Carol Oates had written some essays during the ’80′s in a collection called On Boxing. But it was out of print too.^[1]

And then I got sidetracked from boxing altogether, opting instead to discover and consume nonfiction from Gladwell and Klosterman and Wallace and Orlean.

Then, a few weeks ago I saw The Fighter.^[2] And afterwards I went immediately to the bookstore and picked up a recently republished edition of Joyce Carol Oates’s On Boxing. On Boxing consists of six essays, starting with the 118 page eponymous essay. (Note: it is not a full 118 pages, as random full-page pictures of boxing images are scattered throughout.) The essay “On Boxing” is nothing short of brilliant. Filled with Oates’s own insights that at times have a real air of profundity to them, quotes from boxers throughout the 20th century, and an overall feeling of a literary (yet still accessible) critique of the sport, “On Boxing” is on the short list of greatest pieces of sports writing I have ever read. Think I am exaggerating? Here is an excerpt from pages 12-13:

“Boxing’s claim is that it is superior to life in that it is, ideally, superior to all accident. It contains nothing that is not fully willed.

“The boxer meets an opponent who is a dream-distortion of himself in the sense that his weaknesses, his capacity to fail and to be seriously hurt, his intellectual miscalculations—all can be interpreted as strengths belonging to the Other; the parameters of his private being are nothing less than boundless assertions of the Other’s self. This is dream, or nightmare: my strengths are not fully my own, but my opponent’s weaknesses; my failure is not fully my own, but my opponent’s triumph. He is my shadow-self, not my (mere) shadow. The boxing match as “serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude”—to refer to Aristotle’s definition of tragedy—is an event that necessarily subsumes both boxers, as any ceremony subsumes its participants. (Which is why one can say, for instance, that the greatest fight of Muhammad Ali’s career was one of the few fights Ali lost—the first heroic match with Frazier.)”

To be sure, this excerpt (and this collection of essays as a whole) does not redefine, or shift any paradigms of, sports writing. (Not that Oates is trying to anyway.) Sports writing in general is founded on trying to show you the sport(s) in question in a new, different light—or it attempts to give you the human side of its participants. Or both. And because of this, we as fans and audience are just as capable of caring about the losers and the runners-up in a neutral match/event than we do about the winners and the champions. And, to be sure, this is nothing new. We not only love underdog stories but we love seeing spotlights on new sports, as well as spotlights on the sports we already like/love. Our attachment to these things was why Wide World of Sports ran for so long, why Sports Illustrated is still functioning, and why ESPN was ever allowed to grow from its original plankton form to the whale form that it is today.

At the end of the day, how we digest sports writing—like any other form of review or criticism—depends greatly on presentation. And with these essays, the presentation that Joyce Carol Oates gives is truly outstanding. Outstanding because she is not only a gifted and educated writer and spectator of boxing, but because her insights into boxing and all of its history and its index of metaphors are so precise. “On Boxing” is so thoughtful, so cared for, and so interesting there were many moments where I thought to myself I don’t think that that thought, or observation, can be written any more perfectly. (These are the exact thoughts that went through my head while reading David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again too: I’ll probably never read anything in my life about fiction, irony, and cruises that will surpass what is in that collection of essays.)

On Boxing includes five other essays with topics such as Mike Tyson (from 1987), Muhammad Ali and Jack Johnson. These essays are indeed terrific, but they were written after “On Boxing” and thus borrow from that source material from time to time. The other essays are definitely worth a read but it is the eponymous essay that is the must-read, the crown jewel of the set.

Even if you are not interested in boxing, On Boxing is something that should be added to your reading queue at some point. The goal as readers when we pick up a piece of nonfiction is to become immersed in someone else’s passion, to see things differently; to read something we’ve never read before and to have it make such naked sense that we feel silly to have never thought of it that way before. “On Boxing” achieves this with ease.

[1] A few words about Million Dollar Baby. Maybe you didn’t like it or maybe you were impartial to it. And I will grant you that the tragedy that befalls Hillary Swank’s Maggie Fitzgerald is maybe a little too unbelievable and/or melodramatic. Whatever. Everything that happens before it, and especially everything that happens after it, is perfect. And when the movie ends with its final shot and Morgan Freeman’s Eddie “Scrap”‘s final narration of the letter that he wrote to Eastwood’s daughter, my wife and I left the theater having our faith restored in Hollywood. (Because, to me at least, movies had taken a considerable collective nose dive in quality after 1999.)

[2] A few words about The Fighter. Overall, a very solid movie. I thought Christian Bale and Amy Adams were outstanding, and that Mark Wahlberg was believable. (Though whenever Mark Wahlberg plays the “underdog” character I find it very hard to separate it from his role as Dirk Diggler.) I thought that the movie did a good job of exploring how family and external forces can potentially ruin an athlete. It shouldn’t win an Oscar for Best Picture but it’s worthy of the price of tickets and popcorn for sure.

I am told that America is an extremely religious country.

Miles of poll data and statistics show that America loves religion almost as much as hammers love nails. Between the mega churches and the hours of religion-based conversation that talk radio and politicians produce in a typical month, it is easy to reach that conclusion. Additionally, nearly every index and indicator that tracks or sorts through international data shows that America is the most religious country in the world in terms of industrialized and democratic nations.

And then there is Denmark and Sweden: two countries that are a) very successful democracies b) very equal in terms of gender equality c) very equal in terms of income equality d) very progressive with regards to recognizing homosexual relationships and e) very secular. Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College, decided to live in Denmark (as well as visit Sweden somewhat regularly) in an attempt to find out why Denmark and Sweden have a healthy and vibrant society, in spite of the fact that an overwhelming majority of its citizens don’t believe in God, don’t go to church, don’t believe in Heaven and Hell, and don’t believe most of what is written in the Bible.

Zuckerman goes into a decent amount of detail from the interviews he conducted with the Danes and Swedes (across a sizable age spectrum) he met with one-on-one or had phone conversations with. He found an overwhelming majority—probably around 90%, if not more—of people that do not believe in God but still live healthy lives inside of a healthy country. Zuckerman paints a picture of Scandinavia (sometimes he overdoes it: sometimes it reads like a travelogue for Denmark) as being the antithesis of America: a healthy country free of crime, poverty and health care issues, with the added bonus of not having any of that pesky religion stuff.

If you are naturally inclined to believe that our American breed of religion is a problem and that it has been gradually infecting our society and our political arena, Society Without God is a book that will confirm many things for you. You will probably nod in agreement while reading it. If you are naturally inclined to believe that religion in our country is constantly being besmirched publicly and that our politicians are not following the Word of God enough, this book will do nothing than probably reinforce your belief that Atheists and Atheistic writing is nothing more than elitist crap that is unworthy of any serious digestion. This is not to say that this book is polarizing per se (it is certainly not at the same confrontational level as Dawkins or Hitchens) but it definitely falls short of being as comprehensive as it thinks it is.

Here are my biggest problems with this book in no particular order.

1) I think that Zuckerman severely undervalues the significance of free speech and the freedom of religion in America. He constantly reiterates throughout the book his surprise at how completely reticent Danes are at talking about God or the Church. He expresses amazement that people who are religious in Denmark are seen as outsiders, just as Atheists are here. He writes an anecdote at the end of the book about how he overheard, while waiting in line at a bank, a teller inform a customer that they take all of their money to a reverend who will show them how to get their financial affairs in order through blessing and prayer. Basically, he is almost always viewing his experiences through the lens of a biased American: when things are positively different in Scandinavia it is amazing, when things are negatively religious in America it is unfortunate. But we live in a country in which you can literally say almost anything you want. We live in a country in which the Church and State must be separate. The residual effect of both of these things is that, when you scale the 300 million people barrier, you get a lot of people who speak very freely about religion—even if it is uncomfortable or based on whim. So, yes, a teller in Denmark would never tell a customer to go to a church for financial advice. But the Danes are also way more stoic than Americans. Zuckerman mentions this stoicism but only in passing, and he puts very little emphasis on our collective subscription to freedom of speech and religion as being two of the most important pillars of our society when attempting to compare the two.

2) The United Nations officially recognizes 192 countries. Is it really absurd that 2 countries—in a world with 192 sovereign countries and 6.8 billion people living on it—can be both really secular and really successful democratically? It doesn’t seem too far-fetched or amazing that 1.04% of all sovereign countries (or 0.21% of all the population) on Earth fit this bill. It would actually be more amazing if that were not a single country on our planet that possessed these qualities. I understand Zuckerman’s desire to write a book about this, but from a sheer numbers and Law of Averages aspect it’s not really surprising at all that Denmark and Sweden are how they are. If it wasn’t them it’d be two other countries. You know, because life is all about balance and there can never be 100% extremes w/r/t any important signifier.

3) Zuckerman only mentions in passing Denmark’s and Sweden’s inherent homogeneity. Yes, both countries (especially Denmark) has seen some Muslim immigration recently and Zuckerman mentions this on a few occasions. But for a few decades Denmark and Sweden were mostly comprised of white people living in a country that was not occupied by a Communist power after WWII, was left relatively alone by Germany, and had a large population of poor citizens after WWII who were willing to make their brand of socialism work. Again, when looked at objectively (rather then through the aforementioned lens of an American used to things being the opposite) is it really surprising that Scandinavia unfolded like it did? (Also, is it surprising that they are having problems with the recent Muslim immigration?)

4) The subtitle of the book What The Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment is, to me, never really expanded upon. If we are to believe what Zuckerman writes, then contentment is merely the absence of religion from daily life. The interviews that he transcribes in this book never to my knowledge include a statement by someone that says anything to the effect of “I am happy because I do not think of religion” or “I am content because religion is never discussed publicly” or “My happiness is due in large part to how religion is seen here.” In fact, most people seem to say that their contentment and happiness originates from things that could very easily say are tenets of basic religious belief (be kind to others, help the less fortunate, love your family, etc.). To be sure, one could argue that these things exist outside of religion too. Either way, I don’t think Zuckerman made any inroads towards discovering what lies at the core of Danish and Swedish contentment.

5) One of Zuckerman’s theories about why the Danish are so secular yet get married in churches, continue to make payments to the Church, and get their children baptized is because of a kind of social tradition that could be summarized as “We do it, but we totally don’t believe in any of it.” Fine. I’m sure that that explanation is viable and a legitimate reason. I just wish that Zuckerman would concede that maybe a large majority of Americans’ views on religion can be chalked up to the same theory. I.e.–Yes, many polls and surveys show that many Americans believe that the Bible is the literal word of God and that every word should be literally followed… but what if many of those people say that they agree with that idea simply because they don’t want to seem like standouts in our society? How can you quantify what people really think when it comes to religion? You can’t really. But to say that you think that one society is religious out of tradition and that another country’s religiosity cannot be chalked up to tradition is kind of disingenuous.

In summary, this book will convince the convinced and it will probably be interesting to those who think that our society is in a bad condition. It will probably do nothing to help sway people who are very religious. And if you sit in the middle on this topic it’s a 50/50 as to whether you will like it. While I will give Zuckerman a lot of credit for approaching this book from a sociological standpoint, rather than a literal and ultra materialist (and, therefore, entirely opinionated) viewpoint like Dawkins and Hitchens I did not find it to be an insightful book. In fact, I found it to have too many flaws to be taken seriously.

[Finally, full disclosure: I have already written about my thoughts on religion, and I have already written about why I think Denmark ranks high on annual happiness indexes.]

At 11:10a MDT on April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris arrived at Columbine High School. At 11:19a they began shooting at their fellow classmates in the cafeteria during lunch. They would proceed to shoot and throw pipe bombs at their classmates and teachers both inside and outside of the school until approximately 12:08p, when Harris and Klebold killed themselves in the library. In just under one hour they killed 13 people (12 students and 1 teacher) and injured 24 others.

It is the worst school shooting at a high school in American history. And if Eric Harris knew how to properly wire the propane bombs he set up, it would have been the worst public shooting of any sort in American history save for a Civil War battle.

The original plan that Eric and Dylan had hatched for April 20th was to detonate a propane bomb (a bomb made out of a propane tank you would use for your outdoor grill) in a residential area about a mile away from the school. This would throw off the cops while the two committed mass murder inside of the school. Once in the school, propane bombs would be set near the columns of the cafeteria. If they had detonated properly the blast would have been enough to collapse the columns, causing the library to fall onto the cafeteria killing hundreds of people in one fell swoop. From here, Eric and Dylan were going to go to their cars in the parking lot. Their cars were parked strategically so that they would be able to shoot at any people running out of the exit they were closest to. (They had put enough thought into how they parked that they would have been able to shoot their automatic weapons in a back-and-forth motion without fear of hitting one another; their positions mirrored a tactical military position.) After they picked off enough kids running towards them (and once the police, paramedics, and media started to flock to the high school en masse) their final step was to drive their cars—containing a few more propane tank bombs—towards the gathering mob of press and police and paramedics, killing as many people as possible before blowing up their cars.

Instead, the bombs in the cafeteria never exploded (even after Eric shot at them later on) and the two boys essentially ad-libbed most of the shooting.

Reading Dave Cullen’s Columbine 11 years after the shooting I found myself not only re-remembering things that I had forgotten about the shooting (aspects of the original plan, that Cassie Bernall was never asked about her Christianity by Eric Harris before he killed her), but I was also reminded of how fundamentally inept the media is when it comes to stories like this. The immediate national coverage of the story was any (or all) of the following:

“This killing was the result of bullying.” “This was the result of a couple of outcasts lashing out against jocks.” “Music played a role in shaping their aggression.” “Marilyn Manson is to blame.” “Is the Goth subculture rising? Why are they so angry and violent?” “They called themselves ‘the trench coat mafia.’” “Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were insane.”

And herein lies the reason why Columbine is such a good and interesting read: because there is a good chance that your memories of the shooting is half-filled (or at least quarter-filled) with things that were later ruled out, or were never adequately explained in the first place. And the biggest thing that the media misreported (and what we misinterpret in general) was that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were somehow inherently crazy, or insane with rage.

Cullen delves into psychopathy and profiling with such ease and such great and succinct detail that you begin to see the real picture unfold before your eyes, and that picture is that Eric Harris was a psychopath and Dylan Klebold was a depressive. Harris had a supremely inflated God complex, Klebold was mostly a good kid but when he got angry he would intensely snap for a short amount of time. The two fed off of each perfectly.

Revisiting the psychopathy angle, to many people the fragment “Eric Harris was a psychopath” from a previous sentence usually equates to thoughts of insanity. Again, Cullen does a terrific job explaining what a psychopath is.

“Psychopathic brains don’t function like those in other groups, but they are consistently similar to one another. Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it.

“To a psychopath, both motives make sense. ‘Psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only horrific but baffling,’ wrote Dr. Robert Hare, the leading authority on psychopaths. ‘They can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.’

“Eric saw humans as chemical compounds with an inflated sense of their own worth. ‘its just all nature, chemistry, and math,’ he [Harris] wrote. ‘you die. burn, melt, evaporate, decay.’”

The end of the book also goes into some detail about how the Columbine attacks forced local, state, and federal agencies to change not only their attitudes towards profiling kids (don’t single out the outcasts, and killers of this nature rarely come from broken homes) but to completely overhaul how they handle these situations.

When the Columbine attacks had begun, the local authorities and the FBI had no updated schematic of the school, had no access to anyone who could disarm the fire alarm, and stuck to the plan of solidifying the perimeter. Consequently, the FBI and S.W.A.T. teams were entering from the wrong side of the building and were trying to work in an environment in which the fire alarms were going off for hours, the floors were flooded from the sprinklers running for hours, and were so overly cautious that they did not reach the library until almost 4 hours after Harris and Klebold had committed suicide. Nowadays, there is no “protecting the perimeter.” If there’s a shooter, the police (or the FBI or S.W.A.T.) immediately hone in and try to take him out, even if it means walking over wounded or dying civilians. (It is believed that this practice of mass convergence prevented countless other lives from being lost when the Virginia Tech shooter opened fire on campus a few years ago.)

While the subject matter is certainly not cheery and some of the details eye-opening^[1] Columbine is worth your time. It is one of the best nonfiction books I have read in a couple of years and it is unbiased and objective look into one of the most tragic days in recent American history.

Finally, if you are interested in Cullen’s previous writing about Columbine I highly recommend reading the seminal article he wrote for the 5th anniversary of the shooting on Slate titled “The Depressive and The Psychopath.”

[1] As in some of Eric Harris’s writing and journals that were found afterwards that suggest that if Eric had lived longer he would have surely grown up to be a serial murderer and/or rapist. One of the journal entries found referenced a future desire to trick girls into sleeping with him so that he could later kill them.

There is only one word I can use to properly describe The Book of Basketball, the latest book from ESPN’s The Sports Guy (Bill Simmons): maddening.

His maddening use of long-winded metaphors (David Robinson is like a maître d’ at a really fancy, upscale restaurant who happens to really nice, even though there’s a part of us that respects mean maître d’s more than we do nice ones).^[1] His maddening use of plural first person style of writing. (We’ll always remember Rick Barry being a dick. We’ll always remember how Bob Petit shouldn’t have won the ’59 MVP. Actually, I won’t remember those things. Sorry.) His maddening inconsistency when it comes to his five chapter section on the 96 greatest players in the history of the NBA (the worst: the piece on Vince Carter that was nothing more than an excuse to rip on the guy;^[2] the best: the piece on Elgin Baylor, which was posted in its entirety on espn.com when Baylor was fired from the Clippers^[3]). His maddening inability to write things in a larger, objective context: like when he acts genuinely dumbfounded as to why the NBA went so long without a TV contract. Five words for you Bill: college football, pro football, baseball. The NFL did not receive a truly lucrative TV contract until the ’70′s, how could anyone possibly wonder why the NBA did not receive one until later—a sport that has never been more popular than the NFL for any stretch of time? Finally, his maddening (and transparent) ability to constantly wink at the reader.

What I mean is: Bill Simmons, at times, goes out of his way to show you that this book was written by The Real Bill Simmons and not The Edited, ESPN Friendly Bill Simmons. And, apparently, this means that The Real Bill Simmons likes dick jokes and porn references/jokes.

None of this should really be shocking (“A sports writer who likes porn jokes? Next you’ll tell me that politicians lie.”) but it seems as though Simmons is desperately craving an image that he thinks will come across as real, but seems forced. Maybe it’s just me but I got too much of a “look at me, I’m swearing and talking about tits!” vibe throughout the book. Which is to say that some of the book comes across as immature and overly subjective.^[4]

On the whole, The Book of Basketball is recommended reading for anyone who is a fan of the NBA. While I found a few parts of it to be tiresome, inconsistent, and unnecessary I think this has more to do with the fact that I’ve been reading Simmons’ writing since he first landed on the Page 2 section on espn.com. And maybe that’s the overall point I’m trying to make here: if you’ve only recently started reading The Sports Guy this book will probably hit you in all the right places; otherwise, you can kinda see some of the jokes and analysis coming a mile away.

Or, to put it another way (and to borrow a page from Simmons on how to write a long-winded analogy): Bill Simmons is like a comedian that you’ve been following since they came up and you know all of their tells and rhythms and bits so that when you see them live fifteen years later you feel disappointed when they re-hash their old jokes.

Especially jokes about Teen Wolf.

[1] I made this one up, but it seems like it would have fit perfectly in the book.

[2] Look, I agree with ripping on Vince Carter. I thought he was overrated when he played at UNC, and he’s a notoriously soft player (though I think the media giving him shit for attending his graduation—the audacity!—on the same day as a Game 7 kinda permanently messed him up). But don’t put him on a list of greatest NBA players then bash the guy. It’s bad writing and it comes off as petulant.

[3] His pieces on Scottie Pippen and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were terrific too.

[4] Don’t get me wrong: I love me some immature and overly subjective opinions and humor. But it needs to be en-ter-tain-ing. Some of Simmons’ jokes and subjectivity can be groan-inducing. (Like when he wrote that Moses Malone was the Marilyn Chambers of rebounding: he was insatiable.)

An excerpt from the chapter titled “The Best Response”:

“The best response to being arrested for carrying an unlicensed handgun into a nightclub and accidentally shooting yourself in the leg, thereby jeopardizing your pro football career.

“First of all, you people probably don’t know anyone who’s been shot. I, however, know lots of people who’ve been shot. I know lots of people who claim they want to shoot me, and some of those people are technically my friends. So that’s why I carry a gun. Second, you people probably trust the government, and you probably trust it because your personal experience with law enforcement has been positive. I’ve had the opposite experience all my life. I’m afraid of the government. I’m afraid of the world, and you can’t give me one valid reason why I shouldn’t be. So that’s why I did not apply for a gun license. Third, I shot myself in the leg, which is both painful and humiliating. What else do I need to go through in order to satiate your desire to see me chastised? The penalty for carrying an unlicensed weapon is insane. How can carrying an unlicensed firearm be worse than firing a licensed one? I broke the law, but the law I broke is a bad law. Would you be satisfied if the penalty for unlawful gun possession was getting shot in the leg? Because that already fucking happened!”

If you are unfamiliar with the Plaxico Burress story from a few months ago this excerpt is probably lost on you. But if you knew what this excerpt was all about once you started reading it, you will probably agree with how perfectly written and well thought out it is (even if you agreed with the stance of the state of New York throughout the trial as it was happening). The chapter “The Best Response” probably best sums up Eating The Dinosaur, Klosterman’s fourth book of original essays that in many various ways aims to find out why people choose to reveal themselves in the way(s) that they do.

Or, as Klosterman states in the opening essay “Something Out Of Nothing”:

“For the past five years, I’ve spent more time being interviewed than conducting interviews with other people. I am not complaining about this, nor am I proud of it—it’s just the way things worked out, mostly by chance. But the experience has been confusing. Though I always understand why people ask the same collection of questions, I never know why I answer them. Frankly, I don’t know why anyone answers anything.”

What unfolds throughout the rest of the book is a collection of essays that deal with: the similarities between David Koresh and the Branch Davidians and the recording of Nirvana’s In Utero; why ABBA became popular again recently (and why they were never truly unpopular to begin with); the similarities between the NFL and the Fox News Channel, and why it escapes everyone—even hard-core NFL fans—that the NFL is constructed almost entirely on Socialist thought, yet is presented as the most Conservative sport in the country; why Americans love advertising; the morality of time travel, just to name a few.

And if you are wondering to yourself, “What the hell do any of the aforementioned essays have to do with trying to peel away the meaning of reality, or why people answer questions, or why we sometimes apply more weight to public opinion rather than private knowledge?” you will just have to read the book. While I still think Sex, Drugs, And Cocoa Puffs is his best book, Eating The Dinosaur shows that Klosterman is still in his prime and is showing no signs of falling out of it anytime soon. At his best (like with the aforementioned NFL essay), Klosterman is like a succinct and more humorous conglomeration of Malcolm Gladwell and David Foster Wallace.

This is one of the best non-fiction books of the ’00′s.

I blame Behind The Music.

I think that the once-great VH1 show (Garbage, Everclear, and Nick Lachey got their own shows… really?) has ruined my ability to properly read any rock bios. The Behind The Music way of breaking down every story into a format of “Out Of Nowhere Success–>Uh Oh, Here Come The Drugs, Women, And Dissent Amongst Bandmates–>After Hitting Rock Bottom, Redemption (And Possibly A Comeback) Is Sought After” has made it impossible, for me, at least, to read about an artist or musician and not hear Jim Forbes’ voice saying, “And then, it all fell apart…” when getting to the part about drugs and alcohol affecting the band.

And I don’t think I am alone either. It is hard not to see every celebrity profile as a three act story that follows the same success-collapse-redemption script and, to be sure, this is probably how all celebrity profiles have unfolded since the dawning of Hollywood. But at some point the story itself gets lost because it is cheapened by repitition. (The same is true with The E! True Hollywood Story: what started as an informative little show about Rebecca Schaeffer or Gianni Versace or The Partridge Family became a bloated empire that inexplicably gave Jessica Simpson’s career a two hour treatment.) What compounds all of this for me is that, because of this–because of how entertainment reporting, features, and profiles are handled, and how information in general w/r/t to entertainment is fast and furiously banal (for the most part)–there are a lot of people walking around on this Earth who do not know who Sly & The Family Stone are.

Sly & The Family Stone was a groundbreaking multi-cultural band that is partly or fully responsible for the following things (in no particular order):

• Precursor to the musical direction that Stevie Wonder would take starting in the mid-’70′s
• Precursor to Prince
• First band to pioneer the thump and pluck style of playing bass, which drastically altered the direction that funk and soul music would take
• One of the first popular truly diverse bands
• Sly Stone was one of the first musicians to cultivate a look based on wearing ornate jewelry, ultra-flashy outfits, and sporting a huge afro
• One of the first bands to fuse message lyrics with mainstream music appeal
• The simplistic way the drum beats and cymbals were utilized was one of may precursors to hip hop beats
• They wrote “Everyday People”

Regarding the last point, it is impossible for me to convey how significant “Everyday People” is. In my mind, “Everyday People” is one of the ten greatest (and most important) pop songs ever written–not only is the melody just beautiful to listen to but the lyrics encompass an intelligence and a social awareness that has rarely been matched. Lyrics like “I am no better and neither are you/We are the same whatever we do/You love me, you hate me, you know me and then/You can’t figure out the bag I’m in” and the famous “different strokes for different folks” line come to mind in proving its genius. And I say all of this fully realizing that it was used in Toyota ads for a while in the ’90′s. (You can listen to the song here if the title does not ring a bell.)

With all of that said, I totally appreciate that Kaliss has written this book. Sly & The Family Stone is a band that should be more recognizable by name with people and I find it somewhat disheartening that there are a lot of people walking around today that have never heard of this group. But I think Behind The Music and the new school of entertainment profiling has temporarily ruined my ability to truly enjoy reading about anything music bio-related, especially when it predictably falls into line, again, with the success-collapse-redemption mold (all though there were some interesting tidbits in here, especially regarding Sly Stone and his early DJ work in California).

I completely recommend this book for anyone who is a fan or who wants to know more about the backstory of the band. Otherwise, I think there is more value in buying the music over reading about.

Unless, of course, you are immune to Jim Forbes’ voice being in your head.

Wedding Crashers is the one of the worst comedies I have ever seen. And I say this not because the movie itself is uncomfortably unfunny or anything like that (it does have some great scenes) but because the movie should have been a slam-dunk winner right from the get-go. The idea behind Wedding Crashers was so simple and ingenious that any auto-piloted script could have generated an Anchorman- or There’s Something About Mary-quality movie. Instead, there were too many cooks in the kitchen and the end result was that way too many questionable decisions were executed w/r/t the finished product. Why again did the brother need to be some bizarre amalgam/carricature of a homosexual goth artist who exhibits traits of being sexually abused rather than just being plain old weird? How is it possible that the casting of Christopher Walken resulted in no awkward humor, the thing by which we know is Walken’s comedic wheelhouse? But, most importantly, who decided that a potentially classic male-driven comedy needed to include an unbearably uninspired romantic core involving Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams? I realize that the movie could not end without the Ironclad Rule Of Comedic Movie Romances coming into play–this rule stipulates that the two main characters must get together, come rain or shine, or being involved in a series of implausible situations that would make any normal man run away after a half hour–but its ultimate failing was the potential it had to be something truly memorable. Anchorman at least had the sense to make Will Ferrell and Christina Applegate’s relationship comedically ridiculous from the start instead of trying to pretend that something real–something we could somehow identify with–might exist inside.

I mention all of this because The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived is like the book equivalent of Wedding Crashers. The idea is brilliant but the execution is deeply, deeply flawed. Because this book is written by three different men, there are three different voices writing here and two of those voices (I do not know who wrote which pieces as there are no specific credits mentioned in the book) are of people who think they are funny, but are instead the type of “comedic writers” you would probably find working on the set of Two And A Half Men or Yes, Dear. Which is to say that the comedy tries way to hard to be smart. For instance, a quote from the piece about Icarus, who flew too close to the sun with his wax wings even though his father warned him repeatedly:

“Daedalus warned Icarus to keep a middle course over the sea and avoid approaching the sun. But the boy, in his excitement, flew too high. The sun had melted his wings and he fell into the sea and drowned. His father, who complied with all FAA regulations, flew on to Sicily and safety.”

See, because the FAA wasn’t around during the time of Icarus… ugh.

It is writing like this, and there are a lot of these poor quality jokes throughout most of the first two-thirds of the book, that completely detracts from the brilliance of the idea of the book and of the well-written pieces that are a delight to read towards the end. For example, this segment from the piece about Captain Ahab from Moby-Dick:

“Unlike Jonah, who was imprisoned in a whale for refusing God’s commands, Ahab is itching for a conflict. He is willing to risk everything in a contest that pit him against all the forces of darkness. He forges his own harpoon and baptizes it in blood, in the name of the devil. [...] The first mate, too decent to kill Ahab in his sleep, dooms the crew by his inaction, almost as surely as if he’d murdered the whole crew himself.”

Then there is the list aspect of The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived. Here is the top twenty, in order:

1. The Marlboro Man
2. Big Brother
3. King Arthur
4. Santa Claus
5. Hamlet
6. Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster
7. Siegfried (legendary warrior used in German propaganda for both world wars)
8. Sherlock Holmes
9. Romeo and Juliet
10. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
11. Uncle Tom
12. Robin Hood
13. Jim Crow
14. Oedipus
15. Lady Chatterly
16. Ebenezer Scrooge
17. Don Quixote
18. Mickey Mouse
19. The American Cowboy
20. Prince Charming

On the surface, this seems like a pretty good arrangement of fictional people who have really mattered, in one way or another, societally. But then the rest of the list seems a little strange. Hester Prynne is higher than Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Willy Loman’s at #95 while Hiawatha is at #71? Atticus Finch doesn’t crack the top 50? Smokey Bear is #21? Nora Helmer, a character that most people probably could not recall is at #25 while Mary Richards is at #39 and Dorothy Gale is at #91?

Which leads me back to why this book is so frustrating: the debates about the merits of this ranking could have been genuinely inspired, except that the writing behind it is so mediocre or below average at times that the book is severely undercut. It becomes unmemorable, even as you are reading it. Coincidentally, it reminds me of this story I once heard about two men, John Beckwith and Jeremy Grey, who revolve their summer schedules around weddings that they somehow manage to get into and…

“There are eighty-five billion ways to play the first four moves of a chess game, and it has been said that there are more variations in a single chess game than there are atoms in the universe.” –pages 67 & 68.

The above quote represents the dichotomy that is chess. Logically, the fact that there are eighty-five billion ways to play the first four moves makes sense: there are a lot of different pieces that one can choose to move during the start of the game. (Specifically, you can move two knights to two different spots each, and eight pawns that can either be moved up one spot or two.) But to see it written out like how it is above also introduces another different logical fact shared by the majority of the American populace: that chess is more math than sport. We tend to think of nerds or, at the very least, young boys who possess a certain level of social awkwardness that allows them to care about this game–a game that can sometimes require you to sit still in a chair for five hours to play; sitting, thinking, moving pieces, hitting a timer after a completed move. It is essentially part war simulation, part math, part psychology, and part memorization. Additionally, I am going to assume here that if you are reading this that you went to high school, and the Dorky Chess Club Guy is a stereotype that is only topped by Dumb Jock and Slutty Cheerleader in the Pantheon of high school stereotypes. Bottom line: the chess kids can’t win, especially when you factor in the typical scarcity of girls either on the team, or even as recreational players.

What Michael Weinreb attempts to do here is to humanize chess. Because, when you factor in all of the things I have just stated in the previous paragraph and combine it with the fact that the pre-eminent American and international chess icon, Bobby Fischer (“whose name would become shorthand for a brand of mania that is unique to his sport“), turned out to become a tragically broken and paranoid anti-Semitic shell of a man, the sport of chess does not always travel on the same wavelengths that most people respond to. As with Weinreb’s articles on ESPN.com, there is a really palpable feeling to go along with the descriptions he uses when writing, whether it be about Eliot Weiss, the teacher who runs the chess team at Murrow (“Weiss bears a certain resemblance to Paul Krugman, the renowned economist and columnist at The New York Times, and the walls of his classroom are adorned with cartoon paeans to great moments in math theory…”), or about the environment that surrounds the kids at the hotels when they compete in the supernationals (“a self-contained biosphere of overpriced gift shops and ‘authentic’ Irish pubs“).

Obviously, chess is not for everyone and this book will never be confused with The Da Vinci Code for the typical person looking to make an impulse purchase at the bookstore. And, obviously, with any non-fiction/journalistic book about sports or a person or a group of people, the endpoint is always expected to be that of how the subject at hand is relatable to everyday life, or that there is a larger metaphor at play that we do not always catch. And Weinreb is able to provide this for us.

The most interesting facet I took from the book is that to really excel at something–not just be great but to be the flat-out best at something–you are almost required to condition yourself and break yourself down into a shell of a person in intervals. I think this is what gets glossed over when profiles are done on modern athletes. We read or see profiles about the modern athlete and their workout regiment, and how they knew that this was always what they wanted to do, and that it’s not about the money, and that they want to be the best that they can be, and that their dream since childhood was winning a championship or knocking in the winning run or hitting the winning shot or throwing the winning touchdown. All of that is true because it is an assembly of Franken-clichés; a veritable monster of actualized sound bytes that the press has now enabled every player to regurgitate into any microphone or camera that is placed before them. But what about the subconscious battle between individual achievement versus having to conform to the dynamic of your team? The athlete who knows he is great has to sometimes pretend to be humble. This is why Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan are Icons in such a stratified level above everyone else: they knew they were great, we knew they were great, they would kill to win, and they had a personality that mostly disarmed us against seeing their killer instinct as genuinely hyper-competitive.

Chess, while some of us may not think of it as a sport, does involve imposing your will on your opponent and the desire to destroy them. Because it is naturally infused with math, memorization, and strategy, chess is probably the purest form of sport as a representation of life-as-chaos. To become the next Bobby Fischer you would literally almost have to do nothing but think about chess; only the most monomaniacal mind could hope to come close to becoming the next Fischer. Same with becoming the next Jordan or Tiger Woods, except that monomania is most certainly not a sexy attribute to possess. In fact, the monomaniacal mind would most likely be classified as OCD or possibly even autistic in some form.

So, while we happily buy into the marketing of the modern athlete and the marketing of his or her constitution and ethics, if we really want to know what exists at the core of the athlete’s mind and psyche we may have to look to a young person sitting in front of a table with sixty-four squares and an army of pieces at his or her disposal.

Similar to college sports, chess players have rankings (a ranking of 400 would be like a novice, 2400 begins the Master levels, and 2851 is the highest ranking ever, achieved by Garry Kasparov) and those rankings become mutated to the point of skewing their ability to see their opponents literally as numbers. “I can’t believe I lost to a 1744,” thinks a 2083 to himself as he sees a foregone defeat. And when it comes to pro athletes we know that with the superstars, the game somehow slows down for them (i.e.-when a baseball player is in the midst of a hot hitting streak, they might say that “the ball just looks bigger” during those times). But we can’t really grasp that idea logically; instead, we are forced to grasp it as the extension of the athlete’s persona or image. We know that Kobe Bryant is good but, at some point, we just accept it because he’s Kobe Bryant and not because he continually reinvents himself or allows us to hear what he really thinks. Kobe Bryant (or any other pro athlete) would never use a ranking system to describe an off-night or a victory–”I was surprised I was getting as much space as I was for my jumpers because, you know, I’m a 2218 and Tim Duncan’s a 2289 right now…”–even though it would probably be an honest breath of fresh air to hear.

So it is kind of that much more interesting that these chess players–high schoolers who have their own de facto social awkwardness attached to them; who, in many cases, are first-generation Americans still juggling their parents’ culture with all of the culture that exists outside of their front door; who, at some point, become totally aware that as much as they love chess they will most likely watch it float by because there is no real future in it–look at their strategy and their game the way that they do. There is a confidence in these kids that comes out during a chess match that we do not always see emanate from a pro athlete. (To be sure, this confidence exists in pro athletes as well but, by undermining its description with safe clichés in interviews and profiles, the window in which to view it is compromised. Or, to put it another way: a chess player, after saying the appropriate niceities after a victory, is more apt to saying that he destroyed his opponent; today’s pro athlete always has to guard against the temptation to speak his mind when it comes to victory.)

Maybe this is ironic and maybe this is a flawed analogy. Maybe the last few paragraphs have been a wasted effort in trying to make a case for this book to you, the reader. But the fact that the previous paragraphs only comprise about one-third of all of the things that I have thought about w/r/t chess and today’s atmosphere of professional sports since I have read this book is certainly adequate grounds to praise Weinreb for writing this bewitching little book about chess.

More than anything else, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again–the collection of seven essays and articles that David Foster Wallace wrote during 1990-1995–makes one wonder how much editing goes on when a writer submits a piece to a magazine. For instance, take the Harper’s article “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” of which this collection is named after, about a seven night Caribbean cruise that Wallace went on and reported about: it clocks in at ninety seven pages. Obviously, it could just be that the writer in question simply writes more than your average freelance journalist but it definitely got me wondering whether or not a novel or an article makes for the better window into a writer’s mind.

I am completely presuming here that A Supposedly Fun Thing was released in 1997 because of the success of Infinite Jest. I could be completely wrong but I don’t think I am. And I say that because these seven essays, after reading Infinite Jest, gave me a better understanding of Wallace’s influences and thoughts leading up to the publishing of his post-modern magnum opus. It is actually rather hard to escape if you have read the novel first than move on to this collection. For instance, an excerpt from a review titled “Greatly Exaggerated” from the Harvard Review in 1992:

“[...] writing is a better animal than speech because it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract because it is a function not of presence but of absence: the reader’s absent when the writer’s writing, and the writer’s absent when the reader’s reading.”

These forty eight words not only, to me, perfectly summarize the elastic nature of writing w/r/t the author and the audience, but it also kind of perfectly describes what I imagine was Wallace’s mindset while writing his opus–itself a completely abstract and malleable work that could be dissected and rearranged in a variety of ways w/r/t the reader. “I’m not going to make this easy for them but if they really want it, they’ll figure it out,” is what I imagine Wallace subconsciously thinking to himself while writing some of the tennis and Arizona scenes in Infinite Jest. But this is just an on-the-surface observation; something that jumped out at me more out of proximity to finishing the previous work than a calculated attempt by the publisher to get one to look for deeper meaning I am sure. The more static observations of this book are more in tune with the piece as a cohesive whole and that is: David Foster Wallace is one of the most insightful writers I have read.

In “Derivative Sport In Tornado Alley,”^[1] Wallace recounts what it was like growing up in the Midwest and as a high-ranking junior tennis player. The introductory paragraph sets the tone:

“When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad’s alma matter in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this was so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids–and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child’s play.”

Later on, he accurately sums up perfectly (from the perspective of others) what it is like to live in certain parts of Illinois and then closes the summation of what really defines it if you live in the area where he grew up in.

“The people I know from outside it distill the Midwest into blank flatness, black land and fields of green fronds or five-o’clock stubble, gentle swells and declivities that make the topology a sadistic exercise in plotting quadrics, highway vistas so same and dead they drive motorists mad. Those from IN/WI/Northern IL think of their own Midwest as agronomics and commodity futures and corn-detasseling and bean-walking and seed-company caps, apple-cheeked Nordic types, cider and slaughter and football game with white fogbanks of breath exiting helmets. But in the odd central pocket that is Champaign-Urbana, Rantoul, Philo, Mahomet-Seymour, Mattoon, Farmer City, and Tolono, Midwestern life is informed and deformed by wind. [...] Chicago calls itself the Windy City, but Chicago, one big windbreak, does not know from a true religious-type wind. And meterologists have nothing to tell people in Philo, who know perfectly well that the real story is that to the west, between us and the Rockies, there is basically nothing tall, and that weird zephyrs and stirs joined breezes and gusts and thermals and downdrafts and whatever out over Nebraska and Kansas and moved east like streams into rivers and jets and military fronts that gathered like avalanches and roared in reverse down pioneer oxtrails, toward our own personal unsheltered asses.”

This is his setup that leads in to how his tennis ranking was high because he knew how to play the wind and the court. That, when playing in Central Illinois, he was a force to be reckoned with and could make his opponent miss shots or gradually degenerate into a frustrated pile of emotions and hormones because of how well he knew how to play with the swirling wind. But, whenever he played outside of this area–the nicely manicured courts of Chicago, the calmer environs of Iowa or Arizona–his weaknesses would inevitably be exposed.

The other works in this book are an article about David Lynch (“David Lynch Keeps His Head”), an article about the Illinois State Fair (“Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All”), the aforementioned “Greatly Exaggerated,” a review of H.L. Hix’s Morte d’Author: An Autopsy–a book about literary criticism, an essay about TV and U.S. fiction (“E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”) and the problems that TV causes for prospective fiction writers, an article about pro tennis player Michael Joyce (“Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry As A Paradigm Of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, And Human Completeness”), and the aforementioned article about the seven night cruise that Wallace took for Harper’s.

It’s probably fair to assume that David Foster Wallace is not for everyone. Even if his legacy grows as a result of his decision to kill himself while still young, his works will almost always attract a certain kind of reader first and foremost: the high school- or college-aged reader who voraciously seeks out something New and Important. To which these circles of people will doubtlessly promote Wallace’s works as masterful and ensure that his legacy never falters. It is a cycle that I have full confidence will only grow so long as people read Infinite Jest. So, to the outsiders–the ones who aren’t voraciously looking for Important New things to ingest: I understand completely any reluctance to pick up and plumb through Mr. Wallace’s works. To be honest, five years ago I would have most certainly passed on all of it myself. If anything, though, his nonfiction begs to be discovered. In a world where news and entertainment are not mutually exclusive; where the print media is hemorraging because its classified sections aren’t being used by customers anymore, yet they, the print media, believe that they’re failing because A) people are stupid or B) because people would rather peruse free news rather paying for it (both examples equally rendering the print media as an entity that would rather dole out contempt at its customers rather than trying to fix their problems); where to be truthful has become synonymous with non-denial denials–it is refreshing to read someone’s thoughts that originate from a place in which the writer wants nothing more than to prove to you that every possible facet of his opinion and outlook is seen all the way through. You may not care about David Lynch but Wallace’s insight and writing about Lynch is outlined so thoroughly that you may want to rent Blue Velvet afterwards.

Finally, when speaking about New Important things it is easy to fall under the guise that all that is being written is too intellectual. David Foster Wallace was smart enough to realize that humor can make it easier to transition between the heavy stuff. For example, this excerpt from “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” in which Wallace describes some of the things he has seen and heard on the ship and for which I shall end this review with:

“[...] I have heard a professional comedian tell folks, without irony, “But seriously.” I have seen fuchsia pantsuits and menstural-pink sportcoats and maroon-and-purple warm-ups and white loafers worn without socks. I have seen professional blackjack dealers so lovely they make you want to run over to their table and spend every last nickel you’ve got playing blackjack. I have heard upscale adult US citizens ask the Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the skeetshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is.”

[1] Published as “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes” in 1992 for Harper’s.