The Lost Art of Postcard Writing

by Charles Simic

Here it is already August and I have received only one postcard this summer. It was sent to me by a European friend who was traveling in Mongolia (as far as I could deduce from the postage stamp) and who simply sent me his greetings and signed his name. The picture in color on the other side was of a desert broken up by some parched hills without any hint of vegetation or sign of life, the name of the place in characters I could not read. Even receiving such an enigmatic card pleased me immensely. This piece of snail mail, I thought, left at the reception desk of a hotel, dropped in a mailbox, or taken to the local post office, made its unknown and most likely arduous journey by truck, train, camel, donkey—or whatever it was— and finally by plane to where I live.

Until a few years ago, hardly a day would go by in the summer without the mailman bringing a postcard from a vacationing friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, you’re bound to get an email enclosing a photograph, or, if your grandchildren are the ones doing the traveling, a brief message telling you that their flight has been delayed or that they have arrived. The terrific thing about postcards was their immense variety. It wasn’t just the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal, or some other famous tourist attraction you were likely to receive in the mail, but also a card with a picture of a roadside diner in Iowa, the biggest hog at some state fair in the South, and even a funeral parlor touting the professional excellence that their customers have come to expect over a hundred years. Almost every business in this country, from a dog photographer to a fancy resort and spa, had a card. In my experience, people in the habit of sending cards could be divided into those who go for the conventional images of famous places and those who delight in sending images whose bad taste guarantees a shock or a laugh.

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Ryan Adams

[ed.  Love this one...]

There's No Wrong Way to Play Monopoly

by Andy Baio

Marco Arment just linked to this great article about how everyone plays Monopoly wrong. If you read the actual rules, it's a completely different game than the one you likely grew up with — one that moves much, much quicker.

Five things I never knew about Monopoly's official rules:

1. If a player decides not to buy a property, it immediately goes up for auction by the bank and is sold to the highest bidder. This blew my mind.
2. Houses must be built, and sold, evenly across a color-group. For example, you can't build three houses on Park Place without having two houses on Boardwalk first.
3. It's the property owner's responsibility to ask for rent. If you forget to ask for rent before the end of the next player's turn, you're out of luck.
4. Rent is doubled on properties without houses in a monopoly.
5. Income tax is calculated from your total net worth, including all properties and buildings, not just your cash. And you have to decide whether to pay 10% or $200 before you add it up.

While these official rules gradually disappeared from common play, other unofficial "house rules" came to take their place. We always put funds collected from Chance/Community Chest cards into a "kitty" that was given to whoever landed on Free Parking. Many others gave $400 when landed on "Go," or didn't allow rent to be collected while in jail.

Many of us learned Monopoly like we learned the rules of dodgeball or rock-scissors-paper — spread by word-of-mouth from family and friends.

It's interesting to see a commercial game see the same sort of cultural variation as other children's folk games.

But maybe that's appropriate for a game that was itself derived from another board game. Contrary to popular belief, Charles Darrow didn't invent Monopoly in 1933 from scratch. It was heavily based on The Landlord's Game, an innovative board game patented in 1904 by Lizzie Magie, to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences."

The Landlord's Game and its variations like "Auction Monopoly" and "The Fascinating Game of Finance" spread by word of mouth throughout the early-20th century with evolving rules and hand-drawn boards, popular among the Quakers and used as a teaching aid for university students.

In 1933, Charles Darrow played a homemade version of The Landlord's Game printed on oil cloth, saw the market potential, and tried to patent the new "Monopoly" as his own. After finding great success selling handmade versions, he sold the rights to Parker Brothers. Parker Brothers bought Magie's patent for $500 to have an undisputed claim to the board game, but was threatened by other popular competitors and homemade variations. Through a process of litigation, acquisition, and quiet settlements during the late-1930s, Parker Brothers wiped all the other derivative versions of The Landlord's Game off the map.

By the 1970s, Parker Brothers' revisionist history was canon — the official Monopoly rules and a 1974 book on the history of the game stated that the game was created solely by Charles Darrow.

So, when someone says you're playing Monopoly wrong, tell them you're playing your own version... just like Darrow did.

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The Recording Industry's Evolution in 30 Seconds

by Megan Greenwell

There’s been no shortage of hand-wringing about threats to the music industry, whether from technology or piracy. But hearing reports of dismal album sales is one thing; seeing the tidal shift in a 30-second gif is quite another.

Digital Music News created this simple animated pie chart to illustrate how the sources of music revenue have changed. It begins with the year 1980, when LP and EP sales were still on the rise. By 1982, cassette sales have begun to expand, but their moment of dominance was brief—they were quickly surpassed by CDs. In 2002, CDs held a whopping 95 percent of the market, but we all know what happened from there. In 2010, CD sales comprised less than half of all music revenue for the first time since 1990. And of course, those numbers don’t even include the albums or singles downloaded illegally.

Taken together, the 31 pie charts are one part nostalgia trip (remember mix tapes?) and one part thought-provoking question about what the future of music will hold. In another 30 years, it’s entirely possible that the entire concept of owning music will look as antiquated as those old EPs.

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Racial Profiling First Hand

by Xeni Jardin

Via the ACLU and the Boston Globe, a first-hand account of how "security theater" makes us no safer, and a lot less free.

Massachussetts-based folk musician Vance Gilbert, a law-abiding citizen who is black, 6 feet tall, and loves poodles, was harassed and humiliated on a flight out of Boston—apparently in part because he was reading book about old-time airplanes.

The TSA scanners and screeners had no problem with him. His problems began after he boarded his United Airlines flight, and appear to have been the work of the flight crew.

Here is his account, shared with the ACLU. He titled it "Racial Profiling First Hand," and signs the essay, "Flying While Black & Reading Antique Aviation Books." Snip:

Policeman: "Did you have a problem with your bag earlier?"
Me: "No sir, not at all. The flight attendant wanted it secured elsewhere other than behind my feet, and I opted to put it under the seat in front of me. It's my wallet, even though there's only 30 bucks in it…And all that was done without belligerence, or words for that matter…it was all good. A few beats...
Policeman: "Sir, were you looking at a book of airplanes?"
Me: "Yes sir I was. I am a musician for money, but for fun I study old aircraft and build models of them, and the book I was reading was of Polish Aircraft from 1946."
Policeman: "Would you please go get that book so that i can see it?"
I go back onto the plane - all eyes are on me like I was a common criminal. Total humiliation part 2. After a couple of minutes he says, "Why, this is all Snoopy Red Baron stuff..."
Me: "Yes sir, actually the triplane you see is Italian, from 1921 a little after World War 1..."

"Read more: (boston.com, via @lizditz) 
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Gorillaz

ed.  A sunny summer morning, with a touch of fall crispness.]

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The Buddha in the Attic

by Alida Becker

In the Japanese art of sumi-e, strokes of ink are brushed across sheets of rice paper, the play of light and dark capturing not just images but sensations, not just surfaces but the essence of what lies within. Simplicity of line is prized, extraneous detail discouraged. Although Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California and trained as a painter in the Western tradition, she seems perfectly attuned to the spirit of sumi-e. Otsuka claims to have been a failure as an artist, but she might only have erred in choosing the wrong medium. Proof arrived almost a decade ago, long after she’d traded painting for writing, with the publication of her first novel, “When the Emperor Was Divine,” a spare but resonant portrait of one Japanese-­American family’s daily life, at home and in the internment camps, during World War II. Now she returns with a second novel, also employing a minimalist technique, that manages to be equally intimate yet much more expansive.

Like its predecessor, “The Buddha in the Attic” unfurls as a sequence of linked narratives, some no longer than a paragraph. While it appears to hold the characters at a formal distance, that reticence infuses their stories with powerful emotion. The central figures in Otsuka’s first book, a mother and her children identified merely as “the boy,” “the girl” and “the woman,” were followed from their home in Berkeley to a barracks in the high Utah desert, then back again. As the string of vignettes proceeded, the questions they asked, the observations they made, the illusions they cherished created a bond with the reader. With their sometimes uncomfortably familiar hopes and fears, Otsuka’s characters emerged as particular individuals even as their concerns took us far beyond the particulars of the Japanese-­American experience. In these nameless people, we confronted our own uncertainties about where we truly belong, where our loyalties lie, where we should place our trust.

There are plenty of names in Otsuka’s new novel, but this time the cast is composed of an entire community of families. The voice that speaks to us here is the “we” of the Japanese women who arrived in California in the aftermath of World War I, most of them young and inexperienced, most bearing photographs of men they had agreed to marry, sight unseen: “On the boat we could not have known that when we first saw our husbands we would have no idea who they were. That the crowd of men in knit caps and shabby black coats waiting for us down below on the dock would bear no resemblance to the handsome young men in the photographs. That the photographs we had been sent were 20 years old. . . . That when we first heard our names being called out across the water one of us would cover her eyes and turn away — I want to go home — but the rest of us would lower our heads and smooth down the skirts of our kimonos and walk down the gangplank and step out into the still warm day. This is America, we would say to ourselves, there is no need to worry. And we would be wrong.”

“The Buddha in the Attic” is, in a sense, a prelude to Otsuka’s previous book, revealing the often rough acclimatization of a generation of farm laborers and maids, laundry workers and shop clerks whose husbands would take them for granted and whose children would be ashamed of their stilted English and foreign habits. Otsuka’s chorus of narrators allows us to see the variety as well as the similarity of these women’s attempts to negotiate the maze of immigrant life. Each section of the novel takes them one step further, from the ship to the farm or the shop or the servants’ quarters, from bearing their children to watching those children grow up and away, from blindly obeying husbands and employers to making clear-eyed moves toward self-reliance, albeit often of necessity rather than choice. As their families become less Japanese and more American, the women gradually establish a new equilibrium, only to have it shattered in a passage, simply called “Traitors,” that returns to the forced removals of World War II.

Otsuka’s incantatory style pulls her prose close to poetry, but it’s far from the genteel stereotype of “short, melancholy poems about the passing of autumn that were exactly 17 syllables long.” The swift, mostly brutal encounters in “First Night” remove any such illusions: “That night our new husbands took us quickly. . . . They took us even though we bit them. They took us even though we hit them. They took us even though we insulted them . . . and screamed out for help (nobody came). . . . They took us cautiously, as though they were afraid we might break. You’re so small. They took us coldly but knowledgeably — In 20 seconds you will lose all control — and we knew there had been many others before us. They took us as we stared up blankly at the ceiling and waited for it to be over, not realizing that it would not be over for years.”

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Gillian Welch, David Rawlings

[ed.  If there's anyone I'd like to play like, it's David Rawlings.]

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The Secret Language Code

by Gareth Cook

Are there hidden messages in your emails? Yes, and in everything you write or say, according to James Pennebaker, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Pennebaker has been a leader in the computer analysis of texts for their psychological content. And in his new book, “The Secret Life of Pronouns,” he argues that how we use words like “I,” “she,” and “who” reveal secrets of our psychology. He spoke recently with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook​.

COOK: How did you become interested in pronouns?

PENNEBAKER: A complete and total accident. Until recently, I never thought about parts of speech. However, about ten years ago I stumbled on some findings that caught my attention. In the 1980s, my students and I discovered that if people were asked to write about emotional upheavals, their physical health improved. Apparently, putting emotional experiences into language changed the ways people thought about their upheavals. In an attempt to better understand the power of writing, we developed a computerized text analysis program to determine how language use might predict later health improvements. In other words, I wanted to find if there was a healthy way to write.

Much to my surprise, I soon discovered that the ways people used pronouns in their essays predicted whose health would improve the most. Specifically, those people who benefited the most from writing changed in their pronoun use from one essay to another. Pronouns were reflecting people’’s abilities to change perspective.

As I pondered these findings, I started looking at how people used pronouns in other texts -- blogs, emails, speeches, class writing assignments, and natural conversation. Remarkably, how people used pronouns was correlated with almost everything I studied. For example, use of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others. It was almost as if there was a secret world of pronouns that existed outside our awareness.

COOK: What would make you think that the use of pronouns would be meaningful?

PENNEBAKER: Never in a million years would I have thought that pronouns would be a worthwhile research topic. I ran study after study and initially found large and unexpected differences between people in their pronoun use. In hindsight, I think I ignored the findings because they didn’’t make sense. One day, I lined up about 5 experiments that I had conducted and every one revealed the same effects. It was that day that I finally admitted to myself that pronouns must be meaningful.

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Glen Campbell: One Last Love Song

by Simon Hattenstone

When you first listen to Glen Campbell's new album, Ghost On The Canvas, nothing seems amiss. His voice is rich and clear, the songs intimate reflections on his 75 years. There is plenty to reflect on – the drink and drugs, the four wives and eight children, the fame and fortune, 50-odd years as one of the world's great singers and guitarists. It's only when you listen closely that a recurrent theme emerges – of confusion. In A Better Place, he sings:

Some days I'm so confused, Lord,
My past gets in my way.
I need the ones I love, Lord,
More and more each day.

On the sleeve notes he writes: "Ghost On The Canvas is the last studio record of new songs that I plan to make. I've been saying it to friends and family, but now that it's in writing it really seems final." In June, Campbell revealed he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease six months earlier and that he was going to do a farewell tour before retiring. The announcement was shocking in its bluntness. Many of us still remember Glen Campbell as the eternally youthful hunk with huge shoulders or the naive boy-man who stars alongside John Wayne in True Grit. Glen Campbell wasn't made for growing old.

Malibu, California. The road winds round the hills until I reach a private estate. I am buzzed through the intercom and welcomed in warmly by a huddle of people and a couple of large dogs. After a few minutes a big, strong elderly man in shorts and T-shirt enters the room, doing a brilliant Donald Duck impression. He smiles, grabs my hand, says, "Well howdyado?" and makes good eye contact. "Well howdyalikeitoverhere?"

It's strange talking a man who is drifting in and out of the present. I'm waiting for his wife Kim to arrive – it feels wrong to start the interview before she does. We try to talk about the new album, which really is rather wonderful. "Well, thank you," he says. "Now, what album are we talking about?" I tell him it's called Ghost On The Canvas, and that he has said it's going to be his final record. "Well, I dunno about that," he says. "If I ran into five or six good songs, I would make another. Yeah, I'm sure I will. I dunno. Let me see how old I am now? I'm 75. Yeah, yeah, 75."

Before his successful solo career he was a member of the Wrecking Crew, a group of musicians that worked on numerous classic songs including You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin', Strangers In the Night and Viva Las Vegas. It was in the 1960s and 1970s that Campbell enjoyed his greatest success with songs such as Galveston, Gentle On My Mind, Wichita Lineman and Rhinestone Cowboy. And he did look like an all-American cowboy – blond as the sun, solid as a bale of hay, simple values. Classic beefcake. (In True Grit his character is called La Boeuf). Yet he was a supremely subtle, and surprisingly mournful, interpreter of songs, especially those by Jimmy Webb. In Wichita Lineman, which contains my favourite ever lyric ("And I need you more than want you/ And I want you for all time"), Campbell brings an incredible melancholy to the story of the lineman hearing the ghost of his absent girlfriend in the wires he's working on.

Campbell was one of 12 children born to a sharecropper father in Pike County, Arkansas. His Uncle Boo taught him guitar and at 16, he left for Albuquerque, New Mexico. Five years later he moved to Los Angeles as a session musician. He worked hard, lived hard, loved hard. By the time he married Kim in 1981 he'd been through three wives. They met on a blind date. She was a young dancer with the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, he was a wreck. He had just come out of a tempestuous relationship with country singer Tanya Tucker, who claimed he had knocked her teeth out, an allegation he denied.

"JJ get outta here," says Kim, who has just joined us. She shoos the alsatian away. "Dog get outside. He's just a big old baby. Get outtahere dog."

She hands her husband the lyrics to A Better Place as a reminder. He looks at them and starts singing, falteringly at first, as he searches for the tune. "I've tried and I have failed, Lord." He slurps his cranberry juice through a straw with relish. "Yeah, that's a good one…" He's more relaxed with Kim by his side, but is still trying to make sense of why I'm here. Where did the album title come from? "I dunno. They just said that's OK." His voice is slurred, drunk-sounding, though he's been off the booze for an age. "They just said, 'Are you gonna put something on an album or'… what d'you call this thing here?" He looks at the CD cover and then to Kim for guidance.

Kim: "A CD."

"A CD, yes. It's cool."

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Bobby Boud
Moving Clouds - oil on paper with silk screen
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Sandy bird by Dmitry Dubikovskiy (Tadrart , Algeria)
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Good Night, Irene

Whatever happens, here are a few tips to ride out the storm.

If you've ever wondered what total disaster preparedness looks like, here it is:   http://goo.gl/kFmPL

Another hurricane to-do list, this one a little more relevant to New Yorkers:  http://goo.gl/7sJtD

Finally, don't take it too personally.

(Image: Taking things very personally on Van Dyke Street in Red Hook., a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image from Shelley Bernstein's photostream, via @adrianchen) 

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Friday Book Club - The Road

by William Kennedy

Cormac McCarthy’s subject in his new novel is as big as it gets: the end of the civilized world, the dying of life on the planet and the spectacle of it all. He has written a visually stunning picture of how it looks at the end to two pilgrims on the road to nowhere. Color in the world — except for fire and blood — exists mainly in memory or dream. Fire and firestorms have consumed forests and cities, and from the fall of ashes and soot everything is gray, the river water black. Hydrangeas and wild orchids stand in the forest, sculptured by fire into “ashen effigies” of themselves, waiting for the wind to blow them over into dust. Intense heat has melted and tipped a city’s buildings, and window glass hangs frozen down their walls. On the Interstate “long lines of charred and rusting cars” are “sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber. ... The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.”

McCarthy has said that death is the major issue in the world and that writers who don’t address it are not serious. Death reaches very near totality in this novel. Billions of people have died, all animal and plant life, the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea are dead: “At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death.” Forest fires are still being ignited (by lightning? other fires?) after what seems to be a decade since that early morning — 1:17 a.m., no day, month or year specified — when the sky opened with “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” The survivors (not many) of the barbaric wars that followed the event wear masks against the perpetual cloud of soot in the air. Bloodcults are consuming one another. Cannibalism became a major enterprise after the food gave out. Deranged chanting became the music of the new age.

A man in his late 40’s and his son, about 10, both unnamed, are walking a desolated road. Perhaps it is the fall, but the soot has blocked out the sun, probably everywhere on the globe, and it is snowing, very cold, and getting colder. The man and boy cannot survive another winter and are heading to the Gulf Coast for warmth, on the road to a mountain pass — unnamed, but probably Lookout Mountain on the Tennessee-Georgia border. It is through the voice of the father that McCarthy delivers his vision of end times. The son, born after the sky opened, has no memory of the world that was. His father gave him lessons about it but then stopped: “He could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own.” The boy’s mother committed suicide rather than face starvation, rape and the cannibalizing of herself and the family, and she mocks her husband for going forward. But he is a man with a mission. When he shoots a thug who tries to murder the boy (their first spoken contact with another human in a year) he tells his son: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you.” And when he washes the thug’s brains out of his son’s hair he ruminates: “All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.” He strokes the boy’s head and thinks: “Golden chalice, good to house a god.”

McCarthy does not say how or when God entered this man’s being and his son’s, nor does he say how or why they were chosen to survive together for 10 years, to be among the last living creatures on the road. The man believes the world is finished and that he and the boy are “two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” But the man is a zealot, pushing himself and the boy to the edge of death to achieve their unspecified destination, persisting beyond will in a drive that is instinctual, or primordial, and bewildering to himself. But the tale is as biblical as it is ultimate, and the man implies that the end has happened through godly fanaticism. The world is in a nuclear winter, though that phrase is never used. The lone allusion to our long-prophesied holy war with its attendant nukes is when the man thinks: “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.”

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