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• Super Bowl Diary
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ABOUT THIS WEBLOG

"Content" is one of the more odious buzzwords of the information age. "Content" (with emphasis the first syllable) is merely "something contained," as the dictionary says. In the online age, "content" means the containment of words, sounds and pictures in cyberspace. In the lexicon of the digital world, "content" is just one cog in the machine, filler material among the advertising. We call our massive media institutions "content providers," as though they were trading on units of communication as a blacksmith would peddle horseshoes, rather than using their words and pictures to define our reality.

"Content" connotes a neutral commodity, a dry product that belies the fact that communication is a very human, dynamic, and spiritual phenomenon. The word reflects a fascination with the mere transfer and retrieval of digital data. But human beings don't just "access content" and "distribute content" as robots do—we use our unique cognitive and creative abilities to form and share our unique perspective on reality through words, sounds and pictures. Ironically, although the Web was supposed to expand our minds by connecting us to information, it too frequently does the opposite; despite our "abudance of information, or maybe partly because of it, the West has great difficulty in finding its bearings amid contemporary events," as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said a quarter century ago at Harvard. He is quoted in Quentin Schultze's new book Habits of the High-Tech Heart (which I reported on for the Nov./Dec. 2002 issue), which talks about "informationism" as a religion unto itself—the worship of data and the belief that it will redeem and transform us. "Informationism," says Schultze, "produces what Lewis Mumford calls 'cold intelligence,' a kind of knowing disengaged from the deeper drama of life."

So for a periodical like Books & Culture to start a weblog may seem an incongruous gesture. Publishing bi-monthly in a world of 24-hour news, Books & Culture exists not to gratify our appetite for constant data, but rather to zoom out from our daily view of the world and put it in larger perspective, drawing on history, analysis, and faith to give deeper meaning to our content-saturated but perspective-starved lives. Why venture into the "blogosphere," which embodies the foolish preference for the immediate over the important, content over context?

The short answer is that we're looking for that elusive Aristotelian golden mean: the middle ground between a dangerous addiction to the constant manipulation of digital data and shying away from it altogether. Discerning readers can pluck the many intellectual fruits the Web does bear—and bears not just by mathematical chance, in a validation of the age-old monkeys-typing-Shakespeare scenario, but because many creative, intelligent people are using the Web to read and write about the increasingly complex world around us. The Web is neither a magic bullet for social progress (as mainstream culture believes) nor a complete waste of time, and this weblog—which does not purport to speak for Books & Culture as a whole, but nonetheless tries to strike a resonant tone with the print magazine and Web site—will try to illustrate both these points. Inevitably, it will involve content, since a weblog by definition links to other Web sites and articles and laces them together with brief commentary. But true to this magazine's mandate, context will be the driving force. After all, it's possible to use the Web to search not just for information, but for wisdom—and to avoid confusing the two.

1. My introduction to weblogs in the Chicago Tribune
2. My personal weblog at NBierma.com

Skip to Super Bowl diary/Skip to Digest

PLACES & CULTURE

In the real world, there is no such thing as a "news cycle," only the ongoing daily drama of cultural dynamics that often eludes the headline-driven news media. Thus some of the most enduring and worthwhile writing in newspapers and periodicals is about places—their history, their landscape, their culture and their social shifts. To continue a strand of links I began six months ago at my personal weblog, I'll introduce Places & Culture here as a regular entry in this weblog. This week, both clips are from the New York Times.

FAIRMEAD, Calif. — Somewhere around the Mammoth Orange, a ramshackle orange-shaped burger stand that is the lone survivor of hundreds that dotted California roadsides in the 1950's, the two faces of Highway 99 merge. There is the wildly unromantic back-alley 99, a blur of cellphone towers, salvage yards, used car lots, strip malls and phosphorescent billboards for personal injury lawyers. But there is another 99, found fleetingly in places like Selma ("The Raisin Capital of the World"), Fairmead ("Elev: 246") and even rapidly growing cities like Fresno. It is the 99 of early March, when peach and almond blossoms burst forth by the thousands on every tree, and of late September, when it is possible to roll down the windows and smell grapes drying into raisins. … This unheralded historic highway, pipeline for migrants and Bay Area commuters as well as almonds, pistachios, grapes, cotton, walnuts, Roma tomatoes, strawberries and potatoes, may have its moment yet.
http://www.nyt imes.com/2003/01/06/national/06HIGH.html

PARIS, Jan. 8—The daily Figaro published maps of the most dangerous battle zones. The radio station RTL announced survival strategies. The Ministry of the Interior pledged to maintain an increased police presence deployed during the Christmas season. The high anxiety has nothing to do with the vulnerability of French peacekeepers in Ivory Coast or President Jacques Chirac's speech on Monday about military readiness. Rather, it has to do with slashing prices. Under French law, retail stores are allowed to run sales only twice a year, in January and August. Today marked the start of a merchandising offensive that can last legally for only four to six weeks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/09/international/europe/09PARI.html

• Previous Places & Culture entries at my NBierma.com weblog

CITY SCENE

Little more than a year removed from the weeks she lived in London as a college student, my wife was a little apprehensive about how faithfully the Red Lion would, in a nod to cultural purity, reproduce the drab cuisine of the mother land as we walked into the quaint British pub on Chicago's North Side. Fortunately, it was distinctively American in two ways: 1) it tasted good and 2) we got free refills. We remarked on our satisfaction in these two areas when the affable bartender stopped by our table. "Our motto," he replied knowingly, "is: our food isn't authentic—it tastes good."

vTHE IRONY BEAT: SUPER BOWL DIARY

American males' infatuation with violent sports goes beyond their primeval pleasure in seeing bone-bending collisions and flying sweat droplets, each grunt and drop a small celebration of masculinity.

To hear the sports media tell it, what men care about is relationships.

All week the press has been emphasizing the personal drama of the relational storylines behind the scenes of the big game—tirelessly reporting that Tampa Bay coach Jon Gruden is the first coach to switch teams between seasons and then face his jilted organization the following year in the Super Bowl, and then asking everyone how it makes them feel. The story in this morning's paper—headlined: "When Does A Super Bowl Resemble 'Divorce Court?"—led with the fact that tonight's game is "full of broken and bitter relationships," and the tinkling piano soundtrack piped in the background of a pregame show interview with Gruden was right out of a Lifetime documentary. This Super Bowl figures to do much to disprove the notion the men are immune to the melodrama of soap operas, and as I watch it I'll be on the lookout for these and other ironies of this strange cultural ritual.

6:02 p.m. EST. Of course, while football at times is a soap opera, at others, the distinction between it and a testosterone-glazed action movie is negligible, as it is at the opening of tonight's Super Bowl telecast (after a brain-cell-popping afternoon-long pregame show) with Arnold Schwarzenegger narrating a "Terminator"-esque montage presenting star players in tonight's game as weapons in his arsenal. ABC producers presumably deemed it insufficient to say, "Oakland and Tampa Bay will now play in a championship football game" and trust that millions of viewers would be duly interested in watching—no, the Disney-owned network insists the Super Bowl broadcast blend into the vast American entertainment complex, just another mass-produced cultural product in an entertainment-drenched nation. Indeed, the Schwarzenegger skit ends with a telling title graphic: "Super Bowl XXXVII: The Movie."

6:33. Seconds after the Raiders kick a field goal to go up 3-0, the real action begins: the ads, at a cost of $2.2 million per 30 seconds (in other news, hundreds of thousands of the nation's homeless will sleep in the cold tonight). In the very first spot, the football-playing horses are back in the latest in a series of humorous sketches that involve two mumlbing spectators watching from a nearby fence; the punch line revolves around the appearance of a zebra to officiate. Still, in an apparent realization that though funny ads make the most enduring impression on viewers, they don't translate into selling actual products, the next spot is the lame car ad with Celine Dion ("God Bless America," the Canadian sang earlier tonight to commence our national ritual) crooning in the background.

6:45. My wife isn't home yet, so it falls to me to pick up the pizza, a four-block walk that leaves me in dread of missing the defining ad or play that will be the talk of the water cooler tomorrow. As I step outside my downtown apartment, I am surprised to find the streets have not shut down—cars and El trains stream down the street, people amble about, seemingly oblivious to the monolithic cultural ritual unfolding on their televisions at home. You have to conclude that they are among the most well-adjusted citizens in the republic.

I know it's a bad night to try to get a pizza, but I'm agitated as I wait for the workers to put down the phone and find my order—one rubs the temple on one side of her head, her phone affixed to the other, and her colleagues are similarly stressed out. One shuffles through the orders being spit out by a printer, and the spool gathers at his feet like a Christmas tree skirt. Pizza in hand, but not my pennies in change, I scurry home and am relieved to find the score still 3-3.

My wife returns with a different report from the streets—she says they're emptier than usual where she walked (which is preferable to the opposite situation that will play out in just a few hours, with car accidents expected to rise 41 percent when the game ends)—and finds occasion for commentary on our society's priorities: "A whole nation shuts down for a pigskin … men in tights falling on each other—it's stupid."

More stagnated, even, than the phone lines at the pizza joint is the Raiders league-leading offense at the hands of the Buccaneers' league-leading defense (in the first championship meeting of league leaders in those categories). Authorities have declared a 7-mile no-fly zone around the stadium in San Diego, and the Buccaneers have enforced it, grounding the Raiders' potent passing attack.

8:00. As though inspired by the "Terminator" introduction, announcer John Madden (whose previous insight into an offsides call was that "as a defensive lineman, you want to be quick, you want to get off [the ball], but sometimes it's just too early") reports that coach Jon Gruden will attempt to score again before halftime—or as he puts it, in a macho tone of admiration you might ordinarily reserve for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Gruden "is going to go for the kill."

8:03. Super Bowl Sunday is usually the one night of the year when other networks not broadcasting the game wave the white flag and admit that hardly anyone will watch them, but NBC refuses to resign itself to such reticence. As soon as the first half is over, NBC interrupts its "Fear Factor"—that improbable incarnation of elementary school playground amusement: "Dare you to eat bugs!"—with a special edition of "Saturday Night Live." It offers viewers relief from the obligatory Super Bowl halftime pop concert, when a stage is suddenly thrust onto the field and the athletic arena is transformed into concert stage—as jarring as a conga line breaking out in a board meeting, until you remind yourself that the Super Bowl isn't about football and repeat under your breath, "American entertainment industrial complex."

8:14. A quick flip back to ABC validates my decision to flip to NBC. Shania Twain is up to her usual duplicity—trying to pass herself off as wholesome and siren at the same time—belting her shy, harmless ballads while dressed in what can only be described as a costume reserved for cameos by supermodels on futuristic science fiction films—her skirt, jet black with streaks of glittering sliver, is so short and strange it looks like a manufacturer's unfinished first version, and we can only guess (and hope) the finished product is hanging in a closet somewhere.

Meanwhile, the gags get a little better on SNL—a pseduo-Al Sharpton accuses "telephones, rubber bands, and that lizard from the Geico commercials" of being racist, while a Chris Matthews facsimile rests on a pillow on his news desk when he hears the somnolent sounds of Joe Lieberman's creaking voice and bland rhetoric.

8:26. Halftime's over, and the awkward juxtaposition of battlefield and stage is underscored as ABC cuts to a wide shot; the dense smoke from the halftime show fog machines billows out of the stadium like steam rising from a soup bowl.

8:55. Tampa Bay's Dwight Smith returns an interception 44 yards, and the blowout is on. ABC, which has endured numerous blowout games this season, tries to arouse viewers' attention with Zapruder-like serial frames of the angle of Rich Gannon's throwing arm, which has (like viewers' interest) flattened over the course of the game as the Buccaneers front four has blocked the usual passing lanes.

8:59. Does football introduce violence into mainstream culture? One commercial seems to hope so; it presents a skit of how an NFL player could help them run their business better—the massive man gets a running start and crushes unsuspecting office workers caught playing "Solitaire" or taking a long break.

9:25. What other dysfunctional values do football enforce in an otherwise civil and functional society? One of the ads longingly portrays the masculine ideal, as one man pretends to take an interest in his girlfriend's conversation but hears only the play-by-play for the game in the background coming out of her mouth. The girlfriend mistakenly observes, "You're such a good listener." There it is, a guy's dream world: your girlfriend talks football and erroneously thinks you're sensitive. Earlier, another guy fantasy plays out: in another beer ad, a man tells a woman he's conflicted about her and another woman he's interested in; the woman cheerfully responds: "You can date both of us!" Each time these punch lines are delivered, at women's expense, you can hear a little dent being put in the state of communication between the sexes—which is not so peachy as it stands.

Ironically, the name "Super Bowl" came from a man actually paying attention to a female—as the story goes, football owner Lamar Hunt saw his daughter playing with a super ball, and his suggested name for the first AFL-NFL championship beat out other entries like "The Big One" and "The Final Game."

10:15: A Raiders comeback stalls and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers—a sports punch line for so long for both their futility and their former uniform pants the color of orange sherbet—are Super Bowl champions, winning 48-21. A telecast that began as a sentimental soap opera about drama, broken relationships, and feelings ends on a similar note—a shot of winning coach Jon Gruden fondly stroking the world's most expensive table centerpiece—the championship trophy designed by Tiffany & Co—clearly anticipating the arrival of new jewelry: his shiny new Super Bowl ring.

It's not just a sentimental moment, but a spiritual one as well, one that should convince anyone who doubts that the Super Bowl is America's most heartfelt religious ritual, as the Buccaneers' owner remarks on the hiring of Gruden earlier this year: "He came from heaven, and he brought us to heaven."

• Super Bowl Ad Meter from USA Today
• Facts and figures from SuperBowl.com
• Coverage of the champs from the Tampa Tribune
• My 2001 Super Bowl diary

DIGEST

For links with an *, you can log in with both member name and password of "bcread"

• The Atlantic has taken on an ambitious project in conjunction with the non-partisan think tank New America Foundation on the occasion of the State of the Union address. Although the Constitution vaguely mandates that the president "shall, from time to time, give to the Congress information of the state of the Union"—as an advisor pointed out on an episode of "The West Wing," the president could fulfill his constitutional requirement by furnishing Congress with a subscription to the Wall Street Journal—by now all manner of State of the Union traditions have become entrenched since Woodrow Wilson began the practice of delivering the report in person. As has long been custom, the president parades in to pronounce what a sagacious shepherd of our land he is, after which, as is also now custom, the opposing party leader, in his or her own supposed benevolence, quickly steps in front of the camera to curmudgeonly retort that the president couldn't give a fig about the average working American.

The mission of both the Atlantic and the NAF is to rise above such narrow rhetoric and produce original thinking—all too rare in our political culture in which most communication occurs to confirm the existing assumptions of a certain audience. That being said, it may be a tad cynical to go as far as the fine journalist James Fallows, who writes in his introduction to the Atlantic series on the "real" State of the Union:

Some of the essays that follow offer specific action plans; others identify trends to watch. And although they are political in the broadest sense, most don't bother with comparisons of the Democratic and Republican positions on the subject at hand. The assumption is that in most of the areas under discussion the major-party platforms are essentially fundraising tools or ways to organize blocs of interest groups.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/01/union.htm

• Art as social moral engineering? A far cry from "art for art's sake," but can we deny art's duty to the soul, asks Julia Keller in the Chicago Tribune?

Matthew Arnold, he of the muttonchop sideburns and starched-collar seriousness, knew exactly what art should do: It should make people better. By "better," the 19th Century poet and literary critic meant more moral, more just, more optimistic, less selfish, more filled with "sweetness and light"—Arnold's phrase for the good stuff that infuses the soul after a close encounter with art. Almost a century and a half removed from the British author's prim directive, we still live in the shadow of that idea, the idea of art as a didactic enterprise. Art as spinach. Art that teaches us Life Lessons—somehow, the capital letters seem essential—on a grand scale. Art that is Good For Us. But is that idea necessarily good for art?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0301260286jan26,1,1783050.story*

See also: Keller on "The Hours"' faithfulness to the work and identity of Virginia Woolf*
and The New Republic on "The Hours" and "The Pianist"*

• College in America means many things: leaving the nest, reams of term papers, drinking rituals on the weekend, gearing up for the vaguely-conceived "real world." What it doesn't mean, a concerted minority fears, is a sustained and habit-forming encounter with the life of the mind, says the Christian Science Monitor.
  American higher education has long had a dynamic tension between intellectualism —represented by the humanities and elite colleges—and more "practical" education offered up by land-grant universities, observers say. But while the US university system is widely hailed for its quality, some fear the pendulum may be swinging toward an overall anti-intellectual approach.
  http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0121/p17s02-lehl.html
• Slate's Scott MacMillan traces Czech newspaper coverage of the end of the Vaclav Havel era. The "global reputation" of Havel (quoted extensively in "Habits," mentioned above), "rivals that of Nelson Mandela in its moral stature," MacMillan writes. Not that he ever established a clear political identity as the first-and-only president of the post-Soviet Czech Republic, which made for a messy vote to replace him, says MacMillan.
  http://slate.msn.com/id/2077139/
• Whether or not he's through with incarnating sweaty historical heroes, as with Braveheart and Patriot, (or, for that matter, with spiritually wishy-washy roles like his conflicted priest in Signs, reviewed here in the Nov./Dec. 2002 issue of B & C by Roy Anker), Mel Gibson, has, for the time being, set his sights on filming the life of Christ and has pitched camp in Rome. The new twist? It will be in Latin and Aramaic—without subtitles. The old standby? Christ has flowing shoulder-length locks and a sturdy square jaw. Honestly, has any of the countless Christ filmographers actually read Isaiah—you know, the part that says there was "nothing in his appearance that we should desire him"? "This has been germinating inside me for 10 years," Gibson says in this Time magazine preview story. "I have a deep need to tell this story. It's part of your upbringing, but it can seem so distant.
  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ …
• The South's center of intellectual gravity may have just shifted from Oxford, Mississippi, to Little Rock, Arkansas, just as the Oxford American did. In any case, the magazine's demise was exaggerated, says the NY Times:
  Editors of The Oxford American … hope that the continuing strength of Southern literature and the emergence of a broadening intellectual class in the South will allow them to reclaim their position as a regional cultural beacon.
  http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/arts/21OXFO.html*
• Sure, the Sundance festival celebrates the best in non-market-minded filmmaking, but when indy film patron saint Robert Redford laments the lack of political expression in today's film, you have to wonder, are ranting documentaries the highest calling of film, as much as pure storytelling? From the Tribune:
  "It seems to me like a totally great time to be really getting out there with some risky, bold statements about the times we're living in," said Redford, looking fit as ever in a black T-shirt and blue jeans—though his face can't hide the impact of 65 years in the sun—as he sat in a hotel function room looking out on the Park City ski slopes.
  http://www.chicagotribune.com/features … *
• The dirty secret one Michelangelo scholar says he's discovered about his subject has more to do with his pocketbook than his painting. Michelangelo, it appears to Rab Hatfield, author of the new book The Wealth of Michelangelo, was both filthy rich and a cheapskate, says the NY Times:
  The professor said that the house in Rome in which Michelangelo died had little furniture, no books and no jewels, but it did have a chest with almost enough gold currency to buy the Pitti Palace. What kind of person did that make Michelangelo? "I guess you could say cheap," Professor Hatfield said.
  http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/international/europe/21FLOR.html*
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Nathan Bierma is an editorial assistant at Books & Culture.