Oh Yeah… Blog. Plus, Sarah Vowell and Snark.

Sarah Vowell

Hi everyone, starting this blog up again if anyone out there still cares. Huzzah!

Anyway, so on Friday CJ and I went to see Sarah Vowell read from her new book — “Unfamiliar Fishes,” about the history of Hawaii — at First Parish Church.

It was a very mixed experience. The bits of the book she read seemed great, really interesting and well researched and very funny. And she has a great presence when she’s reading, mostly because I picture Violet from “The Incredibles,” (whom she did the voice for) whenever she talks. I’ve never read her books, only heard her pieces on This American Life and read her various op-eds in the papers.

But the question and answer session afterwards was sort of creepy and unpleasant. She has this very snarky affect — I don’t know whether it’s her real personality or a kind of act — when she interacts with people. She shuts people down and sort of insults them and tries to score easy points off of the audience. It is very funny, for what it’s worth, but it’s also kind of insulting and cheap-seeming.

I don’t know what exactly she’s going for. I know that this kind of snark is a part of the whole McSweeney’s, This American Life oeuvre. But it bugs me. You can, after all, be very smart and funny and not also be a total dick to people. And someone like John Stewart — who Vowell called a peer of hers at one point during the reading — can pull off a certain amount of snark but also seems to have some actual compassion with whatever person he’s interacting with, even if that person is someone like Bill Kristol.

And what CJ pointed out is that the voice Vowell adopts in her books is quite different than the tone she took in the Q+A. She’s funny and snarky, but also someone who is interested in sharing information with her readers, which she seems completely uninterested in doing in person.

Vowell also made a couple offhand references to how she’s bummed that her op-eds never seem to have any effect on the world, making some joke about, oh, I might as well fax them to my wastebasket next to the desk etc. etc.

But from what I remember, her columns generally take the “oh, everyone is such an ass,” tone that she seems wont to fall into. As such, complaining about how nobody ever decides to revise his or her worldview based on her writing seems kind of lame.

And yet, I still want to read her book. Go figure.

Houdini Exhibit at the Jewish Museum

CJ and I went to see the Houdini exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York City on Wednesday.  Apart from a horrific crush of people getting into the museum — made a lot worse by the metal detector and mandatory coat check — it was a pretty great experience.

I’ve never known much about Houdini, or fixated on him specifically — to the extent that I had no idea that he was Jewish until I heard about this exhibit — but he’s an interesting and impressive guy.  The exhibit was a mixture of contemporaneous memorabilia, footage, and some modern art interpreting Houdini.  In general, the actual artifacts were the coolest part.  They had Houdini’s handcuffs, straitjacket, crate, milk can and so on.  And lots of posters and photos from his early career.

The more modern art was mostly either uninteresting or just bizarre.  That definitely includes the room full of jacobin pigeons pooping on a fake glass coffin, which was apparently one of the big draws for a lot of people.  The one piece we did both like a lot was a painting by Joe Coleman (pictured here), which was great, and looked sort of like a carnival poster combined with lots of crazy Kabbalistic symbols.

But mostly the exhibit did a good job in examining and analyzing the reasons for Houdini’s appeal — most of which have to do with the basic Kavalier and Clay thesis that the immigrant’s story is already a kind of “escape.”  And Houdini comes off really impressively, especially in his later career as one of the first public skeptics, debunking spiritualism and so on.

The Jewish Museum itself was also cool — lots of neat artifacts, and the building itself was interesting at least on the outside.  It’s apparently an old converted mansion.  I kind of wish more of the building had been preserved on the inside though.  It seems like it was pretty much gutted and only the exterior shell was left.