Destiny Rides a Bicycle

My favorite thing about Wikipedia is the list of nations ranked by per capita GDP (Purchasing Power Parity). My second favorite thing about Wikipedia is the access it grants me to sub-world-historical biographies, the two-minute introductions it offers to people who might not rate a Britannica entry or leave a work of art behind, but illuminate dark patches on the canvas of being alive by their choices. There are billions of ways to navigate from birth to death, and tens of thousands of those ways, at least, are profoundly awesome. George Whitman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_whitman) is a profoundly awesome way to be alive. The proprietor of the Haunted Bookstore near my house was larking around Paris one day many years ago, fresh from a stint restoring art in Florence, trying to decide what to do with her life, when a man carrying a sack of nails over his shoulder sliced a narrow turn on his bicycle and nearly clobbered her in the face. We should all be so lucky. This was George Whitman on the bike. A few weeks later she returned to the U.S. buzzing with a conviction that Whitman had helped her come to: Just because you can't stay in Oz doesn't mean you have to settle for Kansas. So she opened the best used book shop in Iowa City.

Oblique Movie Reviews, volume I

I watched The Station Agent in a crowded theater at a film festival in Rochester four years ago, and it was unlike every other movie experience I've had. The audience response was entirely individuated. Different pockets of the crowd laughed at different times, and often the same joke would generate several different kinds of laughter---some wan, some rueful, some uproarious, all at once. A Sunday afternoon showing of Knocked Up didn't generate quite as much good will, but the laughter was comparably diverse. The laughs coming out of my own throat were more typical of the way I laugh during a conversation with a friend than the way I laugh at a movie--appreciative laughs and sometimes even encouraging laughs, as though the movie were sensitive to my receptiveness. One way Judd Apatow seems to create that true-life texture is by letting his characters re-live interesting things that have just happened to them. We all do this sometimes, and it's a confession of our own boringness, on one level. "I have nothing to add right now--remember that hilarious thing that happened before?" It's much more organic than the situational hyper-awareness of Dawson's Creek, or the winky-wink instant nostalgia of Best Week Ever, and sometimes it plays like a wasted beat. I'm not even convinced that the failure of imagination is strictly on the characters' part, as opposed to Apatow's, but the effect, because I essentially like what's going on, is that I want to pick up the slack a little. I put in a little more effort to keep the energy high. I laugh an encouraging laugh.

Matched Perfect, and Staggered Special

I don't know much about NASCAR, but I doubt NASCAR fans could be as monolithic a political bloc as the media tend to portray them as. The homestretch of the 2000 Presidential campaign coincided almost exactly with a Subway Series between the Yankees and Mets, leading to a few quasi-scientific polls on the culture and political fault lines between the teams' respective fan bases. The same New York City epithetted by that same media as the liberal nanny state redoubt of transsexual immigrant francophiliac heathens turned out to be a complex ecosystem that included declasse people who put ketchup on their scrambled eggs. (They were invariably Mets fans.) Does anyone know of good data on the divergent predilections of prominent Nascar drivers' fans? Iowa sports sections devote considerable space to motorsports, so I've been reading all about Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s move to a new racing stable, which will entail a new sponsorship deal, and possibly a new car number. Earnhardt seems to straddle the young-apathetic and arch-red state demographics---as an underachieving legacy kid, he has natural affinities with the performance-oblivious loyalties of Junior Bush's implacable 29%--but he seems atypical in this way. Meanwhile, I fail to understand Sony's interest in replacing Budweiser as his big-bucks sponsor. Not that rednecks and youngsters aren't big segments of the consumer electronics market, but I imagine that logo placement of this sort works best for products with low cost- and quality-differentials. Bud, Coors, Busch, Natty Light and Beast all cost about the same, and taste about equally bad. Buying a case of Bud because Jr. pretends to drink it doesn't NOT make sense. But purchases of the kind of high-end items that Sony markets are much, much more likely to be influenced by product research and price comparison, which already lifts a potential buyer out of the quasi-subliminal state in which marketing seems to work most effectively.

Let's hear that string part again, because I don't think they heard it all the way out in Indianola!

Let's be honest. Even if he lives to be 100, Sufjan Stevens will never cover all 50 states, unless he awards himself "School of Rembrandt" status and takes on collaborative apprentices in states like Iowa. If I'm Sufjan, I'm opening a six-month contest on the Asthmatic Kitty website, allowing artists from a state I'll never do to submit tracks, and if the stuff's any good, there's a compilation album that breaks 12 new indie acts, with a built-in audience. If that album sells, I'm doing a Paula Abdul impression on Alaska Idol on streaming video six months later.

Welcome, Unmet Readers

I don't know how you found me, but I'm glad you're here.

True What They Say

The only retail store in downtown Iowa that does not sell Hawkeyes merchandise is the Maharishi Enlightenment Center, which snookers you in with promises of a complimentary, organic peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and 80% off all apparel, and then, the moment you realize that all you have for apparel is an end table of effeminate men's shorts with elastic waist bands and tapered legs, in pastel shades that will get your block knocked off on Dubuque St. after midnight on a Friday, tries to sign you up for a lifetime of herbal supplements and transcendental meditation classes. The cult side of things must be humming along behind closed doors, because on the front side of things, you've got a ton of retail space moving very little merchandise. Every tone is white aging to beige, and the medicinal aroma is overpowering, as though a giant ball of that smelly cotton stuffed into the top of a supplement bottle has just engorged your head like a metroid. The Maharishi Enlightenment Center manages to squeeze the most floor space into the smallest product inventory of any business I've ever known. Aside from the table of shorts and a few flyers, you have one or two sofas, a floor mat for yoga practice, and a couple shelves, and nothing else, in a space large enough to accommodate a full video arcade. The ambience of a video arcade--assaultively loud, cluttered, artificial, smoky--is like the perfect inverse of the MEC's sedative nullities, but somewhat less rebarbative. The cashier's hair looked like vipers, and she wore a white tunic previously seen on a Bacchant, and as she followed me around the store sizing up my aura, I thought the chances were decent and escalating that I had only been fed the organic sandwich to fatten me up prior to my ritual disembowelment and ingestion. When I finally escaped into the unconditional neon embrace of a Buffalo Wings and Roasters, I was breathing deeply from relief, and a great peace began to spread over my body. Breathing is key.

Scream 2

The Clinton and Obama campaigns occupy neighboring offices in the same mixed-use building in downtown Iowa City. Hillary's office windows are bricked over with official Clinton '08 placards; Obama's office windows are a pastiche of different campaign images and crude hand-painted signs. Inside Obama, you see a jumble of clipboards, college kids hanging out shooting the breeze, cult-of-personality images of Barack all over the place, and a few wise men in the back on a conference call. It's difficult to say where the cutoff between staffer and volunteer falls, because the official greeter is a college kid from Des Moines, who doesn't seem to know much, and seems desperate to be liked. On the walls, more contributor art, including twee finger paintings of the Obama logo done by some preschoolers shepherded into the office for a photo op.

Hillary's office is spartan and efficient. No greeter, but you can help yourself to the water cooler, or any of the campaign paraphernalia, buttons, signs, posters, arrayed in the vestibule. Four full-time staffers work down a short corridor in offices adorned with maps and easel-pad sheets with columns of numbers: these are the 57 precincts within Johnson County, with approximate vote targets. The staffers aren't desperate to get me on board. If anything, they want to know what I can do for them. This is appealing. The Clintonites aren't bothering much with the campus, and they shouldn't. College kids turn out in small numbers to vote in regular primaries; it's even less likely that they'll take 3 hours out of a weekday night in the middle of exams in the January cold to participate for no money in an arcane political ritual that subjects them to nonstop hectoring from their elders. Hillary instead is doing community outreach to core constituent groups, and has outflanked Obama in Iowa City's small applied housing neighborhoods, where she's throwing a block party tomorrow night. The Obama team's proudest accomplishment to date, it seems, is finding sister colleges in neighboring Illinois for every college in Iowa. Obama volunteers from Obama's homestate will thus have places to stay when they arrive a few days before caucuses, barely briefed on the townships they're entering, iffy on the decisive issues, to recapitulate the p.r. disaster of Dean's Perfect Storm.

These two small offices may or may not be indicative of their respective campaigns on the statewide and national levels, but if they are, Obama is toast. The Clintonites have a war room, from which to stage a campaign. The Barackers have a safe space where people of the right conscience can come and bask in the aura of the leader.

The Drinking Life

Literary taste is a mercurial thing, but the Fox Head, the preferred tavern of Iowa MFAs going back many years, has weathered the caprice of faddish loyalties because it offers the dypsomaniac something no other bar in Iowa City can: a location on the same downtown block as Mercy Hospital. Nota bene: Writers drink a lot. When Dylan Thomas visited the workshop in the 1950s, he outdid himself, tumbling down three flights of stairs in a drunken swoon, according to legend. So what? you might be howling--Thomas did plenty of stuff like that. Bear in mind this is Iowa City. Five decades later you'd still be pressed to find a building higher than two stories.

In Praise of Folly

Each day I've been here, the city has seemed less anodyne, and more like a copying error. The civic high points of your favorite cosmopolis can be found, but they'll have a flaw that almost defeats their purpose. The summer outdoor movie festival is held on the narrowest strip of the river's east bank, minimizing the number of decent sightlines. A concert series takes place in the shadow of the city's highest parking garage. The water sculpture that anchors downtown's civic plaza comprises four water bands that emerge abruptly from the brown brick piazza with the same diameter, the same flow rate, and the same languid arc of your elementary school's drinking fountain. The common fault in all these examples is modesty. The city fathers in New York, when they err, err greatly. Likewise, Princeton's pastiche of architectural styles has created a herd of white elephants, but it's dynamic. The Regents of the University have adopted a strict policy of awarding each major architectural commission to a different, Iowa-based architect, resulting in a tumblework of unambitious brick-and-concrete buildings that manage the improbable feat of being simultaneously incoherent and repetitive. Only today, when I eyed a filthy wino staggering up Washington St., did I flash back gratefully to city life in Brooklyn. He swept past me and veered wildly toward a chatting pack of young parents and strollered children. I stopped and braced for the confrontation. "Don't stop in the middle of the street!" he remonstrated in a clear voice. How discouraging it was, to find that in Iowa City, even the delinquents are conscientious upholders of the civic order.

President Blues

To boost citizenship and literacy on campus, the student government allocated funds a few years back to offer students complimentary copies of any or all of the following newspapers: USA Today, the NY Times, WSJ, Chicago Tribune, Des Moines Register, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Iowa City Press-Citizen, et al. You need only swipe your valid Hawk-ID through one of the card-only vending machines located conveniently throughout campus, and draw as many periodicals as you'd like. I've drawn late the past two afternoons, and I've drawn from the top of the pile.

Like most campus newspapers, the Daily Iowan pre-recycles itself, accumulating unread in large piles at various drop spots. This, despite the fever of an ongoing search for U of I's next President, which has meant open forums with the four finalists all week, and banner treatment from the DI, the credulity and obeisance of whose reporting make the Daily Princetonian look like The Final Call. Yesterday's show pony was a slick provost from South Carolina with only six years of administrative experience, who seems to have annoyed the Regents with glib answers, sycophancy, and an unconvincing denial that he would use Iowa as a stepping-stone to an even more prestigious post. "Universities are crown jewels, candidate says," led the Daily Iowan, loyally. One of the remaining finalists is a VP at Rutgers, who, thanks more to New Jersey's glutted patronage system than its cost of living, would take a pay cut if he got the Iowa job. The other, more consequential Presidential race going on in Iowa is quiet here. By far, the largest poster-, flyer- and meet-up presence belongs to Ron Paul, proving once again that drunk college kids will only turn over in bed for the candidate wearing the mantle of the no-shot wacko who blows up his own campaign attempting to speak truth to power.

First Impressions of Iowa

The last seven years, whenever I have moved into a new apartment, it's been my trite custom to christen the new space by unpacking my gear to the strains of an increasingly fatigued LP of the London Philharmonic playing Dvorak's Symphony "From the New World." The appropriateness this time was more than thematic. Dvorak composed the symphony in New York City under contractual obligation, then fled the new world promptly and sought refuge in a Czech enclave in northern Iowa called Spillville. With a current population of 300 (sic), Spillville is smaller than Iowa City. But not much smaller.

My new housemate Monica, a neuroscience researcher at the University who will pay me to participate in her study if I can convince her I've taken ecstasy, welcomed me Sunday night with a dinner of barbequed chicken breast, asparagus tips and local mushrooms. Then she conducted me through a meticulous walking tour of downtown Iowa City, which took ten minutes. According to Monica, her fellow Cedar Rapids native Ashton Kutcher went unnoticed by the professional beauty scouts until relocating to Iowa City, where he was promptly spotted (hitting on a 40-year-old woman, one can only imagine) in a prepossessing local nightspot called The Airliner. The Airliner turns out to have been a pedigreed cafe during Iowa City's literary heyday some decades back, but it's kept step with the changing identity of the Iowa University student body by converting itself into a generic sports bar, with $3 pitchers of domestic swill whenever the Cubs are playing. (The same racial divide that fissures Chicago--the Southside Sox belong to minority fans, the northside Cubbies to the bourgie whites--exists here: Nobody roots for the White Sox.)

Because the university has thoroughly strangled off the town, the persecution complex borne by the rightfully insecure lifetime academics eschews town-gown resentment for a demonization known locally as "across the river." On the Iowa River's east bank lie the student union, the undergrad dorms, the bars, and the humanities departments. West of the river, the graduate and professional schools sprawl over large, unlovely tracts. They're joined there by all the athletics departments and facilities, which should come as no surprise. At the University of Iowa, the football program counts as a professional school.