The Cultured Girl

I long for more episodes “Arrested Development” and still get choked up about “My So-Called Life” being cancelled. So I love the idea behind Brilliant But Cancelled, a new web-only TV channel that Bravo is launching tomorrow. The concept itself was resurrected from a show on Trio, the now-defunct Bravo-owned cable channel, which featured pilots from shows that vanished into obscurity. (Anyone remember the show based on the movie Fargo? Me neither.) Some of the content is likely to have more novelty appeal than anything, though I’ve been told that “EZ Streets,” a cancelled crime drama from Crash director Paul Haggis, is worth checking out.

Nobelity isn’t playing at a theater near you, but that hasn’t stopped the new documentary from generating lots of buzz. The film features interviews with nine Nobel Prize laureates pontificating on how to solve the world’s problems, but rather than a traditional release, it’s being screened by nonprofits and other small groups across the country. You can find a schedule of screenings or learn how to host your own on the film’s web site

I had the privilege of attending a Nobelity screening last night at Lucasfilm’s new Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco. (If you ever get a chance to visit, I highly recommend the theater; it’s a beautiful arts-and-crafts style space with, not surprisingly, a really good sound system.) The documentary is directed by Turk Pipkin, a lumbering Austinite who often wonders what the world will be like when his children come of age. He finds a cast of tragically little-known laureates that is highly progressive and wonderfully diverse: land mine activist Jody Williams; the brilliant but recently deceased nanotechnologist Richard Smalley; Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan woman who founded the Green Belt Movement in Africa; and the highly entertaining Desmond Tutu.

Unfortunately, the person we hear the most from is filmmaker Pipkin, who is too concerned with waxing rhapsodic and showing footage of his two daughters to come up with good questions to lob at the laureates. It’s frustrating, because the subjects are fascinating, and you suspect that if they had been asked the right questions, they would wow you even more with their wisdom. A less amateurish filmmaker (even on an equally small budget) or a better interviewer could have done so much more with this material.

Debating what to read next? Consider these 10 literary treasures that Departures magazine has declared “the most sought-after first editions of 19th- and 20th-century fiction.” They aren’t the priciest books ever sold–that award goes to The Birds of America by John James Audubon, which went for $8.8 million. But if a hefty first-edition price tag is any indication of literary worth, then the books below are surely ones that every Cultured Girl should be acquainted with.

The Adventures Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1885)
Value: $200,000 for the author’s own copy

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1866)
Value: $150,000 for a first complete edition signed by author

Three Stories and Ten Poems by Ernest Hemingway (1923)
Value: $125,000 for a volume inscribed by the author to Edward J. O’ Brian, editor of The Best American Short Stories

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (1844)
Value: $150,000 for a first edition with original wrappers

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
Value: $115,000 for one with slight markings; a perfect copy might fetch $150,000

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I love the idea behind Swaptree: I get rid of something I don’t want, and a perfect stranger sends me something I want for free. The online bartering service is one of several new sites that let you “buy” new stuff using your old stuff. Lala.com, which launches on July 4, deals exclusively in CDs, and Bookins.com lets you trade books. Swaptree does both, plus DVDs and videogames. The site is in private beta right now, but we explain the whole concept in this month’s Business 2.0:

“To start a swap, users enter the UPC codes of the titles they want to trade and create a list of those they might want. Swaptree’s engine will constantly look for matches and present users with potential swaps. … When users find a swap they like, they can initiate trades: Within two days, all parties get e-mail instructions on where to send their stuff.”

Upgrade: Cat Power, The Greatest
Old favorites: Iron & Wine, Mazzy Star

Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power) traveled to Memphis to lay down the tracks for her newest record. Fittingly evoking a steamy piano bar, the album alternatively makes you want to gyrate in tune to the muted trumpets and weep into your whiskey with the mournful strings. Yes, I know this album came out way back in January, but I’ve just now recognized its beauty. Trust me, this strong blend of sexy saxes and bold, breathy vocals deserves to move to the top of your mellow-music rotation.

This weekend, fundamentalist Mormon leader Warren Jeffs was added to the FBI’s top 10 list of most-wanted fugitives, based on charges of sexual conduct with a minor and arranging marriages between teenage girls and older men. Polygamy, it seems, is all over the place these days, from the HBO series Big Love to the most recent episode of America’s Most Wanted featuring Jeffs.

If you haven’t already done so, now would be the perfect time to pick up the Jon Krakauer book, Under the Banner of Heaven, which came out a few years back. Ostensibly the story of a murder in the fundamentalist Mormon community, the book serves as a comprehensive history of the Mormon faith in general and the cult-like polygamist offshoot that is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). The book covers everything from the origins of the Mormon religion (two words: magic eyeglasses) to the Jeffs’s remote and lawless outposts on the border of Arizona-Utah border. To my mind, Heaven was as morbidly fascinating as Krakauer’s higher profile page-turner, Into Thin Air, the kind of book that will have you rattling off “can you believe that?” facts to your friends for weeks.

I just came upon this highly entertaining profile in the Washington Post of Pitchfork Media, the online indie taste maker that has long been the only music magazine I read. Sure, it’s elitist and overly hypeful at times, but it’s also funny, well-written, and astoundingly influential. The writer interviews founder Ryan Schreiber, who recognizes the irony in his now labeling Clap Your Hands Say Yeah as overexposed, and even quotes Schreiber’s wife, Elizabeth: “He doesn’t hate you if you love Celine Dion. I mean, he might not hire you. But he won’t judge.”

Last night I picked up a copy of Blueprint, the new Martha Stewart magazine that’s essentially going after the Cultured Girl demographic. After all, I’m a sucker for new magazines, and my devotion to Everyday Food, another Martha title, could almost be the basis for a new religion. (I’ll save that for another post.)

My reaction to Blueprint is mixed. The tagline—”Design Your Life”—aptly describes what’s inside, a Real Simple-like primer on home, health, and beauty aimed at women in their late 20s and early 30s. I found myself dog-earing several stories, including herbal supplement suggestions from an integrative-medicine doctor to an article called “Stealth Health,” about how to sneak good-for-you ingredients, like flaxseed, into normal meals. But they totally lost me with “100 Reasons to Crack a Smile,” a list of “funny” web-site references (”William Hung’s Wikipedia entry”) and lame revelations, such as “the sulky teenagers that we all were once (but only realized we were in hindsight).” I guess the mag in general seems a bit stodgy, perhaps because most of the staff comes from Martha Stewart Living. And it’s certainly no Everyday Food.

Upgrade: Drive By Truckers, A Blessing and A Curse
Old favorites: Wilco, Neil Young, Rolling Stones

With their syrupy drawls and craggy guitars, the Drive By Truckers are often unfairly categorized as “Southern Rock.” In fact, the band’s three brilliant songwriters owe far more to Bob Dylan than they do to Lynyrd Skynyrd, penning Gothic tales, redneck histories, and tales of wasted-youth nostalgia in the guise of great rock songs. DBT’s latest outing—their 7th album—isn’t their strongest (I suggest you start with Southern Rock Opera or The Dirty South) but it is their most straightforward and accessible. I highly recommend it for anyone who finds they’d rather listen to classic rock or alt-country than the latest flavor-of-the-week indie band.

Most of my peers can’t understand why I read the Wall Street Journal: It’s so conservative, they grouse, while others stigmatize it for being all about money. While the finance-centric paper certainly isn’t liberal, that’s no reason not to read it. In fact, the newspaper boasts some of the best, most compelling newspaper writing around. (Until May 10, you can sample it free of charge, thanks to a 10-day open house at the normally subscription-only site.)

The best part? So-called “a-heds,” the quirky feature stories that occupy the WSJ’s front page middle column every day. Most often, they have nothing to do with business and are most useful as cocktail-party conversation fodder. (I highly recommend the anthology of middle-column articles, entitled Floating Off the Page.) Here’s a sampling of what I’ve learned from Wall Street Journal a-heds:

* The streets of Key West are overrun with wild chickens.

* Jeff “Skunk” Baxter of Doobie Brothers fame is an expert on Homeland Security and a consultant to the U.S. government.

* Olympic figure skaters are being crippled by their skates, because designs essentially haven’t changed in 100 years.