Jean Paul Yamamoto at Vroman's (and on YouTube)

Surfing around the interwebs yesterday afternoon, we came across this video of a performance by the local band Jean Paul Yamamoto from our "The Edge" Summer Music and Author Series. Jean Paul Yamamoto was paired with author James St. James, who read from his book Freak Show. (You might know James St. James as the famous club kid, played by Seth Green in the movie Party Monster, based on St. James' memoir.) The video is a little Blair Witchy (Isn't that the point of YouTube?), but it gives you an idea of how insane this performance was. Enjoy.

If it's Friday, it Must be Links

It's a miracle I'm here today, since it's raining outside, and everyone knows that Southern California comes to a standstill whenever it rains. But here I am, and here are a couple of quick things to get you a head start on the weekend:

• The LA Times reviews Michael Shermer's new book, The Mind of the Market.

  "...we have author Michael Shermer, founder and director of the Skeptics Society, captivating raconteur of all the greatest hits of behavioral, evolutionary and neuropsychology, provider of wonderful cocktail party material, like the one about 50% of an audience challenged to count the number of completed basketball passes failing to notice the gorilla walking across the crowded court."

  Amazingly enough, Shermer will be presenting his new book at All Saints Church this Wednesday (brought to you by Vroman's!). Weird, right? It's almost like I planned this...


• Charles Bock's debut novel, Beautiful Children is getting marquee treatment pretty much everywhere these days. It just got a good review from Entertainment Weekly, who said that "the story, rendered beautifully, even heartbreakingly, plays out at top speed..." In an odd twist of fate, Bock will be appearing at Vroman's on February 22 (and giving away all kinds of cool stuff, including signed limited edition posters. I'm sitting in my office right now lusting after them.). Seriously, folks, I can't make this stuff up.


• Salon has an interview with Deadspin's Will Leitch, who has a new book, God Save the Fan about being a fan and hating ESPN and some other stuff. I also appreciated Leitch's column in Publishers Weekly about how blogging made him a better writer (the answer is that it forced him to write, all the time). Clearly, it hasn't done much for me. Leitch, actually, will not be appearing at Vroman's any time soon...unless he just shows up to buy something, which would be pretty sweet.
  


• I loved loved loved Kate Christensen's novel The Epicure's Lament, so you best be believing that the next time I'm sick I'll try her hot toddy recipe which Maud Newton posted this morning.

Get linking, folks. Enjoy your weekend!

Sudhir Venkatesh in the House

Last night, folks braved the wind and rain to hear Sudhir Venkatesh discuss his book Gang Leader for a Day. I was one of them...OK, so I was already here, but you get the point. Venkatesh came to national prominence after his story was told in the runaway bestseller Freakonomics. While working on a PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago, Venkatesh insinuated himself into the life of JT, the leader of a crack-dealing gang that dominated the Robert Taylor Homes, one of Chicago's most notorious housing projects. Venkatesh shadowed JT, learning about life in the projects from the inside.

His reading was riveting, combining the most incredible stories with a great deadpan sense of humor. He stressed that his book was more of a memoir than a treatise on public policy, though many in the audience were obviously interested in hearing his thoughts on the urban poor. Most interesting to me was his discussion of what happened to the residents after the Robert Taylor Homes was torn down. According to Venkatesh, many of the residents of the projects lived a sort of communal existence by necessity. Often there would be a group of families who would come together because only one family would have an apartment with hot water, another family would be the only one with gas for the stove, etc. These families came to rely on one another, and when it came time to be relocated, they wanted to move together. The Chicago Housing Authority refused their request. Why? Because it's illegal to relocate members of the same race, ethnic group, socio-economic group, etc., because of federal statues against "re-ghettoizing."

Even more disheartening were the stories of residents who distrusted the world so much that after they had moved to the suburbs, they didn't call 911 during an emergency, electing instead to try and contact their former building manager from the Chicago Housign Authority, the woman who controlled many aspects of life in the project. Unfortunately that woman had passed away. Several people died specifically because they didn't believe 911 would help them. Why should they have believed in it? It had never helped them in the projects.

Bananas? Bananas!

Last night I stuck around to hear Dan Koeppel read from his new book Bananas: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World. Food writing like this -- deeply focused and researched writing on a single subject, moving from the micro to the macro -- has really taken over the publishing world in the past few years. Mark Kurlanksy (Salt, Cod) has made a cottage industry of it, and Michael Pollan's fabulous The Omnivore's Dilemma (a book with a slightly broader scope) continues to appear on Vroman's bestseller list on a weekly basis.

While the reading (the first for the Banana book) opened my eyes to bananas in a whole new way (Did you know the banana is in danger of going extinct? You see, every banana is an exact genetic replica of every other banana, so they're all susceptible to the same diseases, and ...well, read the book), what most interested me about Koeppel's talk was how the banana fit (or didn't fit) into contemporary food politics. As a guy who tries to eat as much organic, locally grown food as possible, what should I do with the banana? Can I justify eating a fruit that, by necessity, travels thousands of miles to get to my fruit bowl? My concerns were shared by some in the crowd.

Koeppel was good enough to address these issues in his post-reading Q&A. According to him, the banana was the first fruit to be shipped across seas in refrigerated shipping containers. This practice is common now, as anyone who's ever eaten a spear of asparagus in February in Buffalo, NY can attest. Much of our produce now travels the high seas (or the skies, occasionally), making just about everything available year round, but also contributing to global oil consumption and climate change. Unlike asparagus, however, it's pretty much impossible to grow a banana in Buffalo, even in summer. On the issue of food miles, the banana doesn't seem like a very "eco-friendly" fruit, at least not for Americans to eat.

Food miles is really only part of the issue, though. In America, the push to grow more and more organic food grows stronger by the day. But the banana, again, stands as an exception to the rule. Due to its unique genetic identity (every banana is a genetic twin of every other banana), the banana is incredibly vulnerable to diseases, most notably the dreaded Panama Disease. The only defense against many of these diseases is chemical spraying. An organic banana, left to its own devices, stands no chance of survival. Even worse, once a field of banana trees has been infected, no bananas can grow there again, meaning that even more land --usually rain forest-- must be cleared for banana farming. So no organic bananas.

Where does this leave the eco-conscious, health-conscious American banana eater? Koeppel's answer was pretty simple -- decide for yourself. If you feel comfortable eating a banana, know where it comes from, how it's grown, etc., then go to town. If not, don't. Koeppel pointed out that, as much as we'd like to eat organic fruit, keeping the banana alive is vitally important in certain parts of the world, particularly eastern Africa, where the crop sustains millions of people on its own. Koeppel's talk was a good reminder that we produce food globally now, and that, when it comes to food politics, not every part of the world has the same concerns as Americans.

Check out Dan on Good Food and On Point.