As Federer traveled to England to stage his most audacious public spectacle, Sacha Baron Cohen departed for a similar reason. For the past few months, the British comedian has been pumping America’s entertainment outlets dry to promote his new film Bruno, which premieres this Friday. From talk shows to magazines to social media to staged stunts, Cohen appeared in character across the country to deliver the wacky hijinks that made Borat a household name. But like Federer, Cohen’s promotional fervor threatens to overwhelm his professional output. After this relentless blitz of bleached hair and short shorts, his character feels worn out before his debut, and the films looks like an afterthought next to its behemoth marketing campaign.

Of course, none of this is new in hyper-capitalistic America. Spokespeople rush the floor with hats after every championship in mainstream sports, and overzealous promotion accompanies the release of every major-studio film. But Federer and Cohen stand apart from this crowd because they do not represent a commercial entity or product; they are advertising themselves as semi-real people.

A team is an abstract entity, so it’s easy for fans to insinuate themselves into that team, which turns the buying of hats into an act of communal celebration. But Federer plays only for himself, so even a die-hard fan would find it difficult to share in Federer’s achievement. They can celebrate for him, but not with him as Boston might with the Patriots after a Super Bowl win. Federer’s championship merchandise, then, comes across as self-serving because the player and his commercial presence are synonymous.

Cohen’s promotional campaign feels similarly out of place. This happens because his PR schtick hews too close to the content of his movie. In the film, Bruno appears on a talk show and acts ridiculous. Then, Cohen appears on a talk show as Bruno and does the same thing to promote the film. Not only does this technique neutralize the premise of his comedy — the character is only funny when his target is not in on the joke — but it also damages the credibility of the character in the film itself. Cohen undermines the subversive note he aims to hit by using the “controversial” Bruno as a P.T. Barnum-esque shill with a marketing budget as big as Michael Bay’s. Like Federer, Bruno represents both craft and commercial, and both suffer as a result.

But these cases of selling out are complicated by the considerable achievements that gave both men the option to sell out in the first place. After all, Federer is arguably the greatest tennis player ever, and Cohen toiled for years on hilarious independent shows before breaking through in America. No one would deny that they have both earned whatever spoils they can wring out of the public.

Perhaps that’s what makes these cases so sad: the realization that these two greats have reached the public-wringing stages of their careers. Federer only prevailed in his last two Grand Slams because the indomitable Raphael Nadal was sidelined by injury. In fact, Federer may not even hold his “most-titles” trophy for long; Nadal is well on pace to surpass him. As for Cohen, he has exhausted his stable of characters, and if people were not sick of his style after Borat, they certainly will be after Bruno. Both men have probably reached their last, best chance to cash in before they lose their edge for good. It’s just a shame when the final act of a spectacular career is to compromise one’s hard-earned integrity.

I interviewed Temple and the rest of the band after their show at Chop Suey in Seattle on June 25.

Here We Go Magic; photo courtesy of Western Vinyl.

The Bygone Bureau: Do you expect to keep both names of Luke Temple and Here We Go Magic going?

Luke Temple: Yes. Right now my heart is set in playing as Here We Go Magic. I’ve never played with a solid band before, and it’s a lot of fun. I’m sure Luke Temple stuff will keep happening though.

How did you guys end up playing together?

Temple: Well I’ve been playing with Mike [Bloch] for a while. He’s my roommate as well.

Michael Bloch: We met and picked up our keyboardist [Kristina Lieberson] from a show we played with a project that she was in. Luke really liked her voice.

Temple: We also met our bassist [Jennifer Turner] from another show. She was the only one at that show who was really ecstatic about our music. She asked if we needed a bass player, and we currently had been trying another one that wasn’t working very well. So she came out and played with us. The first song we played went on for like twenty minutes, and she just stood really close to our drummer [Peter Hale] and felt out what he was playing. That was one thing he was really struggling with when we were playing with the previous bass player. So, it was a good sign that things were going to work out.

What kind slower/spacier/ambient music inspired songs like “Ghost List” and “Nat’s Alien”?

Temple: At that time, I was listening to the soundtrack to the remake of Nosferatu a lot. It was done by Popol Vuh, which is really cool German Krautrock.

Is it hard to go from recording everything solo to playing live as a band? What was that process like?

Temple: It’s really hard. The first time I played with a band, we had six days to figure out how to play all the songs as a live band. But I don’t currently play with that group anymore. This time around, we had a few months.

Bloch: It felt like a few months, but really it was six weeks.

Temple: Okay, well… six weeks. We really got to work through our songs this time around though.

There were a few new songs you played at the show tonight. Are these also songs you wrote and then tried to figure out as a band?

Temple: No, these are more band-oriented songs. All the live versions of songs are band twists on my original ideas. I write the core of all the songs, but the songs have a much different feeling when they’re written out with the band in mind. It’s a good feeling.

When do you think you’ll record next?

Temple: We’re set up to be recording in August and should have the record done sometime in September. We’re putting it out with Secretly Canadian.

How was touring with Grizzly Bear?

Temple and Bloch: Amazing.

Temple: [It's] really inspiring how four people could make so much noise on stage.

Bloch: They have done a really good job of recreating their new album [Veckatimest] on stage. It’s absolutely beautiful.

Temple: They have such a full sound with every little detail tweaked to perfection. We play within the limitations of our equipment and try to be creative with it.

This philosophy is shown through in your recording. Your recording process has always been analog. Why do you like analog better than digital?

Temple: I’ve always really liked what tape does to music. It compresses all of these audio signals on to just one thin strip. I also just listen to a lot of older music and like how those recordings sound.

What was the recording process of your recent album like?

Temple: I recorded the entire album, which was recorded on a four track and GarageBand with one microphone. I would record four tracks and then bounce them to two tracks in GarageBand and put on all sorts of effects. Then I would bounce these back as two tracks onto the four tracks and have two free tracks to record more on. I’d continue with this process and have unlimited tracks to record on the four track, but still have that tape sound.

The last song on the album is different…

Temple: That song came from a Luke Temple recording session. I was playing with Mike and a few others on that track. It’s the only song on the album that I didn’t entirely record.

Here We Go Magic is closing their tour in Europe. Their self-titled debut album is out now on Western Vinyl.

Mostly, it’s hard to think of celebrities as normal people: they’re either lesser men or supermen, as the case may be. Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and Michael Jackson always existed in that otherworld of fame and fortune: they spoke or sang or acted for us, but never to us. Michael Jackson’s Thriller might have been the soundtrack to people’s youths and Ed McMahon might have introduced Johnny Carson to the American viewing public every night for over 30 years, but they always stood just out of reach, their rapport with their audience as artificial as their stage makeup (or plastic surgery). And because of that distance, it doesn’t seem so odd to see old footage of any of them on TV, in the prime of their career: they created museum pieces, whether instances of pop art or flashes of musical genius, that were perfectly complete, with or without an audience. Their music, or acting — their art, in other words — exists entirely separate from their personas.

But we, the viewing public, also act as if anyone who shows their face on television enough deserves to have their lives combed through. And without any real, meaningful interaction, celebrities become blank slates for their fans to obsess over — hence the enduring interest in every lurid detail of Fawcett’s illness, McMahon’s bankruptcy, Jackson’s bizarre personal life, in the never-ending search for something relatable. And celebrities are happy to oblige, to a point. Their public faces are carefully orchestrated, in order that they never appear too individual, and cross the boundary of relatability. Even their quirks tend to be non-issues: Jennifer Aniston eats mayonnaise sandwiches; Angelina Jolie is really a private person at heart; and Bruce Springsteen demands raw oats in his dressing room. This is the stuff that allows People magazine to have almost half a million more readers than TIME, and a million more than Newsweek. We buy their creative output because it’s extraordinary, and then by fixating over the minutiae of their lives we try hard to make them ordinary — or worse.

Once they stick their necks beyond that threshold, they open themselves to a torrent of abuse. William Congreve might have said that hell has no fury like a woman scorned, but then again he had never heard of TMZ.com — or its readership. We watch to rubberneck, sure, but also to heap scorn on others’ apparent failings, especially if doing so reflects well on us. Meanwhile, we keep ourselves tuned in: there may not be anyone left who likes Paris Hilton non-ironically, but she still somehow manages to stay affixed in the public consciousness.

So whether it’s likened to a drug, a food, or plain old lust, fame becomes a psychological addiction. It’s not just the relationship between a performer and his or her adoring fans, it’s a mutual, infantilizing dependence. The silent validation of people we don’t even know drives us not only to google our own names but to become shameless self-promoters in order to boost our search rankings. But then we make a point to remember which Hollywood stars are dating and which ones are feuding, who’s released the latest sex tape, and the thousands of other gossipy factoids. And, on top of it all, there are plenty of people who make a point to mock the very idea of celebrity, but who are hypocrites about it all the same, either because they are knowingly cynical about it, or because they wish they were.

Oliver Cromwell once remarked that people who cheered him for being famous would have cheered just as loudly if he were going to be hanged. He at least understood the illusion of celebrity.

I’ve lived within a two hours’ drive of the ocean for most of my life, and when I moved out to the Midwest in 2007, I wondered what I would be giving up besides the prospect of freshly caught seafood. So I consider it a minor miracle that northern Indiana is so close to Benton Harbor, Michigan City, New Buffalo, and the dozen or so small towns along the Lake Michigan coastline that could stand in for Oregon’s Newport or Massachusetts’s Manchester-by-the-Sea. Maybe the bodies aren’t as hard or the surfing as good as along the Pacific Coast, but I am there to get tanned, go swimming, and escape for a few hours from life in the Rust Belt. And although I haven’t been able to find a good corndog vendor yet, I still consider my trips to Lake Michigan time well-spent. – Bureau Writer Darryl Campbell

I started indoor rock climbing last spring, but climbing outdoors, which I did for the first time earlier this summer, was an entirely different monster. If indoor climbing is like fighting Godzilla, then getting outside is like fighting Godzilla’s older brother who’s taller, more dangerous, more rewarding, and doesn’t have clearly marked hand holds.

I’m a fan of any athletic activity where being lanky and weighing nothing is an advantage rather than a disadvantage; factor in the relatively inexpensive basic equipment costs and you’ve got a sport that even the laziest of people (read: me, maybe Jordan) can enjoy. Just make sure that you’re smarter than me and double back your harness correctly — over instead of under, which effectively undoes your buckle. But that won’t happen to you, unless you’re the stupidest person on Earth (read: me, maybe Jordan). – Bureau Editor Kevin Nguyen

Whether you’ve been hiking uphill or jumping from city to city on your world tour, there’s nothing more important than getting a good night’s sleep. Let the mattress be as hard as you like and play the music as loud as you want (provided you’re in a hostel). The primary component to my sleeping success is the right sleepwear.

While I have owned a zero-degree Fahrenheit sleeping bag for quite some time, high altitude and winter camping is not something I’ve done much here in Europe. Summers are hot and sticky which makes a normal sleeping bag nice and sweaty. Especially with their bulky carrying size, sleeping bags are often more of a hindrance than a help in the summer. That’s why I’m happy that the people at Design Salt have created the COCOON TravelSheets.

Made of a special moisture-wicking fabric, the COCOON is lightweight for your long days on foot, and cool and dry for your evenings lying horizontal. It’s a perfect alternative to sheets while hostel jumping (those normally cost you €5) and great for those hot sweaty evenings on Isle Royal, MI or the Boundary Waters in MN. – Bureau Writer Locke McKenzie

I know these are unpleasant times. Recession’s on; heat-wave’s on. We all just want to stay inside with the air-conditioning cranked and play videogames all day. But, you know, come on — it’s summer. You can play your videogames outside.

Yes, with money tight and the sun shining, now is the perfect time to invest in the pinnacle of modern frugal gaming: the Game Boy Advance. You can pick up the sleek SP model for $30 on Amazon, or you can take advantage of the season’s extended daylight to grab the super-cheap original GBA without worrying about its notoriously dark screen. Or, better yet, just ask your nerd friends if they’ve got one lying around the house. Odds are pretty high.

You can take advantage of a sprawling catalog of amazing, cheap games. From Metroid to Wario Ware to Mario & Luigi to Castlevania, the Game Boy Advance offers a lineup on par with any system ten times as expensive. Plus, like the SNES before it, the GBA’s 2-D graphics lend its titles a timeless quality. Also, crucially, the GBA can be used inside with the AC, safe from the cruel torture devices advocated elsewhere in the feature. – Bureau Editor Nick Martens

In my coastal hometown of Santa Barbara, CA, the beginning of summer is all about enjoying the gifts of the nearby water. That’s why this month, my favorite thing is the Pacific Ocean. Even when she tries to shoo us off with a frequent marine layer (known, thanks to a local tendency for pathetic fallacy, as “June Gloom”), it’s hard to spend a day in this town without enjoying the ocean’s many charms.

At times of aesthetic reflection, one can appreciate scenes of picturesque sailboats scattered before the horizon, or dolphins smoothly cresting above the surface. On a more practical front, the ocean keeps the town’s tourism industry alive — for better or worse — as it sits ripe for exploration by kitschy rides like the truck-cum-boat “Land Shark” or Captain Don’s Pirate Cruises.

And for yours truly, the ocean exhilarates unlike any other outdoor space. Whether it’s 8 a.m. dips in the rocky shallows of Hendry’s Beach or bodysurfing along the extended whitewater at Santa Claus Lane, these local spots manage to transmit some of the kinetic energy of the greater Pacific to those lucky enough to jump in.

All of which begs the question why I own no swimwear and am reduced to splashing around in spandex bike shorts. Normally I’d be ashamed at my own breach of So-Cal beach style, but when I return to Washington State in July with a mid-thigh farmer’s tan, I’ll be glad I came to my hometown unprepared, and left with a souvenir of its greatest asset. – Bureau Writer Daniel Adler

My first, and arguably worst, experience with the crows occurred in June of 2006. I was working for my college as a parking lot painter, and had noticed the variations in the crow’s calls. I also noticed they weren’t flying away from nearby humans, as they usually did. Unwittingly, I passed by a tree that had been deemed crow territory. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a dark shape hurtling towards my head. Instinctively I ducked. The dark shape changed direction and once again came straight for my head. I dive-rolled down a grass slope to another section of sidewalk. Looking behind me, a crow skimmed along the grass where I had been moments prior, issuing several threatening caws. I ran, and the crow gave chase for a block, until I had reached our office.

I spoke with my boss, Ed, who told me all he knew about crows. They are protective during their mating season, he said. They can remember individual humans who wrong them (several employees had been marked men for years), and they mourn the death of a chick by attacking anything that comes near them or their nest. Ed himself has rescued a few baby chicks, but the crows often would not touch the saved birds. He found the crows interesting, but to me, they were only a threat.

The next few years passed uneventfully until this past May and June, when I have been plagued by crows. I live within a mile of my work, so I walk to my office every morning. Usually, I have the freedom to wander through the many blocks and neighborhoods that lie between me and my job. During my walks this spring I began noting the crow’s behavior, not wishing to reprise my first attack. In late May I began to hear the deeper calls of the crow, so I avoided certain streets. In the first days of June, I thought that their nesting had finished and I thought the crows had cordoned themselves off to four square blocks. But then, a block away from my work, two crows followed me down the street, then swooped and cawed, threatening me away from their trees. I began avoiding that section of street.

Block by block, I altered my path to work. I was chased for a block by crows who had staked out the tallest tree in the neighborhood as their own. Other families of crows would hear the calls a block over so that one particular morning I walked through a swooping gauntlet of black wings and hateful crow calls. Finally, only one route lay open to me. For a week, I was restricted to that one certain path, unable to deviate for fear of crows.

Being inside did little to assuage my fears. I could feel the crow’s beaks and claws on my shoulders, in my scalp. I imagined their claws searching, stuck, as I fled down the street. For hours afterwards, I was prisoner of imagined injuries. I hated that these simple creatures had awakened a primal fear of flying predators in me. Even in our modern age, I could fall victim of wild animals.

Without a car, I had no refuge from the crows outside. I feared walking to the store or for pleasure. I didn’t know where the crows nested in all the different neighborhoods. I didn’t know any safe zones. My diet suffered because I couldn’t go to the store as often.

But time spent with friends gave me valuable knowledge. I learned that they rarely attack two people, and that I could use clapping as a weapon. The crows are cowards, so they attack from behind whenever possible. I have traversed several blocks walking backwards, clapping at the crows, spinning around as the crows hop from power line to power line, trying to out-flank me.

The crows found other victims. One morning I saw three dead birds — each mutilated by crows, the holes in their body a testament to the violence of the black beaks. The crows also suffered. I saw their frayed shapes against the sky — feathers torn by countless battles as they attacked every passing threat. Paranoid and drunk with exhaustion, even their calls were ragged as they tried to summon the effort to dive at me. I saw crows turn on crows, battling for survival, trying to stake out the best territory.

In my yard, there is a large pine tree that litters the lawn with useless pine cones. It also harbors a family of crows. Because I have done no harm to this particular family, they have stayed silent, content to let me enjoy sunny afternoons on my balcony in peace. Not long ago, during a dinner with friends, these crows cawed all evening. Frustrated, I stormed out to the balcony, intending to frighten them off. My presence was enough to startle them, but they didn’t flee far. They were concerned for their nest in the tree. It was then that I saw the face of a raccoon peeking out at me, his back a red pelt of scratches. He did not seem deterred from his dinner, and I left nature to do as it would.

It is only as summer has approached that the crows have settled down. Their chicks have hatched, and the birds are busy feeding and nursing them. The streets have grown silent, so I can go to the library and buy groceries in peace. There are still a few aggressive bastions, but I know the signs and can avoid them. I have my weapons and my wits. I am a veteran of this avian war.

Although the initial lesson plan dealt almost exclusively with learning phrases (”Would you mind if…,” “Do you think it would be alright if…”), the class deteriorated quickly into a much larger discussion of communism and capitalism, community and independence.

In March, I wrote an article praising many aspects of communism. Therein I discussed the levels of trust and community that I experienced while in Lviv, Ukraine, and how these qualities are slowly disappearing from capitalistic society.

A large part of the discussion I had with my students worked to reinforce these points. As Diane, the Russian, said:

“I remember being shocked when I moved to Germany as a child. People are so unfriendly to their neighbors. In Moscow, when you go to your neighbor’s to borrow sugar, they invite you in and you drink tea together, even if the other one doesn’t have much time. In Germany, I went to my neighbor to borrow sugar, and she said, ‘No, no, I don’t have time now. You have to come back some other time.’

“I was so surprised by this. This sort of unfriendliness to a neighbor would never happen in Russia.”

Within the Russian social system, there’s not much movement. According to Diane, families still live their whole lives together in Russia. The grandparents, parents, and children support each other through the different stages of their lives. They stay in the same city where they grew up in and have the same friends they’ve had their entire lives. Even the neighbors stay the same.

In Russia, you don’t have to be best friends with your neighbors, but you had better treat them well; they will be there as long as you are. In Germany, however, the average mid-sized apartment complex (15 to 30 apartments) turns over an average of two apartments per year. In America, my friends from college are spread across the nation. And my father’s job promotions had me living in three cities before the age of twelve.

There is no community in these situations because people don’t stick around. The retired banker of our class, Theo, attributed this mobility to the growing capitalistic way of Western life.

“Here in Germany, we have become so financially independent. When I was young, life was still quite communal, but by the time I was a teenager, it had faded. We do not live as a community anymore, especially in the city. We all have our own separate lives with our own busy things we need to do.”

In theory, I find the lack of community that has developed from our financial independence completely tragic. But when I look back on my actions, I see how little I adhere to the aspects of communism that truly promote community.

I like living my own life and making my own decisions. The thought of staying in the same city I grew up in has always seemed like a boring idea. I also think my parents and I would be at each other’s throats, should I spend more than a couple of weeks living under their roof.

I moved to Europe to try something different and have some new experiences, but living an ocean and continent away, I have sacrificed that sense of community. My mother is constantly telling me I need to come home and visit my sisters. One is in high school, and I haven’t lived with her since she was in elementary school.

When another of my younger sisters came to visit at the beginning of June, she was constantly reminding me just how disconnected I was from her here and now.

“I have the feeling you still think of me as the seventeen-year-old you knew in high school.”

She’s 22 now.

She was here for two weeks, and it seemed we spent the entire first week just getting to know each other again. By the time she was leaving, we had rebuilt our relationship, but now she is off to the states for another six-month stint.

Especially within the expatriate world, any sense of community is fleeting.

Expatriates in Europe are constantly on the move. Aside from those not tied down by long-term significant others, few seem to stay anywhere more than a year or two.

One of my best friends here in Germany will be leaving in the next month or so. I’ve noticed myself passively trying to faze him out of my life. I’ve got to get used to him not being there.

I try to idealize my life and the way I would like to live it but sometimes the separation between the theoretical and my reality is embarrassing. Often because I want a little bit of everything.

I now find myself selling a product I once condemned and celebrating my success.

It would be lovely to think that one could live ones life as a neat philosophy, but it seems to lead more often than not to extremism and dogmatism than enlightenment. Look at what some sects in the U.S. and Middle East have done with religion. Or what the Russians did with Marx’s theories.

So much for the theoretical. Maybe I should stick to grammar.

Turning a 40-page book, half-filled with pictures, into a feature-length movie is daunting, and judging by recent attempts, fraught with failure. (The Cat in the Hat, The Polar Express, and Curious George immediately come to mind, though I have admittedly not seen a one of them.) Matt Kirby identified the main pitfall of the process when he wrote, “Picture books are an art form altogether different from other types of literature. For me, they are an alchemy of story, poetry, and image, almost impressionistic works.”

“Impressionistic” is particularly apt; the process of turning a picture book into a film cannot be much different than adapting a painting. (I’m sure somebody has tried). The trailers for both Where the Wild Things Are and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs reveal the different philosophies of adaptation held by the creative teams behind each film, and offer insight into how the filmmakers went about turning their impressionist source material into something for the masses.

Meet Carroll.

The difficulties that Where the Wild Things Are has encountered are no secret; the film was pushed back a year to allow director Spike Jonze to re-edit and finesse the film after Warner Brothers found it to be “too weird, too scary… subversive,” and generally unsuitable for children. Though it’s not known what changes Jonze has made, the trailer still appears to hint at these elements, elements that were present in the book.

If there’s one thing the trailer captured perfectly from the book, it’s the tone. The book was unafraid to explore the fears and uncontrollable emotions of childhood. Sometimes a kid just needs a wild rumpus. That spontaneity and release is right on the trailer’s surface when Max and the Wild Things howl from a cliff’s edge at nothing and no one, or when the Wild Things toss Max and each other through the air, seemingly without consequence.

Likewise, the tone of Cloudy is where the most egregious changes have been made. The book always had a subtle undercurrent of foreboding, especially at the end when the weather revolts and and the townspeople are forced to flee Chewandswallow. Based on the trailer, I don’t see the film delving into such unsettling territory. A film where the kids cheer when a giant pancake crashes on top of their school likely would not then turn every character into a refugee, nor would it include imagery as indelibly creepy as this image from the book:

I’ll never forget those pale faces splotched with sore-like jelly.

The trailer for Wild Things also upholds the source’s economy of language. The book never contained more than three lines of text on a given page, and often had none. Fittingly, the trailer includes only a single line of dialogue and no voice-over narration. Wild Things author Maurice Sendak was a master of showing, not telling. His illustrations were so evocative they did most of the work for him. Jonze, or at least the editor who cut the trailer, understands this.

Cloudy never had such restraint. It was surprisingly wordy for a picture book, so perhaps it should be no surprise that the trailer includes narration littered with food puns. I’m not sure how telling the audience to “Prepare to get served” will help sell the movie, but I suppose it tested well.

Not quite the same.

Then there’s the issue of backstory. This is the most obvious area to expand on a picture book-turned-movie, since it lengthens the plot without changing the essential structure of the book. Wild Things adds backstory by explaining the childhood alienation Max feels. His father appears to be gone and his mom is dating a younger man. Meanwhile, Cloudy seemingly abandons the frame story of a grandfather telling his grandchildren of the magical land of Chewandswallow, instead focusing on a crackpot inventor who discovers a way to turn rain water into food, destroying the beautiful simplicity of the book, which never explains the food-based weather patterns. A brief shot in the trailer resembles Times Square in New York, suggesting that the film isn’t set in Chewandswallow at all, but in an approximation of reality.

But judging a film by it’s trailer is clearly a fool’s exercise. Some of my favorite trailers have lead to unspeakably awful movies (I’m looking at you, The Phantom Menace). Yet, I would guess that more than any other factor, audiences base their viewing decisions on the previews and advertisements they see. So when a trailer indicates that Cloudy With a Chance of Meatball has jettisoned everything save for the barest approximation of the picture book’s premise, people will notice. Likewise, an Arcade Fire song over a trailer can’t disguise the fact that Where the Wild Things Are looks to be made by filmmakers who understand what made the book special.

The scenarios are satirical in tone, but reveal a portrait of a generation that’s obsessed with devouring viral media sensations. Wasik’s book is playfully unscientific, clever but always curious. Where else would you find a chart comparing dystopias in the Orwellian and Gladwellian sense (yes, by which he means Malcolm)?

I caught up with Wasik before his talk at Seattle’s Town Hall last Tuesday.

The Bygone Bureau: The central building block of the book is the nanostory. Is this a term you coined?

Bill Wasik: Yeah, I made it up. As I explain at the beginning of the book when I unveil the term, I believe there are a lot different terms people use to describe a lot of related ideas: There are trends and fads, there’s celebrity and fame. In the internet context, there are memes and viral sensations.

The thing I like about nanostory, as a word, is that it first of all brings all of these disparate phenomena together as instances of the same type. Second, it focuses on narrative. I really feel like narrative — and the idea of sharing stories and advancing stories — is very crucial to how these things operate.

The phrase I really like is “fifteen minutes of meaning” instead of “fifteen minutes of fame.”

Right, in the book I use the example of Blair Hornstine, and you see a similar thing more recently with Susan Boyle, where people become instant celebrities. But what’s really at work there is the way they become not just celebrities but symbols. To a certain extent, you don’t actually have to be famous — your face doesn’t have to be seen — in order for you to perform this function in the churning media conversation.

From reading the book, I get the impression that you listen to a lot of indie rock.

Yeah. (laughs)

Since you bring up the short-lived success of indie bands as their own nanostories, do you think that Pitchfork’s building bands up on their debut and knocking them down on the sophomore album is productive to the art?

No, I don’t think it is. I feel like there’s such a premium on novelty placed by anybody whose doing journalism or criticism or is involved with tastemaking in any way. Even within a relatively small subculture like indie rock, there are many different blogs and people who have this goal to find new bands and knock down bands that they think are overhyped. It’s contentious, and there’s so much at work that it’s almost mathematical that you’re going to have these bands that are built up and brought down in these incredibly short periods of time. And I don’t think it’s productive.

Talking to the bands though, I think most of them tend to take an admirably philosophical attitude about the whole experience. I never met a band that had a bunch of buzz and seemed full of themselves, riding in the back of limos with pools in them. They tend to say, “We’re happy that people are talking about us and listen our music. We’ve seen other bands go through this and know that at the end of the day it’s still a long road for anybody to make it, as a long-term proposition.” You just enjoy the fame while it lasts, and then you go don’t get too upset when it goes away.

Pitchfork is able to knock down bands, but with your Stop Peter Bjorn and John experiment, you unsuccessfully tried to create antibuzz about a band. I’m curious what the difference is between you starting a blog where you try dissuade people from liking a band and Pitchfork giving something a 5.4 and killing the buzz that way.

My blog was sort of a joke, but I think that Pitchfork, arguably and rightly, has a lot of clout built up through trust with their fans. Ironically, the bands come and go but there’s a relationship between the readers and Pitchfork that’s been going on for nearly a decade. They earn it by continuing to review lots of albums and bringing up lots of stuff people don’t see; they take eclectic tastes and, being judicious, find things you wouldn’t expect. I think there are definitely tastemakers in online subcultures, and Pitchfork is absolutely one of them.

Another one of them is KEXP, a radio station in Seattle that I talk about in the book a little bit. KEXP isn’t so much in the business of denigrating band. But there are a few places that have the ear of the listener, and their opinion really matters.

That’s interesting because you frequently mask your identity when you do your social experiments in the book. So on one hand Pitchfork succeeds because they have that clout, but for things like the flash mobs and other personas you make for yourself, anonymity is key.

It can be. To a certain extent, a lot of my experiments are just me playing around, being satirical. I think anonymity certainly helped with the flash mob project and, on a more serious note, people were more likely to forward something along if they didn’t feel like they were pawns in some particular person’s megalomaniacal project. The fact that the organizer of flash mobs was anonymous meant that if you got the email about the flash mob, you would forward it along and on some level, you would be taking it on as your own project.

Anonymity can be useful not just to cloak your identity or to try to fool people. It allows people who might pass something along to not be too caught up in the question of “who’s behind this?”. Instead, the idea exists on its own terms, which makes people a little more inclined to actually press Forward on the email.

You have a chapter about corporate brands trying to market themselves through a viral campaigns. But it hasn’t worked because, on one hand, you have to be anonymous, but on the other, you want your brand out there. In that way, do you see the same sort of anonymity hurting the advertising model?

I think it’s related to the corporate thing because it speaks to why viral marketing has proved to be this elusive dream. Some corporations have figured out how to make little videos that get a lot of views, but by and large, most viral marketing fails in part because it’s both really hard to make something go viral and because people are reluctant if they feel like an instrument in some corporate game to get more people to buy a product.

That’s what I make fun of in the Bill Shiller chapter. That kind of experiment is a gag. I act out a character, pretending to be someone who wants to forward along every viral marketing campaign he gets. Beneath that kind of joke, there’s a serious point: you’re in a bind if you want to do viral marketing because you have an audience that’s going to be very suspicious of being a corporate shill.

What you find instead are marketing campaigns where the branding is very subtle. People forward them along, but if they’re so subtle, how are they promoting your product in the first place? So it’s a tough needle to thread, in terms of creating things that go viral and yet actually create positive associations with you and your product.

The book ends with the idea of “time-shifting” and creating contexts for ourselves in which we consume media. Could you expand on that idea?

There’s a professor at the University of Washington, David Levy, who coined the concept of “information environmentalism.” The thing I really like about the term is that it’s not an anti-information pose. The idea is that we can’t stop these new tools — nor would we want to — but we also need to recognize the times in our life when we’ve allowed ourselves to become too much of a slave to our data stream.

To me, the idea of information environmentalism is about becoming really judicious controllers of what’s coming in — not allowing our bookmarks that we check everyday to wind up getting longer and longer and longer to the point we’re spending six hours a day refreshing a giant list of blogs. We need to allow ourselves to step away from all the information devices for a certain amount of time and think about other things and read a book — maybe a book that isn’t even about the internet.

I definitely don’t mean this book to be an anti-internet or anti-new media book. But I do feel like if we allow ourselves to live at the pace of the internet, then it’s bad for us not just in terms of personal psychology but it’s also bad sociologically. We have trouble connecting with each other about big picture issues, big unglamorous shifts that we need to be concerned about, because we’re constantly obsessed about some new website, some new celebrity, or some new band. So for me, information environmentalism is about making responsible choices and not getting too caught up in the daily internet chatter.

Bill Wasik’s new book, And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, is out now on Viking Press. He’s on tour now supporting the book. Check his website for dates.

But true public intellectuals emerged only with twentieth-century Cold War writers, many of whom were European: Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Václav Havel, and even George Orwell (though he would have never considered himself one). They were literate, learned (though not always formally), and passionate. They transcended political and ideological dogma, and in many cases fought to understand, engage, and combat it. They wrote books. And they have been endangered since the moment of their birth, according to books like Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, and Richard Posner’s Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.

In their place, says this litany of cognitive decay, we have the modern pundit, who trades in innuendoes and sound bites rather than ideas and principles. They thrive on reducing politics into a kind of soap opera: all plot and no story, designed for visceral rather than cerebral effect – hence the full-throated outrage of Bill O’Reilly or the sneering sarcasm of Rachel Maddow, for example. Tacked on to these mass-media pundits are the majority of political bloggers, whose authority depends on neither expertise nor hands-on experience but on sheer popularity, which is achieved through vitriolic or snarky commentary, a refined sense of self-promotion, and enough money to pay for web hosting. Although it seems rationally absurd to take political direction from anyone who can be described as a “pundit,” since many are either current party operatives or self-made ideologues, we do it anyway — to the general detriment of civil society.

But political scientist Daniel Drezner paints a much sunnier picture of American intellectual life in his May 2008 essay “Public Intellectuals 2.0″. He argues that there are plenty of intellectuals around (he lists 65), that the United States has a preponderance of them, and that their audience has not really shrunk because it was never big to begin with. In fact, the only real difference he sees between the intellectuals of today and those of 50 years ago is that most contemporary ones come from social science rather than humanities backgrounds. And to top it all off, he says that blogs have not killed off long-form intellectual discourse but have become “a powerful complement” to the printed word, either acting as a sandbox of ideas or as a speaking platform for those otherwise without access to one. With lowered expectations on the one hand and the promise of an internet-fueled democratization on the other, an intellectuals’ renaissance seems all but inevitable.

So if Drezner is right, then we are on the cusp of a revolution of ideas; if the traditional narrative is right, intellectuals are dying off thanks to a paucity of venues in which to promote their ideas, a decrease in their public stature, and a fragmented and inattentive audience. And amid all this hand-wringing over whether they are coming or going, one question remains: what is it, exactly, that intellectuals do?

There’s no question that intellectuals are “opinion-leaders” — and although any idiot with a blog can claim to influence public discourse in some small way, at least prominent academics and authors get a disproportionate share of web traffic, which means that they exert a proportional influence on mainstream media’s coverage of the blogosphere. Still, the intellectual’s stock and trade has always been in ideas and words, whether in the form of pamphlets or blog posts. And while it might be easier than ever to get ideas out there, it’s not clear that doing so is a public good.

Let’s start with the period between September 11 and the Iraq War. For the right, the years of the Bush administration marked a political heyday, with neoconservatives above all directly influencing foreign policy in a way that few, if any, intellectuals since Henry Kissinger and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. have done. But neoconservative thought proved disastrous in practice. It went into the idea mill of the White House policy team, and came out as the “Bush Doctrine,” which was based on a series of fictions — and not just ones about the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

That is, neoconservatives grossly underestimated both the effort required to reconstruct a nation’s political and social fabric, and the difficulty of spreading American ideals abroad. They reduced the world into an ideological binary, with supporters of democracy on one side and terrorists/”Islamo-fascists” on the other. They believed that the post-September 11 world was entirely without precedent, and that the attempts of other nations to impose their political systems through force (the U.S. in Somalia, Britain and its imperial colonies, the USSR in central Asia) had no bearing on their calculations. And when neoconservative intellectuals outside of the policy realm took a step back and engaged in ass-covering en masse (see, for example, Peter Berkowitz’s “The Neocons and Iraq”), they, in the words of historian Tony Judt, “focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but rather on its incompetent execution.” Daniel Drezner points out that “the dismal performance of intellectuals in proximity to political power” has always been a universal, and that neoconservatives are no exception. They resemble the bomber pilot “King” Kong from Dr. Strangelove more than anything: so dedicated to their ideology that they are willing to ride it into the ground, even if it’s been discredited by both historical precedent and contemporary experience.

The same period marked leftists’ failure to seriously oppose the war in what Judt called the “strange death of liberal America.” Those leftists who attempted to oppose the war from a “scholarly” (as opposed to “political”) perspective had no effect on foreign policy or on their own cohort. “Security scholars” Stuart Kaufman and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson termed this practice, rather pretentiously, “Weberian activism,” whose goal was to “intervene in a political debate without giving up [our] scholarly credentials.” Trying to draw such a distinction is fair enough – but if “Weberian activism” succeeds only in giving its practitioners the (slightly smug) attitude that they never compromised themselves, it hardly seems worth the trouble. At the same time, other leftists such as Christopher Hitchens and Thomas Friedman became some of the war’s most prominent cheerleaders. They lost sight of the intellectual left’s traditional hard-nosed skepticism and suspicion of all political ideologies. Leftists have become either toothless or rootless, and if they could only look back after the fact and say “I told you so” — especially to those who should have been its spokespeople — then what good were they?

In other words, although most intellectuals might be kings in the free-floating world of discourse, they haven’t managed to make much of a splash outside of it — and neocons are the exception that proves the rule. The Iraq War is just one case study of failure among many. With a few exceptions such as Nouriel Roubini, intellectuals didn’t — couldn’t — see the approaching economic train wreck. They couldn’t bridge the ideological divide on global warming. They haven’t managed to rehabilitate the idea of increased government intervention in the free market or the creation of a stronger social safety net or reframe mainstream views of major ethical debates (although Ross Douthat has made a good start on the politics of abortion). They haven’t even successfully debunked the neoconservative attempt to reduce the world to a Cold War-minded clash of civilizations.

Ironically, all of this might explain the Faustian bargain that the neocons made with the Bush White House. One of the reasons that Cold War intellectuals could thrive was that they reacted so strongly against totalitarianism at precisely the moment when it seemed poised to overrun the Western world — everyone agreed on the threat and its severity. Nowadays, there’s nothing to react against, no common ground on which everyone can base their ideas and expect an attentive, fearful audience (the postmodern fate of political discourse? identity politics run amok?).

As a result, intellectuals have become outsiders, either in terms of real political power or mainstream media attention, and even ones with broad platforms have a hard time translating their ideas into action. And so the impressive array of statistics that Daniel Drezner marshals in order to show the endurance of intellectual life doesn’t get the entire picture. Web rankings and hit counters show that people are reading the words that intellectuals write, but is getting someone to look at a page tantamount to getting them to engage with the ideas on it? If an intellectual is doomed to be detached from all reality — due to an inflexible attachment to ideology, or due to the self-imposed oblivion of “Weberian activism” and highbrow media outlets — they could do worse than leaving a mark on the outside world.

My point, I suppose, is that intellectuals’ soaring aspirations have to contend with limping reality. They have apparently reduced themselves to a kind of social guilt reflex — a castrated social conscience — that can criticize and analyze the past just fine but has trouble making much of an impact on the present and the future. In vain, intellectuals strive to retain their credibility and distance from the political machine; or else they ally themselves with that machine and, by doing so, become a grotesque parody of their former, powerless selves. And they have restricted themselves to a small cognoscenti that pays attention to literary and culture magazines (or their web presences) and university-sponsored lectures.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left in a kind of cognitive darkness, without access to the world of intellectual discourse, and without any idea why that’s a problem. Because, by and large, it isn’t: we’ve forgotten the power of ideas.

For the record, I’d like to be wrong about all this.

As with all enigmatic figures, Mr. Thomas’s mystique developed as his own tales mixed with baseless teenage folklore. Five years removed, the two have blended inseparably in my mind. Here’s how I remember him: He was deported from post-war Germany for selling guns he pillaged from old Nazi weapons caches; he speaks something like seven or ten different languages, including dead ones like Aramaic; he once built a submarine in the school’s pond and brought in fighter jets for his students to work on; he basically stole millions of dollars of high-tech science equipment from an old laboratory job (I know this one is true); and he can tell you how much gold is stored in a safe on the thirteenth floor of a skyscraper by detecting variations in gravity using instruments in a plane flying over the building.

Mr. Thomas taught at my school for decades, and I took the last class he ever offered. That year, he was in and out the hospital for several operations on his back, and it felt like he could go any time. But Mr. Thomas never seemed bothered about his mortality. He told us that he wanted to get his back into shape so he could hunt Cape Buffalo in Africa. He liked them as game because they only give you two shots. After you fire, it starts charging. You have time for one more shot, but if you miss, you get trampled. He saw those as even odds.

When I had him, Mr. Thomas health was bad enough that he shouldn’t have been teaching. And, honestly, his style was so anachronistic that none us could follow the material anyway. But he didn’t toil through pain so he could help seventeen-year-olds learn about kinetic energy. He had a mission.

The real reason Mr. Thomas spent so much time teaching high school, as we learned near the end of the year, was that he figured teenagers would be easy to brainwash. As we prepared to graduate, he started to talk about mining. His favorite phrase became, “when the lights go out.” When the lights go out, he asked us, what will happen to our country? When nuclear war arrives, where will America get the resources to rebuild? He felt that we had outsourced the spine of modern civilization — the mining of raw materials — and that when World War III inevitably breaks out, we’ll be left in the dark. (Incidentally, he also told us how to knock the Earth out of orbit and send it into the Sun.)

For the last weeks of school, he turned into an evangelist for mining. He wanted to bring the industry back to the United States — not as an economic engine, but as a safeguard against apocalypse. And he wanted his students to lead the charge. In fact, some of his kids did end up going to the Colorado School of Mines, buy I think they sent in their applications before Mr. Thomas’s sales pitch began.

Since that year, I’ve thought Mr. Thomas was a little cracked up. The whole nuclear holocaust thing feels a bit sci-fi as far as personal philosophies go. But as the world thunders into a horrible moneyless pit, I’ve come to see the logic underlying Mr. Thomas’s paranoia. Maybe the surface of the planet won’t become a shriveled cinder, but the economy just might.

What does this country do? I’ve been looking for jobs, and everything I see is either technology, service, or medicine. You can’t get a job making something where I live (not that you can get a job anyway). You can’t do anything that creates and projects concrete value into the world. I realize this is an old, tired thought, but I can’t seem to shake it.

The anxiety is compounded by another thought: the United States rose to global supremacy on the back of the industrial revolution. Then we got rid of most of our industries. We had a solid, tangible foundation upon which to build a society, but that foundation didn’t even last a century. Given how easily the whole apparatus has been shaken this past year, maybe we shouldn’t have given up that foundation so readily.

I don’t mean any of this as serious economic discourse; it’s just my own personal relationship with the financial crisis. I always thought pining over blue-collar, steel mill jobs was crap, but now I’m not so sure. Some people in California lose their houses, some jackasses in Manhattan panic, and in Seattle my English degree is twice as useless as normal. If this is how we react to a largely meaningless hiccup in our system, then I truly am terrified of what we’ll do when the lights go out.