-Don’t forget about the Red Mars book club.

-”America is not exactly starved of dissident humorists who take us to those ‘scary places.’”

-The combination of Darren Aronofsky, Michael Chabon, and Ayelet Waldman’s sensibilities will be…interesting.

-I really want to see a dragon with Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice declaring “bored!” as Cumberbatch does constantly in Sherlock.

-On women and infidelity.

-I want to spend my summer hanging out with Lady Gaga on a fire escape:

“We’re very underrepresented, as you can see in this conference,” Favianna Rodriguez said at the beginning of the best thing I’ve seen at Netroots Nation so far, a panel called “Educate, Agitate, Inspire: How Artists are Fighting Anti-Migrant Hate” that turned into a broader discussion of the arts and their role in progressivism—and that helped me articulate a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about since I came to ThinkProgress.

What the panelists said, and what I think is tremendously valuable, is that we are losing opportunities to make progressive messaging and campaigns more effective when we marginalize artists. Artists get brought into the conversation last, when, as Favianna put it, professional progressives have decided on strategy and message, and “when they think about engaging artists, they think about ‘here are talking points, reiterate them.’” That’s condescending, of course, and it means you can avoid building an infrastructure that supports and incorporates artists into the progressive movement if you just don’t think they matter very much. But more to the point, an approach to artists that treats them as if they’re just meant to execute messaging within a political context misses is a dramatic underutilization of artistic capacity.

That approach should be reversed, Ken Chen, the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, said, to ask: “how do we taking things that are hard issues, like post-9/11 detention, and spin them in ways that enter people’s lives while they’re pre-political?” That kind of engagement is hard to measure, and because it doesn’t produce a white paper or a talking point, it “requires an investment on behalf of the artist,” that demands a measure of trust and patience, Favianna said.

And beyond politicizing people through the culture they consume, Chen pointed out that shaping campaigns with an eye towards what’s artistically effective can give them tremendous reach.

“There actually is an incredibly successful cultural campaign in Arizona, but it’s not on our side,” he pointed out. “It’s Joe Arpaio, who is probably the best performance artist of the last generation. He’s always thinking about things not in the way a traditional Pat Buchanan thing would think like. It’s like Christo does a crackdown on the migrant community…You can buy pink underwear autographed by Sheriff Arpaio. You can be deputized, and wear night vision goggles, and fulfill your fantasy. He has a tank that has his logo on the side. He raided a house with Steven Seagal.”

And artists can be a check on a progressive tendency to make politics deadening, said Javier Gonzalez, who is helping run the SoundStrike campaign that’s convinced musicians to avoid performing in Arizona to protest the state’s repressive immigration policies.

“The left comes from this rational, enlightenment period debate, we’re going to have a pipe and be Socratic, so we create these boring campaigns,” he said. “You can do the stuff they did in the sixties, ‘come to a forum on Palestinian liberation, discussion from 1pm to 6pm.’ People are not going to go to that stuff anymore. We have to be more creative.”

Progressives are good at recognizing that the medium is the message when it comes to technology. We’re much less good at that when it comes to incorporating art as a core tactic and a shaper of strategy.

The 1979 political drama The Seduction of Joe Tynan has been in the back of my mind as a movie I ought to watch just about forever. It’s early Meryl Streep, it’s a nerdy political procedure movie, it’s Alan Alda. But because, for whatever reason, the movie isn’t treated as part of the first tier of political movies, it was never high on my priority list. But with Anthony Weiner’s sex scandal percolating away, it flitted back into my mind, I checked Netflix for it, and there it was. And it’s really an excellent movie, both about political machinations and about the psychology of people who go into politics and find themselves unable to resist things they really ought to stay away from.

From almost the opening scene of the movie, we know Joe Tynan’s marriage is headed for trouble. “You know how many people have tried, and I got it passed,” he brags in bed, telling his wife about a public works bill. “I got clout!” She’s visibly bored, not just in this instance, but permanently. “I may not like politics, but I love you,” she tells him shortly after. The problem is Tynan is politics, and so when Meryl Streep slides on screen as a sultry Southern political operative with the goods on a Supreme Court nominee with a segregationist past, Tynan is toast.

It’s a sign of Andrew Breitbart’s influence that I spent much of the movie assuming that the goods—video of the nominee opposing integration obtained by a black woman running for Congress in the Deep South, who is using it as leverage to win support from local Democrats—was fake, and that was what would take Tynan down. It turns out that subplot’s really only a vehicle for the affair, and for Tynan’s decision to sell out his mentor, who would prefer him to oppose the nomination quietly, and use the nomination hearings as a platform to turn himself into a national politician and a presidential contender.

And the movie is very, very good at capturing the dual vanity that both leads men into affairs, and leads them into thinking they can lead the nation. In an eerie prefiguring of Weiner’s Congressional gym snaps, we’ve got Tynan working out with his colleagues when his mentor wanders by and declares “You look too good, you’re going to lose votes.” The Supreme Court nomination fight is a convenient cover for Tynan’s affair with Streep’s Karen Traynor, but their work, their common interests, her ability to and interest in making him a great man are genuinely a turn-on for the couple. “You remind me of John F. Kennedy,” Tynan tells Traynor as he seduces her. “When you get there, clip a rose from the Rose Garden and send it to me, okay?” she tells him later, simultaneously stroking his ego and keeping the possibility of their liaison alive for the future.
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As much as I’m fond of the writing that comes out of elevating baseball into a great avatar of American democracy, be it by Roger Angell, Bart Giamatti, or Michael Chabon, I do recognize in my rational mind that it’s all essentially hokum. That doesn’t actually help me figure out how I feel about Moneyball, in which the cynics are actually the sentimentalists:

I think the real problem is that the movie just feels a bit late—Stephen Soderberg was replaced as the director, Aaron Sorkin ended up rewriting the script, and while those changes may have made for a better movie (though who knows), they also removed the movie’s release date from the moment of the A’s last triumph. Sabermetrics won in that the approach is an accepted part of the methodology almost every front office in baseball now, but being early adopters didn’t actually let Oakland overcome its financial disadvantages and win a league championship or the World Series. And the introduction of a new means of evaluation didn’t permanently (or even really temporarily) upset the corporate order of baseball. Oh, well. At least there will be Chris Pratt and Philip Seymour Hoffman to be entertained by.

While I’m running around Minneapolis, the Center for American Progress’s Associate Director for Ocean Communication Kiley Kroh was nice enough to step in for me, interviewing journalist Paul Greenberg about his most recent book—and the most delicious and sustainable ways to eat fish. Thanks to her for this post.

The Center for American Progress’s Ocean Team will be on the road and on the water in New England next week, touring some of America’s oldest and most profitable fishing towns as we investigate the implementation of a new management structure in our nation’s first fishery, the groundfishery. European fishermen plied the waters of the northwest Atlantic for cod, haddock, and flounders for over a century before even Columbus “discovered” America. Today, the industry is in recovery from decades of overfishing, and attempting to climb back to a state of prosperity and abundance.

As we prepared for our trip, we enlisted award-winning author, journalist, and lifelong fish enthusiast Paul Greenberg to help us set the stage. His book Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food recently won the 2011 James Beard Award for Writing and Literature.

We will be traveling in New England next week, talking with fishermen and policymakers, and plan to partake in the local cuisine; tell us about the best seafood meal you’ve eaten.

I am a big fan of eating what I catch. The mortality stats on catch-and-release don’t impress me and so over the years I’ve strived to fish less but make sure to eat all of what I catch. In that respect probably the most satisfying meal I’ve had recently was a New England/New York favorite – snapper blues baked whole with scalloped potatoes, garlic, olive oil and parsley. “Snappers” are young bluefish that come into the harbors in late summer and they have a much more delicate taste than their big brothers and sisters. It can also be argued that eating the smaller fish rather than the big spawners might be little less impacting on the environment. In any case, I adapted a recipe from Marcela Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking that was normally meant for large sardines. It worked great and nothing went to waste.
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There will be spoilers through the first three sections of Red Mars in this post and in comments, so venture there at your peril if you’re concerned about that. If you want to spoil beyond those sections in comments, go ahead, but label spoilers as such. The first part of this book club appears here. For next week, let’s read “Homesick” and “Falling Into History.”

The first two sections of Red Mars have to do a lot of heavy lifting and they feel like it—not only are they outlining a lot of very complex political and scientific arguments, but you’ve got to look at them through Maya’s eyes, which is not always a pleasant or sympathetic place to sit. So in a sense, “The Crucible” is a relief as we shift from Maya to Nadia, probably my favorite character in the books, and from the craft of leadership to the tangibility of engineering and architecture. And in shifting from the world of ideas to the world of things, we actually get a much more powerful emotional sense of what’s at stake as the First Hundred try to decide whether they will begin aggressive efforts to change the Martian atmosphere and climate.

One of the things this section does beautifully is juxtapose the mechanical and the whimsical—it makes Nadia’s jazz habit a perfect metaphor for her experiences. It’s there from the moment Nadia starts unpacking the town that is hers to reassemble: “The tractor itself was a real pig, with 600 horsepower, a wide wheelbase, and wheels big as tracks…They took off and rolled slowly toward the trailer park—and there she was, Nadezhda Cherneshevsky, driving a Mercedes-Benz across Mars! She followed Samantha to the sorting lot, feeling like a queen.” Those moments when Kim Stanley Robinson contrasts her tool kit to King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, or when Nadia explain to Arkady that being on Mars is like Louis Armstrong finding his way to the Hot Five, are just so wonderful in a writerly sense—Nadia’s constantly improvising, and she can do it because of her solid technical background.
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