Trailer of the Week: Confessions of a Shopaholic

It's the one romcom that even romcom fans prefer not to remember. Starring everyone's favorite Amy Adams wannabe Isla Fisher, it's a shameless tribute to retail therapy that should have been rendered obsolete by Great Depression II but wasn't.

Book of the Week

Meltdown isn't the best Ben Elton novel I ever read but it is far from the worst though I will admit that once I caught on the fact that the title referred to a financial meltdown and not the ecological disasters which are usually Elton's favorite topic, I was afraid it was going to be a lot more predictable than it was. In the end, I actually found it intriguing and hard to put down. However, it does go in for a lot of restating the obvious: materialism is bad, making more money than you can adequately deal with is wrong, not saving money is bad, making a profit out of financial disaster is evil.

I must confess that I started rolling my eyes during the last few chapters when Elton stopped mocking the excesses of the very, very rich and started moralizing on the virtuousness of poor people, in effect preaching a sermon which unfortunately says more about Elton's lack of experience with real-life poor people than anything else. It is not that I do not appreciate such a sentiment but in my experience, poor people tend to be just as complicated in their morality as rich people. Not every rich person I have met was a heartless bastard -- though I have met quite a few who were hardly a credit to their class -- and not every poor person I have met qualified for a halo.

I would like to think there is as much wisdom in my late father's description of poverty as hell as there is in Elton's notion that losing one's money makes one more virtuous. Sometimes it does but not always and anyway, it is hardly a theory any decent person wants to test.

Anyway, regardless of my philosophical differences with the author, Meltdown is still a good book.

Rules of the Internet (Reglas del Internet)

1. The same person who complains about having been insulted during adolescence due to his or her appearance will inevitably feel obliged to insult the appearance of various celebrities on a regular basis.

2. The same blogger who gave a rave review to the latest Hollywood film denouncing materialism will devote more than a few blog posts to bragging about all the nice stuff he or she has.

3. The same person who regularly denounces people for using dirty political tactics will routinely write about certain political candidates in the nastiest way possible.

4. The same person who regularly raves about lowbrow films will be the same person who complains about the large number of dumb movies released by Hollywood.

5. The same person who regularly ridicules all the people who went shopping on Black Friday will inevitably spend a ton of money while shopping online on Cyber Monday.

6. The same person who regularly complains about the growing trend toward anti-intellectualism in American society is the same person who will rarely admit to reading a book that wasn’t written by J. K. Rowling.

7. The same person who talks about Hollywood not spending enough time dwelling on class issues will also complain about having to rub elbows with the masses at the local movie theatre.

8. The same person who regularly writes about how stupid religious people are will regularly champion lowbrow movies.

9. The same blogger who brags about how little he or she cares what people thinks about him or her will inevitably take offense at any readers who choose to qualify a compliment by noting that they don’t always agree with the blogger in question.

10. The same blogger who complains about Hollywood filmmakers interjecting politics into their work will inevitably interject politics into his or her work…

Le Matérialisme, C’est les Autres

Ho-hum. It’s that time of year again. The time when all the good folks on the Net who have been bragging all year about all their nice stuff start sermonizing about the evils of materialism.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m unsympathetic to such sermons. The older I get, the more obvious it becomes that there should be a lot more to one’s life than just having nice stuff. After all, the last time I was in the hospital, I wasn’t comforted all that much by all the books I owned or my VCR or even my PC. But a simple visit from a friend or relative would mean a lot to me. And despite the fact that I often like to fancy myself a loner, there’s a part of me that deeply craves the comfort of human company. Thus a simple home-made breakfast with my former bride-to-be meant more to me than any dinner I could order on my own at the fanciest restaurant in town. And I had more respect for the single mom I knew who had no desire to spend her money on a DVD player when her old VCR would entertain her kids just as well than I did for all those people who owned the latest techno-gadget.

So why am I so cynical about the anti-materialism crowd? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that most anti-materialism sermons don’t really concern materialism per se. They only concern other people’s materialism. To paraphrase French writer Jean-Paul Sartre, le matérialisme, c’est les autres (materialism is other people). Thus we get endless lectures about how awful it is that so many people own big houses and big cars -- from the same people who brag about their new Blu-ray recorder or their new high-definition TV or their new iPod and so on and so forth. Not once do such people rarely acknowledge the fact that not everyone can afford the items they possess. Nor do they show any respect for the traditional notion that it’s in bad taste to brag about all the nice stuff you got. Indeed, it seems as if it’s become more and more popular to brag about being what is called an early adopter (a person who buys an item before it is generally popular). The idea apparently being that the ability to afford the latest such gadget is akin to godliness, and that any acknowledgment of the economic factors that might keep others from purchasing such items -- and that might make bragging about the ownership of such items seem gauche -- should be ignored at all costs.

I don’t pretend that there was ever a Golden Age in which such hypocrisy did not exist. Contrary to popular belief, twentieth-century Americans did not invent materialism nor do we have a monopoly on it. But when you grow up around people who used to be poor and grow up hearing constant lectures on the need to save one’s money and to not buy the latest item, one can’t help but be amused by those anti-materialists who seem to want to have it both ways: to brag about all the nice stuff they have and to attack those other people who have the bad taste to own more nice stuff than they do.

Perhaps that is the reason why I wasn’t so quick to join the crowds of Internet posters who have praised the heck out of anti-materialist movies like American Beauty and Fight Club. Because deep down, I sensed that the makers of those movies -- and all too many of the people who praised them -- weren’t really that sincere about their anti-materialism messages. I wish they were. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for them to prove that they are.

Black Friday Blues

And no, that's not a reference to a certain Steely Dan song.

Read this.

Yes, I suppose such out-of-control consumerism is the price we pay for living in a capitalistic society, but geez, people. How about showing a little restraint for a change?

This Week's Excerpt from The Book of the Incredibly Obvious

You are not your shoes.

Nor are you your khakis.

Nor are you your Ipod, your laptop, your website or your blog.

You are not your stuff.

Perhaps a character in Stephen King's Cujo said it best: people who merely buy stuff aren't necessarily better than people who can actually make stuff.

Feliz Navidad y All That Jazz

The holiday season is upon us.

Prepare to see the next month devoted to endless sermons about shamelessly materialistic Americans, sermons that will inevitably written by the same people who can't stop bragging about their $200 Ipods and $1000 laptops.

You see, materialism is a bad thing only when it's practiced by other people...