Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Fictional High School Breaks Out in Song

With news that the new television drama Glee has been picked up for FOX’s fall season, I have the oddities of high school on my mind. Glee follows a motley group of kids who are the core membership of the McKinley High School glee club, and their club director, Spanish teacher Will Schuester. There are many elements to the show’s plot, but here’s what strikes me: Glee kids are losers. Popular kids (that is, football players, cheerleaders, and the like) mock them constantly – every moment of the schoolday they’re laid open to harassment, teasing, and humiliation. Glee is lame, but if glee becomes cool (as all six kids and their director fervently hope), so will they.

But in some schools, there are no jocks, no cheerleaders, and more or less no richie-rich kids. At Edward R. Murrow, a public high school in New York City, the A-list kids are the members of the championship chess team. Sportswriter Michael Weinreb followed the team throughout the 2005-2006 school year, relating stories of chess club meetings, competitions, and cash games played in public parks; of rivalries and friendships; of talent and obsession with the game; and of the charismatic teacher who coaches the team. The Kings of New York is about the game of chess as much as it is about the Murrow team, and in the end it's a fascinating portrait of both.

The tension between popular kids and losers is at the very heart of the literature of adolescence. Nearly everyone who loves books or movies can cite a few that focus on the struggle for identity, on the horrible things kids do to each other to draw social lines, and the pressure everyone’s under. One of my personal favorites is The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton*. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, there are greasers, and there are socs – two groups widely separated by economic status, neighborhood, and general outlook on life. Violence between them is common, usually with the clean-cut socs as the initial aggressors, and it's a series of soc/greaser fights that forms the structural framework of the story. But in many ways, it's really about friendship and loyalty, and about understanding the different wisdom and strengths that different people have.

With all of its social pressure, high school is not for everyone. But how are you supposed to build a life after your teens if you don't have an education? You will find answers in the classic guide to unschooling, The Teenage Liberation Handbook. Former middle school teacher Grace Llewellyn provides guidance for kids who want to quit school but keep learning, every step of the way from investigating non-school options to talking to parents to getting into college without a high school diploma. This isn't a guide for homeschoolers, it's a guide for teens who want to set their own educational goals and reach them on their own terms. Llewellyn went on to write another book, Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go to School Tell Their Own Stories, which should provide would-be unschoolers with more inspiration.

* Library-related trivia: a film version of The Outsiders was released in 1983, after Jo Ellen Misakian (a librarian at Lone Star School in Sanger, CA) wrote to Francis Ford Coppola to ask him to make it into a movie. She attached a petition signed by her eighth-grade students, who loved the book, and had hit on the idea that as a film, more people could enjoy the powerful story. And of course, the library has The Outsiders DVD as well as the book, for all of you who prefer watching to reading – or who just like to try both!

Authenticity in Every Glass

Season three of the period 1960s drama Mad Men starts this weekend, and I'm sure you're all quite excited. There's nothing like a whole tv show full of smoking, drinking, sexism, and completely fabulous vintage clothes & interiors! The New York Times reported a few days ago that the show's prop masters work terribly hard at getting all those vintage details just perfect, including the drinks, the glasses they go in, and the liquor brands they use. Mad Men's network has an online guide to 1960s era cocktails, but since I know you're all so incredibly retro that you prefer to get your information from books, here are some suggestions:

If you want to make cocktails, learn to drink them with discernment, or just find out a bit about what can make them truly great, you could hardly find a better place to start than Dale DeGroff's The Essential Cocktail. DeGroff is a leading authority on cocktail history, and not only does he know how to mix a dreamy drink, he can show you how to do it too. He's arranged his recipes into logical categories, and he explains the features of the classic version of each famous drink, as well as providing an intelligent guide to creating variations. (And, as the Times article noted, DeGroff is not only a cocktail expert, he was himself in the advertising business in the early 70s, so he's definitely got the down low on authentic Mad Men-style boozing.)

If you require a wider knowledge of the drinking arts, you might turn to Kinglsey Amis's Everyday Drinking, a compendium of highly intelligent (though thoroughly subjective) drinking lore, advice and history originally written between 1971 and 1984. Among other things, Amis can help you figure out how to fool people into thinking you’re an expert on liquor or wine even if you know next to nothing, he provides thorough advice on all aspects of dealing with a hangover, and he outlines a recommended weight-loss diet for the heavy drinker. But humorous content aside, Amis was a great authority on wine, liquor, and beer, and had a lot to say about how to understand it and how to best enjoy it.

If you'd like to reach even further back in the past, well before the Mad Men era, I must recommend Charles H. Baker’s Jigger, Beaker, & Glass: Drinking Around the World, originally published in the 1930s. It provides an astonishing catalog of libations and detailed instructions for making each one, together with a dictionary of cocktail ingredients and a huge amount of commentary and advice. Some recipes are exotic, some familiar; some are complex, some incredibly straightforward; but all are clearly but amusingly written -- in fact, you could pick up this book without ever intending to mix a cocktail or concoct a punch, and still find it delightful.

The Romance of Dance

Pop star Jewel and Access Hollywood host Nancy O'Dell both had to drop out of competition on TV's Dancing with the Stars last week, due to injuries they sustained during training. Bummer for them, but it did make for a very exciting season premiere last Monday, during which two new stars took to the dance floor: Playboy model Holly Madison and reality TV veteran Melissa Rycroft (of recent Bachelor-marriage-proposal-followed-by-rejection-in-front-of-millions-of-viewers fame). As in previous premiere episodes, Dancing with the Stars's three judges were encouraging in their comments to the novice dancers, but spent a lot of time making technical notes about foot placement, rhythm, and so on. Which brings me to my first suggestion:

The 1993 Australian drama Strictly Ballroom is part competition movie, part light romance – at the opening of the story, lifelong dancer and star-to-watch Scott Hastings has just lost his dance partner after spicing up a competition dance with his own, unorthodox steps. Scott's reckless disregard of regulation moves becomes a scandal in the dance community, and there is some doubt as to whether he can secure a new partner in time for the most important competition of the season, the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix. But Scott pairs up with ballroom amateur Fran, whose immigrant mother and grandmother give them a master class in the Paso Doble. Will Fran and Scott's passion for the dance, their commitment to creativity and craft, and their growing affection for one another help them succeed at the Pan-Pacific?

Ballroom dance competitions are complex affairs – of course a couple's dancing skills are under review by the judges, but a whole host of other elements affect their scores – music, costumes, and the dancers' interpretations of the emotion and drama of the dance. Jonathan S. Marion's Ballroom: Culture and Costume in Competitive Dance presents an anthropological analysis of ballroom, examining issues such as the performance of gender roles, trends in costumes for different styles of dance, and the role of dance competitions as festivals for ballroom fans.

Eve Golden's biography Vernon and Irene Castle's Ragtime Revolution, on the other hand, chronicles the history of the rise of public social dancing as a respectable pastime for middle-class people, during the 1910s. During that period, Vernon and Irene Castle were perhaps the most famous and influential dance team in the world – but they were also known for their advocacy for greater rights for animals (due in part to their years on the vaudeville circuit, where many animal performers were treated harshly), and for their incredible personal charisma and style. Irene in particular was a trend setter – she bobbed her hair in 1909, well before the fashion was widespread in the United States. (For those of you who want the basic story quickly – and perhaps with a little Hollywood embellishment – check out the 1939 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle.)

"I Get So Emotion-Able, Baby"

While watching the most recent Oscars telecast a friend remarked on a particularly dramatic acceptance speech saying, "Actors are so emotionable!" And you know? They really are! I mean, they are so capable of signifying emotion. How can we believe in what they are expressing from behind that podium? The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that emotionable is synonymous with emotional but I think that "emotionable" has a much more active sense to it and that got me thinking about books that capture the act and the action of emoting.

 In Character: Actors Acting is full of famous faces doing what they do best, often with ridiculous results. Photographer Howard Schatz challenges his subjects to capture, in a single frame, a moment of his design. Where else might you see F. Murray Abraham as "a teenage girl chosen to go backstage at a Justin Timberlake concert" or Edie Falco doing "a little girl telling your mother that your twin brother said a dirty word." Copious sidebar comments from the actors regarding their craft provide useful context but the real joy here is the sheer over-the-top nature of every expression on every page of this book.

If you require a more serious (or more hilarious depending on how you look at it) set of emotionable images then check out Sam Taylor-Wood's Crying Men. When a friend first mentioned this book to me my first stammered, impatient question was, "But does it have Robin Williams in it!?" and indeed Mr. Williams does make an appearance. While his cheeks are dry, his wrinkled and worried brow rests upon those familiar, furry forearms in a way that can only suggest that the deepest and most intense of fake tragedies has just taken place. Does it count as schadenfreude if the object of your joy is feigning their misery? I'm not sure but I can say that while some of the subjects of this book inspired serious contemplation of the import of human emotion in our daily experience of reality, others made me laugh so hard I nearly dropped the book. Yes, Jude Law in the fetal position and Ed Harris with the trembling, lower lip, I'm looking at you.

If a person wanted to find themselves on the other side of the camera, as the puppet master pulling the strings, it'd be hard to find a better source of inspiration than Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1988. Lee Goldberg's collection of descriptions of unsold pilots is outlandish and wild. Witness: Dr. Franken, a drama featuring a doctor who reanimates a dead accident victim with organs and limbs from a hospital medial bank. The resulting creature has the memories, convictions and emotions of the donors and goes about contacting the living associates of said patrons. Think of it as Frankenstein meets Highway to Heaven. Or, consider Clone Master which was to be a series in which a government scientist makes 13 clones of himself. Each clone is sent to battle evil and is the focus of his own episode. Presumably, each clone would meet a shadowy end and season two would have featured a fresh batch of 13 clones. Bad ideas? This book is chock-full of them. Ideas so bad that they're good? Yeah, there just might be a few of those in there too. Lots of opportunities here to draw out that perfectly emotionable performance!