. a blogumn by Howard Leder Lately, I’ve been obsessed with plastic water bottles, particularly those ubiquitous little 16-ounce jobs that seem to have taken over what it means to drink water. I’ve been reading the book Food Matters by Mark Bittman, food writer for the New York Times and the author of the book How to Cook Everything.  One of his key concerns in the book is the interconnectedness between our daily, individual diet and the economy & environment at large.  For instance—and maybe I’m the last person to learn this—agricultural livestock production accounts for 1/5th  of all greenhouse gasses.  I’ll write more about this book at a later time: it is by and large a prescription for eating a lighter diet, higher in traditional plant foods, but he connects this to the bigger idea that we simply cannot maintain the style of eating to which we’ve grown accustomed in the West.  Put quite simply, if the entire world were to eat the way we eat, it would destroy the planet. When it comes to water, he pulls out an incredible statistic.  He compares the amount of energy it takes to produce various foods: one calorie of corn takes on average about 2-3 calories of energy to produce (in the amount of energy needed to water, fertilize, harvest & transport it).  One calorie of beef, by contrast, requires about 40 calories of energy to produce (when you factor in feed, grain, fuel for transportation etc.) The staggering statistic for me, though, came when he started talking about water: a one-quart plastic bottle of water—which has zero calories—takes 2400 calories of energy to produce: The bottle alone.  Bittman says: Overproduction drives overconsumption…but these negative effects can be diminished by more moderate consumption, which in...

. a blogumn by Howard Leder Wanted to follow up just a bit on my last blogumn, where I proposed by way of a New Year’s resolution to pick professional sports teams & follow them for one year, something I have never done.  In my typical nerdy way, I began researching the teams, going to their websites, reading the sports pages, watching ESPN.  I also picked up a copy of Football for Dummies, which while it’s not exactly Tolstoy did get me into the inner workings of the game & the players. (As a side note, there is a whole cottage industry of books explaining sports to women, wives in particular.  Alongside the Girlfriend’s Guide to Football, my faves are Get Your Own Damn Beer, I’m Watching the Game! and Snot Bubbles!  A Football Primer for Moms, Wives & Significant Others) I got a lot of advice about this from various folks, some of it useful, some not so useful (for the record, I’ve never been a fan of the Bourgeois Pig, but we’ll let that pass….) Many people recommended favorite childhood teams.  Others suggested “Root for your ZIP code” – i.e. if you live in LA, follow LA teams. So I’ve adopted a kind of two-pronged strategy.  One is to follow local teams so I can actually go to the games.  My friend Kate has promised to take me to see the Dodgers in the Spring, as much for the baseball as the men in tight pants.  I’m bringing the opera glasses. Locally, I’ve also decided to watch UCLA.  This was not a tough decision for me.  I went to USC for grad school & logic says I should stick with them.  But USC always strikes me as too many whiny rich kids...

. A blogumn by Howard Leder This New Year, I’ve decided to shake it up a little in the resolutions department.  Sure, I have the same typical burning desire to lose some weight & completely renovate my life, but I’m keeping those to myself.  This year, the resolution I’m making public is this: I’m picking teams. I’ve decided to pick a team in each of the three big American sports: football, basketball and baseball – with an added team for college football – and then follow them for a year. I’ve never really followed sports at all.  Truth to tell, I’ve always been rather horrified by them.  As a youngster, my involvement in sports tended to be kind of grudging – grudging on the part of the other kids.  They would allow me to play positions like deep, deep left field, safely shielded behind someone else who was actually covering the left field duties.  Once deployed to my position, I felt less than useless – I couldn’t catch, I couldn’t throw – so I would feign maladies typically reserved for Victorian ladies, like migraine headaches or a severe case of the vapors. “I think I need to spend this inning on the bench,” I’d gasp, fanning myself with my baseball glove. But the past couple months, I watched the complete Season One of the show Friday Night Lights…and I loved it.  And not just the soap opera, family drama aspect of it, but the football as well.  To my surprise, I found myself getting into the competitive, nail biting tension of team, spectator sports. Part of my difficulty with these games is I have no idea what’s going on. I once went to a Seattle Mariners game with someone who actually understood the inner...

. A blogumn by Howard Leder Christmas with the family coming up, the first time in several years.  My mother is crazy for Christmas in a way I’ve always found both charming and a little scary.  She goes at it with an elaborate, over-the-top sense of show, filling the house with as many as three Christmas trees and enough wreaths and garlands to wrap a small Bloomingdale’s.  She gives gifts with a frenzy that most people reserve for Nascar races, and there isn’t a single winking, blinking or tinkling Christmas geegaw that hasn’t followed her home over the years.  If it lights up, spins & sings “Oh Holy Night,” chances are it has spent at least one holiday season on our mantle. Now, in every family, it seems, one of the children has to pick up the Christmas torch and try to keep going the sense of tradition and belonging.  In my family, my younger brother and I have come to treat Christmas with a kind of grudging disdain.  Christmas has taken on a bizarre, almost surreal quality with my family of late, mostly because there aren’t any kids around.  None of my brothers and I have married, and none of us have children.  So it has this static, frozen-in-time quality, a dying ritual that in this season of joy gives little warmth. But my older brother: he is the Ghost of Christmases Past, Present and Future, celebrating it with an abandon my little brother and I can only gawk at, like two acolytes smoking & snickering behind the church between services.  My older brother holds on to Christmas with both hands and all of his teeth, determined that we’ll celebrate it the old, right way.  It can feel a little dogged sometimes, and...

. A blogumn by Howard Leder A lot of folks have written on here about habits:  habits gained, habits lost.  For myself, I’ve put a lot of work of late into trying to build certain new habits – especially around time & money – but there is an old one I’ve had a lot of trouble shaking….. Knuckle cracking.  I’ve had no peace from knuckle cracking since I was about 12 years old. Popping my knuckles started out innocently enough.  It was the early 80’s.  I was the skinny, screeching outsider in my 6th grade class.  Utterly inept at sports and hopelessly disinterested in girls, I was inversely good at stuff that had absolutely no social caché: piano & role playing games. Fads & fashions would sweep the school: one of the big ones was the “pocket comb” craze of the late 70’s, early 80’s: everyone had these stiff plastic combs in soft pastel colors with a handle that you had to have sticking out of your back pocket.  At opportune moments, you would whip it out & feather your hair back in perfect layers. Now my hair was cut by mother at home in the kitchen.  To call it unstylish is almost a compliment.  It was a straight, lank, bowl-like cut that was most remiscent of the Beatles in their moptop days, which was the last time I think my mother bothered to check in on what men were doing with their hair.  Worse yet, I had no idea how to comb it into the current looks I’d seen on the boys I idolized at school.  But, I thought, I could at least tackle the wearing of the comb.  I would hide out in the bathroom–my back to the mirror–carefully placing & re-placing...

. A blogumn by Howard Leder People ask me all the time: “How can I get into opera?”  I assume what they’re asking is not so much how can I launch a singing career & get in a road company for the Marriage of Figaro, but rather what do I need to do to go to & enjoy an opera.  Since I studied singing as an undergrad & worked for several years for one of the larger U.S. opera companies–and can be heard frequently raving on & on about this or that production I just saw–I love answering this question. People want to know where to start.  Two things always seem like the biggest impediment: the (ridiculously) high ticket prices & the somewhat esoteric nature of the whole preceding.  Everybody of course has heard the big names: La Boheme, Carmen, The Magic Flute, but past that, it seems like a lot of white noise, difficult to sort out & understand. To the rescue, the Metropolitan Opera in New York has recently introduced a novel way of presenting opera: they beam Hi Def transmissions of their live productions into movie theaters all over the country. In Los Angeles, the operas screen at several movie theaters throughout the area; the screening times are usually at 10 am.  I’ve been to a number of them now, and I highly recommend it. One of the main selling points for the Met in HD is the price: $22.  Compared to the steep prices charged at the actual Met, this is an incredible bargain.  It provides a great way to dip your toe in the operatic pool without a lot of risk.  If you don’t like it, no sweat.  (The Met in HD screens at USC as well, where admission...

. A blogumn by Howard Leder The last couple days, I’ve become intrigued with a new piece of software on my computer: RescueTime, a software/website combo that bills itself as “Ridiculously Easy Time Management and Analytics.” In a nutshell, it’s a little program that every two seconds scans your computer to see what you are doing.  So, whichever software you are using, it logs it and for how long; if you are on the web, it records the current website you are visiting & categorizes it.  For instance, Facebook it recognizes as Social Networking, the New York Times (or Fierce & Nerdy) as News/Blogs, and so on. If you’re at all like me — a habitual time waster — you can see the immediate appeal of this.  Like many people, when I’m at work–or at home writing–I tend to drift between “work state” and (for lack of a better name) “procrastination state,” typically riding that forward tilting wave of web surfing, twittering & YouTubing that seems to suck up countless hours of my waking life.  (Lately, of course, there’s the presidential election, which seems to require near constant surveillance out of fear that the whole bloody thing will unravel in a repeat of 2004.)  This is a state of affairs that I’ve been almost perpetually unhappy with and that I’ve been looking for ways to reform. The first thing almost anyone will tell you when trying to make a change — particularly when breaking an addiction or letting go of a bad habit — is to develop awareness of your behavior. It’s a model I’ve put to use elsewhere in my life, particularly in regards to money. Several years ago, I woke up & found myself in heavy debt. I had known in the...

. A blogumn by Howard Leder Recently in my reading, I came across a new, old idea: The Commonplace Book.  The commonplace book–or commonplacing–was the practice of keeping a notebook or journal where you would jot down phrases & passages from things you read that you wanted to remember & use later on. It’s similar to the notes you might keep for a class, except this was a notebook kept over a whole lifetime, a summary of all the places the reading mind had rambled. Susan Wise Bauer–in her book The Well-Educated Mind: A guide to the classical education you never had–describes them as “artificial memories,” saying: When we sit in front of Plato or Shakespeare or Conrad, “simple reading” isn’t enough. We must learn to fix our minds, to organize our reading so that we are able to retain the skeleton of ideas that pass in front of our eyes….How is this done?  By keeping a journal to organize your thoughts about your reading.  What we write, we remember.  What we summarize in our own words becomes our own. According to Ms. Wise Bauer, the commonplace book is quite different from what we now think of as a journal or diary, which has become a place to reflect on your feelings & record the ephemera of day-to-day life.  The commonplace book is externalized, looking outside the keeper, interlacing her mind with the books & thinkers encountered on a daily basis.  On a surface level, many online commentators see blogging as a form of the commonplace book. Famous examples of commonplace books were kept by Thomas Jefferson, the poet Milton, and the novelist EM Forster. You can browse through Jefferson’s Commonplace Books online at the Library of Congress.  Leafing through them, it is a...

. A blogumn by Howard Leder To continue where I left off with my last post and my dread over losing touch with the written word: with my usual manic fervor, I launched myself on an ambitious new reading program. Now don’t laugh: I’m reading the Great Books.  Literally, the Great Books.  The Great Books of the Western World were a series put together by American philosopher & pedagogue Mortimer Adler in the mid-1940’s, an encyclopedic survey of the bedrock of Western thought from Homer to Freud that was published by the Encyclopedia Britannica. I first learned about the Great Books when I was a senior in high school from watching a documentary about Adler on PBS. In the documentary Adler & a group of students were discussing some idea or other (Justice?  Liberty?  Freedom?) in the most brilliant way imaginable, like a modern day Socrates & his disciples in that market at Athens.  For me, it was a seductive image. Now, this was back in the late 80’s, and the idea of the Great Books was very much under attack, particularly at my college Oberlin.  The notion of “Great Books” was seen as little more than a trophy case for dead white guy writers.  But still they kept luring me back, always with a certain guilt & fascination.  “I am!  I am reading Toni Morrison,” I would say by day, while secretly longing for Herodotus at night. (And while Morrison has not cracked the Great Books glass ceiling in the most recent edition, they did add Virginia Woolf & Willa Cather…) Mostly, it was the idea of The Set, the set itself of the Great Books that always exerted this strange pull on me.  On one level, it’s just a list or syllabus. ...

A Blogumn By Howard Leder The notes & thoughts of a traveller waiting to be spit back up on dryland The last couple of weeks, I’ve been under the spell of an article I read in The Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” which put the fear of God into me when it comes to reading. Now, when I say “reading,” I’m talking about good old-fashioned, sitting with a book for hours reading, which I’ve noticed has become more & more difficult for me over the last couple of years.  Apparently I’m not alone.  The writer of the article–Nicholas Carr–compares himself to the computer HAL in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” who forlornly moans, “Dave, my mind is going,” as the astronaut pulls his brain offline, piece by piece. Carr feels that in the internet age, our ability to read is paradoxically diminished by the web.  A paradox since the Web is of course rich in word. But the Internet’s words are constantly pushing you towards something else, both through the hyperlink as well as the database-like structure of the internet.  It encourages a restless, wandering kind of reading.  Carr says: Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words.  Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski. In my own life, I had experienced the same shift.  “I can’t finish a book anymore,” I’d complain to people who I knew to be readers. At first I assumed it was just my own life: getting older, the demands of work taking over, concentration maxed out on other concerns (like who lost on “Project Runway” this week).  Maybe reading had lost it’s usefulness. But Carr feelings about how the web influences not just the contents of...