One Year: Storyteller-in-Chief

In One Year: Storyteller-in-Chief, Junot Diaz connects the dots for me on why Obama's first year, following on the heels of his campaign, has felt so weird--as if Obama has somehow gotten lost...been lost to us.

There has been no story.

Diaz writes:

All year I’ve been waiting for Obama to flex his narrative muscles, to tell the story of his presidency, of his Administration, to tell the story of where our country is going and why we should help deliver it there. A coherent, accessible, compelling story—one that is narrow enough to be held in our minds and hearts and that nevertheless is roomy enough for us, the audience, to weave our own predilections, dreams, fears, experiences into its fabric. It should necessarily be a story eight years in duration, a story that no matter what our personal politics are will excite us enough to go out and reëlect the teller just so we can be there for the story’s end. But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all.

Diaz compares stories to Tolkien's "One Ring": stories rule us, they find us, they bring us together, they bind us, and, yes, they can pull us apart as well.

Less prettily: Tell a story is the most basic marketing advice a company can get.

So, come on, Obama team.
I'll start: It's a dark and stormy night.

Wondering just how much oil the US is importing?

And from where?

The Center for American Progress blogs about the amount we import daily and yearly from countries on the State Department's Travel Warning list (in 2008, 1,529,000 barrels from Saudi Arabia per day). Click map to enlarge.

Librarian Cliff Landis:

View below or click. Stick with it till the end (and, yes, I know, "devastation," but just stick with it).

No video here, just a still picture placeholding so you can listen to the song: Robyn Hitchcock beautifully covering Roxy Music's "More Than This":

Same-Sex Marriage Laws/First-Cousin Marriage Laws

I post this not in judgment or mockery of those who marry their first cousins, but because I was truly surprised:



Via madsimian (via the High Definite). Data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

"I'm gonna drive you in queer cars."

YouTube find: Two Nice Girls performing "The Queer Song" in 1991! (NSFW for f word)

A Journey Round My Skull

My favorite new blog find of 2009 was Will's A Journey Round My Skull. It features dazzling book illustrations from around the world, with a focus on forgotten illustrators and children's books. Every post is a visual feast. A great blog for fans of graphic design, poster art, etc. Almost every day I find an image I want to live with. Some examples...

From post The Swamp Ladies of Estonia, an illustration from Jüri Arrak's Panga-Rehe Jutud:

From post The Raven, an illustration from Lorenzo Mattotti and Lou Reed's The Raven:




From post Frolicsome Flowers of Evil, an illustration from Frolicsome Flowers-They See the Wonderful "Rajah Rug" by T. Benjamin Faucett (I'd like to use this on a party invitation):




From post Iranian Kids' Books, Part 2, an illustration from Farshid Mesghali's The Blue-Eyed Boy:




From post Rokuro Taniuchi 5:



...and on and on. I haven't even begun to dig into Will's (I don't know his last name) blogroll, but it looks amazing, too.