This past Sunday, The New York Times Book Review tackled a rather wide-ranging topic: Islam. In the issue, various scholars, intellectuals, and public figures, reviewed a couple of handfuls of books devoted to, in celebration, exploration, and/or criticism of the religion and culture.

Dutch Feminist and American Enterprise Institute Fellow Ayan Hirsi Ali reviews Lee Harris’ Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History, a book that purports the origins of Islamic fanaticism to come from a place of cultural self-defense (in opposition to growing modernization). In her review, Hirsi Ali drops the following money-quote from Harris’ book: “While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive and ruthless.” Also in the issue, Swiss Muslim academic and theologian Tariq Ramadan delves into the Koran, and its many interpretations, and Canadian Muslim journalist, and NYU faculty member Irshad Manji offers some cutting criticisms of John Kelsay’s book Arguing the Just War in Islam. As an added bonus, on the Book Review’s website, readers can also find first chapters of American Crescent, The Adventures of Amir Hamza, Islamophobia, and other relatively new releases relevant to the topic.

While it’s really late in the game for North Americans to still know relatively little-to-nothing about this religion/culture/region, for those who are still in the dark (and afraid to ask, as they used to say about sex in the 60s), this is a worthwhile primer with which to kick off an educational journey.

Having penned A Few Good Men, The American President, and created The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin is notorious. Despite the relatively miserable failure of his television show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, he has found yet another success as the writer of Charlie Wilson’s War, and apparently he’s got more than that to offer up in ‘08. Most recently there have been reports that Sorkin has written a script entitled The Trial of the Chicago 7, that focuses on the trial of seven leftist activists for their involvement in the riots at the ‘68 Chicago Democratic Convention. Steven Spielberg is developing the project and is supposedly intending to direct the film. Most recent news regarding the project places Sacha Baron Cohen in the role of Abbie Hoffman, the founder of the Yippie movement. In addition to Hoffman, the Chicago Seven (sometimes known as the Chicago Eight) included Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden (one of the architects of the Students for a Democratic Society), David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Bobby Seale (of the Black Panther Party), Lee Weiner, and John Froines.

But this is not the only coverage of the event that Hollywood has offered recently. In 2007, Brett Morgan, the director of The Kid Stays In The Picture, made a film that chronicled the event featuring archive footage, animation, and other techniques that aspire to show the event in a more experiential fashion as opposed to the classic documentary format.

It would appear that through painting pictures of nostalgic rebellion, Hollywood aspires to not only represent the frustration of the American citizen with the state of their own nation, but also with a longing for a time in which people lashed out in response.

It’s finally the time of year where by lighting the candles on the menorah or kinara, putting up the Christmas Tree, drowning in rum-nog, and endless, endless amounts of family, the end of 2007 will will make way for rebirth via the coming of 2008. In an all-encompassing atmosphere of electronically disseminated information and opinion, no year’s end would be complete without hundreds of lists proclaiming what was hip and what was not. These, the scribes and screeds of well-respected, less respected, unknown, and self-proclaimed decision-makers alike, have become a regular fixture in the time of out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new.

The Onion, whose list title, 2007: What The Hell Just Happened? serves as the most appropriate summary of how I feel about the years’ events. It recaps the fake news rag’s top ten news stories. Included are, Nation In Frenzy About Little Wizard Boy and All His Little Wizard Friends, Nation’s Crumbling Infrastructure Probably Some Sort Of Metaphor, and Rove Resigns To Spend More Time In Shadows.

The Brooklyn Vegan has a pretty good take on the end of the year, offering pieces by nearly ten personalities. Jon Glaser touches on Top 10 Songs I Played For My Son In 2007 That I Am Glad He Seemed To Like, which has little, if anything to mention about things that happened or stuff that was released this year (which is oddly refreshing). Artists included on the list are The Beat Happening, Yo La Tango, and Christina Aguillera (which he defensively justifies by quoting Herbie Hancock’s praise of her voice). David Cross celebrates books about atheism, advocates scuba diving, enjoys BET’s Hell Date, and comments on the sanctity of little girls singing along to Soulja Boy:

“Almost as great as middle aged white people gleefully singing a song celebrating a place to go for anonymous gay sex during the 7th inning stretch at Yankee stadium.”

And of course, where would any list of lists be without mention of Rolling Stone, a magazine that seems to owe more than half of its copy to well written and researched anti-establishment journalism or massive, massive lists. This time around, they visit the 50 albums of the year, which includes Arcade Fire, Jay Z, Bruce Springsteen, and every other artist the magazine typically fawns all over. A better list (for what is becoming a better medium) from the same issue is the top 40 reasons they enjoyed watching television. It appears that, like many folks I know, Rolling Stone enjoy Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, Kid Nation (for justifying its hatred of children), and getting stoned and watching Planet Earth in HD.

I don’t know about you, but when I think of James Taylor, I think of cocaine, bad balding pony-tails, and heartfelt (albeit lame) music (that I guiltily enjoy/have been known to cry in response to). When other folks think of him, and I am referring quite specifically to director Monte Hellman, they think of him as a drag race-hungry driver who, with the help of a companion is making his way across the country. Hellman put that particular vision of Taylor onto film 35 years ago in the form of Two-Lane Blacktop, and its now making its way onto a beautiful DVD transfer care of the Criterion Collection.

Forgetting that Hellman would make the second sequel of Silent Night, Deadly Night (”You Better Watch Out”) 17 years after releasing Blacktop*, he long ago made Cockfighter, a film that one IMDB commentator (whose credentials are unknown, though his opinion is appreciated all the same) calls “easily the best hicksploitation film ever made.” Take that, Deliverance). He would apply his craft to this transcendent car/country film in an era of 1970s-pre-embargo cheap gasoline, when telling a story about white guys, cars, the road, and the exploration of the United States was almost a rite of passage for celebrated American storytellers. As an extra treat, the film features Harry Dean Stanton, for whom Roger Ebert partly made the Stanton/Walsh Rule (”No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”)

The DVD, as is most often the case with Criterion releases, contains a lot of cool, cool stuff including interviews with most of the folks who appeared in the film (and are still alive). Check it out here.

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The next time you’re strolling through SoHo, you might hear an apparition whispering in your ear. Of course, something so special would be too good to be true, right? And of course, like all things that we consider to be too good to be true, that whisper in your ear is not a whisper at all; it’s actually an advertisement.

This article in Advertising Age offers an overview of a new technology that makes a beam of sound, beams it from a speaker attached to a billboard, and whispers an advertisement right into your ear. In this particular case, the billboard in question is advertising the A&E show Paranormal State.

Check out this article, which is similarly fascinating/frightening. This time, instead of beaming sound into your ear, advertisers survey information about you from your car antenna. Similar to the way that Gmail or Amazon survey your likes, some billboards are able to sense the sort of music drivers are listen to and advertise to the highest represented demographic.

Michel Foucault is looking upon us with scorn from that great bathhouse in the sky.

Huzzah! A group photography show from the ever-talented Tobin Yelland is on the immediate horizon. Older school Thrasher subscribers/fiends will be familiar with Yelland for his contributions to the magazine. At the age of 15, he documented his young involvement with the skate scene in San Francisco (and has claimed that he got paid thirty dollars for his first shot). Since then, he has been published in a few handfuls of publications, including the New York Times. The Yelland-curated show “Hommies” will launch on Saturday the 15th at the Fuse Gallery.

Showing serious focus on documentary photography by the 8th grade, Yelland has since established a sharp eye and impeccable taste. The show should be a good one, showcasing the work of artists who largely rely on their friends as subjects and inspiration. It will feature, among others, Yelland, Dennis McGrath, Angela Boatwright, and Mickey Reyes. It runs through January 12, 2008. Be there or be square.

Gosh-darn the ever-talented (and beautiful!) Whitney Matheson over at USA Today’s Pop Candy for getting to this before we did! But it sure is exciting to see Vincent Gallo back in business by way of a Terry Richardson-conceived and directed commercial for Belvedere Vodka. People tend to crap all over Gallo for directing The Brown Bunny, forgetting that Buffalo 66 was amazing. Also there was that business about him selling his seed on his website, but I digress. The commercial, which features Gallo being his press unfriendly, prickish self at a party, is a refreshing switch from the normal WASPy cocktail hour that occupies many televised booze adverts. As an added bonus, Richadson’s delightfully creepy mug makes an appearance at the very end.

See the ad here.

As if the Apple Store, in all of its two-story, nerdy glory isn’t horrifyingly crowded enough during the holiday season, tonight, the New Pornographers will bring to the SoHo location a power-pop loving army. The Canadian supergroup (old hat media terms for popular culture are a dime a dozen today!), which of course features members of Destroyer, Age of Electric, and Neko Case (among others) will go on at 8:00. At that point, thousands of iPods and other small, expensive Apple devices will be slipped into skinny jeans a plenty in the largest, most passive aggressive electronics heist staged by hipsters in U.S. history.

Years ago, a friend went to St. Lucia and (unironically) bought for me a t-shirt that showed a Rasta confronting a local, joint on lips, exclaiming, “St. Lucia: Same Shit, Different Day.” A few years later, my mother bought me a boxy number from a Voodoo museum in New Orleans.

Travel t-shirts suck.

It didn’t used to be this way. Long ago, one could buy baby blue, light brown and hunters orange colored, paper-thin shirts that featured late-60s/early 70s style clip art images of people and landscapes. They were emblazoned with the shirt’s locale of origin: Colorado, the Grand Canyon, New York City, Salt Lake City, Nashville, Tennessee.

For six years, while improving upon the concept of the travel/locale t, Dangerous Breed has worked out a better, more nostalgic product by mating throwback designs with enviously beautiful examples of aesthetic discontent. Instead of celebrating a stay at a lazy, suburban, US-based tourist town, Dangerous Breed remembers skiing Baghdad, discovering the magic in Iran and spending time in Saudi Arabia (a “sportsman’s Mecca”).

The sweet and sour juxtapositions of the shirts challenge the observer to reconsider the popular news portrayal of supposed danger zones and allows the wearer to remind their family, friends, co-workers and everyone encountered throughout the day that there is indeed a world outside of an otherwise mundane vacationscape.

Check them out here.

With What Would Jesus Buy? shedding further light on Reverend Billy as he carries on his post-millenium crusade against endemic consumerism and the Flying Spaghetti Monster finding new press coverage, religion is helping to tickle our funny bone just in time for the holiday season. In fact, religion hasn’t been this funny since The Onion reported that Mohammed Atta and his stoic band of hijackers were surprised to find themselves festering in hell rather than living it up with 67 virgins.

What Would Jesus Buy?, cleverly abbreviated as WWJB?, is a glimpse into the life of performance artist and comedian Bill Talen’s alter-ego Reverend Billy (see the trailer here). For those unfamiliar with his schtick, the reverend is, as the New York Times has described him, “bleach-blond pompadoured and an impressive presence at 6-foot-3 in his pale brown leisure suit” who travels around New York and the rest of the country denouncing the evils of rampant consumerism. Occasionally, you’ll find him (and sometimes the Stop Shopping Choir) exorcising a store or a Starbucks, on pundit television shows warning of the coming “Shopocalypse”, or anywhere else he finds delivery of the message urgently necessary. Unfortunately for Talen and the gang, the film, which was released a few weeks ago, has received mediocre to negative reviews. However, having personally seen the reverend in action and exhilarated by his delivery and message, I am excited to see him and his exploits on the big screen regardless of the bad press.