Good word

"As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest."

-- Christopher Buckley

Viva Berrymans

In my new editing gig at Isthmus I don't have much time to write magazine-length features. That's too bad, since that writing is the most satisfying work I do, and also the most challenging.

But I'm delighted that in this week's paper is an article I wrote about Lou and Peter Berryman, the local legends of comic folk music. It is here. I hope you read it. I am proud of it.

Walk these hills

On our summer vacation in Townsend, Tenn., I was glad to spend some time relaxing at the place my folks own there: Reading, playing music, idling. But the property's great draw is its proximity to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the forested wonderland whose underutilized Little Greenbriar entrance is about eight minutes away from the old homestead.

Many -- most? -- visitors to the park explore it by car. But it is crisscrossed with hiking trails, and the best way to take it in is to strap on sturdy footwear and walk. So Ereck and I went on strolls of lesser and greater lengths, hikes that took us to roaring cascades, to groves of mighty, old-growth poplars, to stunning, damp grottoes of rhododendron in lush bloom.

Something strange happened as I walked those paths. I kept flashing back to, of all things, vacations I took as a kid to Disney World, and I especially remembered the paved paths I trod at the Frontierland attraction Tom Sawyer Island. Like many Disney attractions, Tom Sawyer Island is about storytelling, of a kind. As with Space Mountain, It's a Small World or the Haunted Mansion, you start at some point; you move through the attraction, either on foot or in some kind of transport; you take in imagery, words, music. A narrative unfolds, and in the process you are, the designers hope, variously thrilled, frightenened, amused, charmed. The same goes for tourist attractions of many kinds: museum exhibits, house tours, caves. The difference with Tom Sawyer Island is that there is freedom, or at least the illusion of freedom. You don't follow a single path. You're free to roam around -- or, more accurately, "free," since your movements are in fact limited by the attraction's design.

I got the same feeling of freedom/"freedom" in the Smokies park. On the one hand, it was liberating to choose from the hundreds of miles of paths, to experience the almost total solitude of the park's remote areas, to encounter flowers, deer, tiny frogs in their wild state.

On the other hand, the Smokies park is in some ways no less an artificial construct than the Disney park. The Smokies park exists partly as the result of an act of preservation, of course, but also acts of creation. Those trails have been blazed, preserved. They are well marked by handsome wood signs. They travel by campgrounds, roads, parking lots.

The weirdest thing about the Disney flashbacks is that I unconsciously kept waiting for the narrative to solidly kick in. Disney attractions let you experience stories immersively: Mr. Toad has a wild ride, Tom Sawyer runs around in the woods, Snow White's prince comes, etc. But although you can pick up on hints of narrative from the Smokies' paths, they're very different kinds of stories. Years ago, mountains were formed, and plant and animal species evolved. More recently, Native Americans lived here, and then European settlers. There were quaint folkways, and also acts of violence. Now, for the most part, no one lives here. Very different from Mr. Toad's wild ride.

But mostly what I contemplated on the paths weren't stories but rather mysteries. Why is this roaring cascade here? Why this lush rhododendron?

I still haven't come up with an answer.

Big screen

I'm fascinated by the New York Times' take on the Blu-Ray release of How the West Was Won, the rare narrative film made in the original, three-strip Cinerama process. Dave Kehr writes: "The images are so crisp as to feel almost unreal; the depth of field seems dreamlike, infinite, with the blades of grass in the foreground as sharply in focus as the snow-capped mountains in the distant background."

I'm transported back more than ten years, when a friend and I made the 10-hour round-trip drive from Chicago to an art cinema in Dayton, Ohio to see This Is Cinerama, the first film made in the three-strip process, back in 1952. Some nut -- um, enthusiast -- had cobbled together enough equipment and film reels to reproduce the Cinerama process, which has three projectors going at once to create a giant, wide image. Like most three-strip Cinerama films (only a handful were made), This Is Cinerama is a travelogue, with scenes shot on a roller coaster; in Venice; and at a Florida water ski show.

I loved the experience, not least because the various bits of film had been gathered from different sources and had aged differently. So sometimes the image in the middle was, say, pinker than the others. Okay, that aspect was more interesting than I'm making it sound.

And 50 years later, old prints notwithstanding, the presentation looked simply wonderful -- as enthralling as Kehr makes it sound, except that I was looking at a huge movie screen, not a television. Widescreen TV is great, but you still can't beat moviegoing. I want the film of my life to be in three-strip Cinerama.

That's sure not to backfire!

An Obama proxy links Sarah Palin, tenuously, to the Nazis. Or Nazi sympathizing. Or something.

Good word

"When Republicans aren't complaining about someone's lack of experience, they are calling for term limits."

-- Michael Kinsley

Arugula-induced amnesia

I'm as effete a Blue Stater as you'll find, but I'm regularly dismayed to see members of my latte-sipping cohort willfully misunderstand their fellow Americans. I'm thinking most recently of today's Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times on Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor who's John McCain's vice presidential pick. Here's smug Dowd:

Obama may have been president of The Harvard Law Review, but Palin graduated from the University of Idaho with a minor in poli-sci and worked briefly as a TV sports reporter.

Now Dowd and I may be impressed by Obama's Harvard Law Review credential. (Especially Dowd, who went to Catholic University of America (where?).) But does she remember why Republicans took over the government some years back? Because Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and a couple of generations' worth of Western and Southern Republican politicians mobilized a great many voters who either a) didn't care about Harvard or b) hated Harvard a lot, and either way thought a University of Idaho education was a fine thing.

If Obama wants to win, what he must do is expand his base beyond Prius-driving, Harvard-enthralled gays and lesbians and convince a whole lot of voters that he's a great guy despite having been president of the Harvard Law Review.