The New York Minute

Anew

2008-10-17T13:35:00.001-04:00

I'm living in Spain & posting daily to my new blog, This Analog Life. My internet presence becomes more & more difficult to make sense out of.

Reconstruction

2007-11-11T22:35:00.000-05:00

A blank slate may make this easier. While a new beginning charged with vitality and purpose is prepared, I'm taking this offline for a bit. Soon to reemerge.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

2007-09-03T02:07:00.000-04:00

Sea Captain of Cortes

There is a broken sea captain on my stoop right now. We're back at 23 Cortes, the brownstones baking into poundcakes in the heat, the Massachusetts Pikeway roaring like the ocean. Off in the distance, the South End shimmers. The Hancock building reflects cloudless.

The captain is laid out like a rag doll. He has not changed his uniform in ten and a half years. He still wears a white sailors' cap relatives keep washed. He wears Elvis Costello glasses. He chomps cigars. He whistles tunelessly. Occasionally, an only slightly younger woman will come outside and, with the help of a friend, stuff him into a shopping cart and wheel him off into the distance. After a short while, he is wheeled back.

General opinion is divided as to why the Sea Captain is the way he is. Some say he was a commercial fisherman in the eighties, that he poached whales, that he had a practice of throwing himself onto the carcasses naked in the middle of the night and rolling in the blubber. This in particular was a mystery - nobody knows why he did it, or why it gave him such evident pleasure to bathe himself in the kill, but it did. There are those who say we shouldn't wonder what happened next, a man goes doing something like that. They might be right.

They say a few militant young idealists tried to stop him one day - the poaching, not the nocturnal rolling - and he killed them. With a harpoon gun. PLUNK PLUNK PLUNK, one after the other. Bleeding into their little idealist rubber dinghy. The idealists were overweight and pale. It was unfortunate that the local reporter assigned to cover the story had a morbid sense of humor and none of shame. The headline read: Poaching Ahab Spears Three White Whales.

It never saw the light of day, of course. The layout editor near about had a coronary, canned the story, screamed at the reporter for a couple minutes and spent the rest of his life trying to get him fired, which wasn't long, since he got clipped in a seven-car pileup on the PCH five days later.

The cub reporter didn't even get fired. He was fresh out of a certain Back Bay journalism school (Go Lions) and had a famous dad, who took it upon himself to take the newspaper's owner - a doughy, unpopular man who sweat profusely and hid surprising naiveté underneath his callous, newspaper-owning exterior - to a glitzy LA restaurant, where they celebrity watched over Boston-imported lobster, and saw - among others - rising star and not-yet-fanatic Mel Gibson. The pleasant afterglow of fame put the owner into a forgiving mood when it came time to consider the cub reporter's future employment; he was shunted aside for form's sake and made a dirt-digging entertainment correspondent with a small army of crack photographers at his disposal, under orders to shoot on sight, which catered to his talent for punchy headlines and his ruthless distaste for phsyical imperfection.

And the Sea Captain? Disgraced, imprisoned - by the time he was let out he was a shadow of his former self. He had relatives back east. He tried lobster fishing for a while, but he was doing it with a pole off of a dock in the Boston Harbor, the one in front of the Aquarium. Every once in a while, drunken merchant marines would stumble up to ask him if he'd caught anything. After nine days without food or water, without abandoning his post, he was picked up by the police for loitering. He lost his taste for wandering after that, and for fishing too. Somewhere in his brain lingered a desire to roll in the carcasses of dead whales, but the thought gave him no real pleasure, anymore - just a kind of dry appreciation. Those who hold up this side of things maintain that's what he's thinking about when he smokes his cigars, whistling sea shantys. He loves the Mass Pike, they say, because the sound of the traffic reminds him of surf breaking on a beach.

* * *

So one school has it. Others say he never saw the ocean in his life, that he both loves and hates the wide expanse of water he cannot bring himself to visit, that the distance terrifies him and excites him, that the great tragedy of his life is that since he was a boy he had dreamed of becoming a sailor, only to be rendered jellyboned and yellow when the time came. Some take it further and say he has never left the stoop at all, that he is paralyzed, either figuratively - Joyce's Dubliners - or actually. Or that like Galileo he has been under house arrest for these longs years and has grown accustomed to it. The Galileans particularly can be found in corners arguing in hushed tones about what got him arrested in the first place - your typical Galilean is a conspiracy nut, and like most conspiracy nuts, the only thing he distrusts more than authority are other nuts like him. There are more Galilean theories than there are Galilean theorists: the Captain is a breakthrough scientist condemned to obscurity by oil corporations, a religious heretic with access to the lost Gospel of James, a Vietnam-era government mind control experiment, a renegade Nazi, a high-ranking Cold War defector.

The people who think he has never seen the sea are mostly either Ironists caught up in the fish-out-of-water aspect, or Freudians who smugly point to the phallic seaman hat as compensation for his exile from the great mother-womb of the ocean. The Ironists never fail to point out that the Mariner (as they call him) lives on Cortes, parallel to Columbus and Isabella. Born and raised on a street named after great explorers, weighed down with the examples of history and the illustrations of his childhood storybooks, unable even to approach the fate that mocks him from the streetsigns... - At this point the Ironists chuckle suavely. One of them, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, draws enough breath to make a smallpox joke.

The Mystics don't fail to point out his birthplace either, but keep mirth out of it entirely. They solemnly note the the birthplace is a sign of reincarnation. He is Columbus, they'll say, bowed down by the weight of his sins, by the decimation of an entire race, by the terrible knowledge of his own shortcomings, by the fact that Vespucci got the continent named after himself. There is a sect of Mystic Colerigites who claim to the point of torture that they can see a shadowy seagull around his neck.

The bitterest feud, of all the schools and sects that debate the life of the Sea Captain, lies between the Keatsian Fantasists and the Neo-Realists. The Keatsian Fantasists have given up on the idea that we can ever know the Sea Captain's true origins. Reason, they say, cannot give us a satisfactory answer, and so we will while away our time inventing one. They believe that if it is beautiful it may as well be true. They are Keats' teenage daughters, hung up on romance and invention. Their origin myths are deliberately frivolous, and often a little sad. The Captain is an aged leprechaun, his wealth gone, the rainbow sunk beneath the ocean. For centuries he has dived for his shattered pot of gold, sailed the seven seas for his vanished wealth, enslaved entire populations to attempt to reclaim it, marched with Cortes on the Incans on the rumor of gold. Or the Captain is not a sailor at all but a merman, exiled on land for loving a human woman, or perhaps the son of a mermaid and a sailor, brought up on the sea, paralyzed without it, caught on dry land like a gasping fish. He is immortal. He is the only immortal. He is (pick one) Jesus Christ; Cain, son of Abel; William Shakespeare; Mark Twain; Karl Marx; Johaan Gutenberg; Leonardo daVinci; Homer, as it was in Borges' The Aleph. He is a famine-stricken Santa Claus set to sea by commercialization. He is the Ghost of Christmas Past. He is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, satisfied for the last ten hundred years that humanity can slaughter itself without assistance, waiting patiently for the end of it all.

The Neo-Realists, dour young Turks that they are, wish to end all of this pointless theorizing. The truth of the matter is, they say over the din, voices still cracking occasionally, is that the Captain is a sad old man. He wears a thrift store uniform and a hat because he's crazy. He sits outside because he's put there, like a potted plant. He smokes because he's addicted. At this point, the Joyceans try to add an epiphany, but the Neo-Realists usually shout them down. The truth is, they say louder, we call him the Sea Captain because he wears that silly hat and for no other reason. The truth is, life is an awful mess and we don't know why things are where they are.

In the corner, the Cynics - and there are always one or two of them - the Cynics smoke cigars and smile mordantly.

Little Bears & the Memory of War

2007-09-03T01:36:00.000-04:00

Notes from Madrid

Madrid is built along the same triumphal lines as all capitals by fiat - St. Petersburg; Washington, D.C. There are palaces, Bourbon and Habsburg, royal gardens, wide boulevards suited for processions and troop movements.

The melancholy and fanatic Philip II came to it in the middle of the sixteenth century and found a small provincial town alone amidst the endless arid plain and the wind. He declared his reign from there, in that place, whose only virtue was its location - at the center of a stubborn and fractured peninsula. For years the only business of Madrid was the Court.

In January, when I was there, the Jardines Botánicas - a walled garden next to the Prado - lie shrouded in a ghostly white haze pierced by sunlight and made luminous. The trees are leafless and mournful. The hedges and the cyprus still bloom green, amidst the dry branches and the old stone and the careful rows where little grows. Its beauty is still evident but it is subdued, autumnal, as something in long decline. Dry leaves cluster the hardbeaten dirt paths. Benches sit empty.

Nearby is the Reína Sofia, the contemporary art museum whose fame rests in the huge tormented howl that is Picasso's Guérnica. In a long hall devoted to the deconstruction of the immortal painting is Dora Maar's series of photographs of the painting's creation in stages - the thing that strikes you is its revision. At the very center, leaping up from the middle of the canvas, an arm thrusts a torch aloft. A bull in the corner gazes placidly. But Picasso continues, filling in - details are changed, places painted over. Slowly the bull's face contorts, twists. The arm is broken and then - suddenly - it is removed entirely. The torch - that organic, classical sign of hope and knowledge - is erased and replaced by a bare electric lightbulb. The bull has dropped its mouth down: it is screaming.

Guérnica commemorates the first time flights of mechanized bombers began in a systemic way to target civilian populations. Late in the April afternoon, on market day, in 1937, the Basque town was razed to the ground by German and Italian planes under Nationalist command. Incendiaries and explosive shrapnel were used; escort planes strafed the fleeing survivors. The men and boys were at the front; of the ten thousand old men, women, and children in the town, a third were killed and more mutilated.

Down the hall, past the compositions, there is a room with pictures from the Civil War. Whole streets are rubble. I recognize the corner my hotel is on; it is cratered. A child stumbles into the frame.

I read, recently, Martha Gellhorn's moving wartime dispatch from Barcelona in 1938 - "The Third Winter." By this time the bombings have become matter-of-fact:

"In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather. The cafes along the Ramblas were crowded. There was nothing much to drink; a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out enjoying the afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come over for at least two hours."

All is perverted by war; nothing is left untouched. Fine evenings are transformed into something ominous.

I bring up Barcelona, in Catalónia, where even the language is different - Spanish, like Italian, is not the language of a nation, just its most powerful province - only because Gellhorn, in the essay, visits a children's hospital. All of the children in the wards are injured, not sick - they are war-wounded, have shrapnel worked through their skin, lead wrapped around their bones, head injuries. Waiting in line for rations, they can distinguish between the sounds of the explosions; they know when the bombs are falling close by. They scatter and take cover in doorways like veterans. There is a ward, a separate wing - she is asked if she wants to go, she wants to say 'no' but can't quite - where the tubercular cases are kept.

The family she visits with that frames these observations has a dying child, a baby. Near the end they promise her that when the war is over, when the Republic has come out of it, they will all meet again.

Of course, they don't meet again, and the Fascists win, and even after the end of the War on Fascism, it is thirty years before Franco concedes Spain. I write all this because my friend, who lived in Salamanca for some time and who made me promise to see the Guérnica, said to look too for the old women in Madrid in winter. The locals call them ositos - little bears. They have one heavy fur coat that they treasure in their closets and take out when the season commences to wear about every day.

And they are dwarfed by their coats, towered over by their grandchildren. They are toylike. Anybody in Madrid over a certain age, who was a child during the War - the children in Gellhorn's essay - grew up starving, sick, rationed, injured. It affected their growth, stunted it, the men and the women both, so that when you walk down a street in the museum district of Madrid, that capital by fiat, when you walk outside of the Prado and its Goyas, you can see the imprint of civil war on the streets themselves, see it in the people - a living reminder, like the places in trees where the width of a ring speaks fire.

Recycle, Reuse, Restart.

2007-09-02T13:32:00.000-04:00

1 September.

Today the city of Boston swells by two hundred and fifty thousand. Cobblestones and gas lamps and chowder halls strain under the weight. The impact sends the Charles sloshing. Harvard spats are splattered at the boathouse. Waves roll in on a breezeless day at the end of summer. It's warm out, but there's something crisp and cold lurking in the shade. A few of the leaves - just a few, bashfully - have already curled and turned.

And two hundred and fifty thousand college students sling cumbersome pieces of luggage and brown cardboard boxes and leather satchels and scuffed black shoulder bags that sport vintage indie button pins and denim backpacks and giant sturdy plastic bins with self sealing lids and totes and shoeboxes and garbage bags full of clothing and a laundry basket with a stereo balanced inside it and garment bags and duffels and carryons and rented moving trucks full of secondhand dented furniture and floral couches into dorm singles, doubles, triples, quads, clusters, suites, on-campus apartments, off-campus apartments, Allston houses, Beacon Hill ancien regime closets, Cambridge lofts, and Symphony stop brownstones.

U-Hauls and battered trucks and compacts stuffed to the gills double- and triple-park in little side streets, Allston & Brighton a congested mass of car exhaust, sweat, and new tenants cursing over the color the walls have been painted. Lines of mattress-strapped cars knot every major artery in the city, wind across the river into Cambridge, chokes the North End and the South, fills the tangle of streets to the brim. It looks like an evacuation and a home-coming. Everything a man needs to live is out on the curb - kitchen chairs, battered dressers, rotting couches, glassware, stereo speakers, ceiling fans, floor-length mirrors, gilt-framed photographs of Paris, one leather high heel, an empty keg of Coors Lite, a three-year supply of coriander and other exotic spices, umbrellas, portraits of the moon, bonzai trees, a red rubber ball.

The city bursts at the seams. Real Boston drowns itself in its pint glass and sighs. The New Year begins.

Commonwealth Ave.

2007-09-02T13:30:00.000-04:00

3:56 p.m.

Down the boulevard-green center strip of Comm Ave, underneath tall leafy trees and a gathering thunderstorm, lovers are sitting on marble stoops below statues of Hope and Victory. A little girl pushing her sister in a stroller is trying to touch William Lloyd Garrison's big bronzed feet.

Playlist

2007-08-30T23:10:00.000-04:00

Five Songs for the End of Summer

Wet heat. A ceiling fan casts revolving shadows against white paint. Bare bulbs light your former home like a laboratory; there is the distant sound of breaking glass. August is a month in suspension, broken promises. You haven't done the things you'd planned; you are surrounded now by half-packed boxes, trash bags, collapsible shelves. You have excavated your drawers, your hidden places, wordlessly crumpled up little pieces of nostalgia, put those too big to crumple on the curb. You have torn yourself from sentiment, from many things. The summer is irrecoverable, already fading in memory, like aging film. It is time, you decide, for a fresh start. Everything you abandon you do from fear; you want to get rid of the smell of failure, to walk away without turning back. It is warm, and dark, there is the heavy smell of rotting flowers. You hope many things for the fall.

1. "Summertime," Porgy & Bess. Ella Fitzgerald & Luis Armstrong.
Lazy swingtime, too hot to move, and Louis playing, brassy and inimitable. Ella Fitzgerald is the sweetest thing singing. But as her voice seduces, you forget it's a lie, that while Your daddy's rich, and your momma's good-looking, it's summer that makes it so - that golden sheen. In the sunlight you can forget almost anything, you can even stop the baby fussing, but there's trouble down the road, and stormy weather still to come. In the last days of August, the strings sour melancholy, the cotton swings low, and 'Summertime,' that sweet little lullaby, suddenly sings of days past.

2. "Holland," Michigan. Sufjan Stevens.
Hushed, fractured lines sung in a whisper over a few piano notes that begin and begin again, haltingly, callused fingers rasping on the frets of the acoustic guitar. The few lines hang, widely separated, just a bare handful of images, a few surviving photographs. Lose our clothes in summertime, he sings, wistfully. Lose ourselves, to lose our minds. He trails off. In the summer heat, I might.

3. "Dinu Lipatti's Bones," The Sunset Tree. The Mountain Goats.
John Darnielle is chilly and desperate here, on the first of his dozens of LPs and compilations and scratchy cassette-only releases to turn autobiographical. The images are oblique, and guarded, and they forever slide into violence, into the suggestion of loss. We kept our friends at bay all summer long; treated the days as though they'd kill us if they could. The low piano sounds like distant thunder. It is a cold song, suspended, crystalline; the music itself pushes summer away. Wringing out the hours like blood-drenched bedsheets to keep wintertime at bay - but December showed up anyway, he sings, shattered and jittery, waiting for the new day.

4. "A Summer Wasting," The Boy With the Arab Strap. Belle & Sebastian.
Stuart Murdoch's lilting vocals bubble along without care over a bouncy piano line, little throwaway pop harmonies. Here, time's passing - summer in winter, winter in springtime - is nothing to fear, and melody bears him out. I spent the summer wasting / The time was passed so easily. But nothing's wasted, - If the summer's wasted, how could the time feel so free? - and the only melancholy lies in Murdoch's wistful vocals, which would lend anything an air of faint regret.

5. "Sleep All Summer," Dignity and Shame. Crooked Fingers.
The sad summer songs all come back to nighttime, hot air, pauses, dreams. Croaking, a man wishes over a lovely little guitar line that the setting sun would crash into the ocean and cut the line that ties the tide and the moon, and a woman coos in return that they take empty hearts and fill them with broken things. Over a classic lover's ballad, the two trade apocalyptic declarations of lost romance, trade blows too, and fatalistic lines about curtains falling, fashions fading, an endless summer over. Together, as in loves songs, for their big duet at the chorus, they sing in major key: Cold ways kill cool lovers, strange ways we use each other, and ask each other over and over, Why won't you fall back in love with me? - as if trying to reverse the tides, to sleep until the year passes - to reach backwards and recover what's been lost, or left on a curb in Boston with a thousand thousand other discards, molding, wrecked, valuable, keepsakes too large to carry along, gifts you never wanted, things you can afford to leave behind.

Other playlists:
Eight Anti-Government Songs to Play in a Senate Office Building

Briefly, Fandom

2007-08-27T19:19:00.000-04:00

Indulge me. I've revealed here in asides my abiding affection for Firefly, the only serial Western-in-space by Joss Whedon that features actual cattle herding, Chinese cursing, and a brain-damaged young woman as botched government superweapon. Turns out somebody's made some very attractive Blue Sun travel posters; since Blue Sun is an all-encompassing government contractor with dirty hands, they feature a nasty Orwellian edge. LONDINIUM, reads one in big Metropolis capitols, over a dark, fractured urban mess: The past, present, and future of humanity. And, in two in-jokes that I can't possibly explain concisely (and, as Polonius advises...), we are invited to Historic Serenity Valley National Park - the 'birthplace of unity' - and, in a particularly cruel twist, 'tranquil Miranda.'

Oh, hell. Just watch the show.

On Digital Machines & the Structures of Everyday Life

2007-08-26T13:36:00.000-04:00

I have been wilting these months under the onslaught of magical anticipation for the iPhone, a machine whose workings are so delicately concealed that it is meant to become an extension of one's body; thinking too, as I read Fernand Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life, of the 'long journey backwards' (as he writes) 'from the facilities and habits of present-day life,' though I'll save the detailed gloss on Braudel later, the observation that the past is a foreign country being an insufficient commonplace.

It was in this state of mind, then, that I came across this passage, from Roberto Calasso's The Ruin of Kasch - a work that takes up (as Italo Calvino puts so well) 'two subjects: the first is [Charles-Maurice de] Talleyrand [-Perigord], and the second is everything else':

In 1956, when John Von Neumann used his Silliman Lectures to give a quick summary of recent and ongoing developments in machines that could calculate on their own, and when he began by distinguishing between digital computers and analogue computers, he gave new names to the two poles that secretly sustain us. The digital pole seems biologically secondary and dependent, for exchange always seems secondary to the object being exchanged. But then the digital pole takes command, revealing its ability to envelop the other pole, to absorb it - and, naturally, to exploit it. The digital pole confers great power, but it does not contain, within the machine, the physical reality of the varying values, which is a last palpable memory of the outside world. Digitality is pure sequence of signs: when its dominion is extended to everything, we no longer know what earth sustains us - or even if there still is an earth. We continue to experience the analogue pole, but we no longer know what to call it: it is mute emotion, which overwhelms and no longer flows into its old estuary. Digitality has given it a new bed made of indestructible silicon. Over it flows a silent stream, awaiting the Bateau Ivre.

To this I'll add a few simple thoughts: Stripped of 'the physical reality of the varying values' - the lever, the spooled film, the hand crank - the machine contains nothing but signs, the semiotic artificialities that create our world in opposition to nature. But if that dominion is 'extended to everything'? Calasso writes later, 'Within Chinese society, within all societies, the park of the Son of Heaven once epitomized all nature in miniature. Now all nature is our park, and we do not know what it epitomizes.' And in "Endgame: Meditations on a diminishing world," Edward Hoagland writes of the 'fizz of electronics facilitating interior monolgues we carry on together in a solipsism so complete it appears to eclipse the whole out-of-doors.'

The workings of the digital machine become incomprehensible, but not mysterious - they do not invite exploration. The convenience obscures the process and worse, breeds indifference to it. Meat is slaughtered, preshaped & deboned, reconstituted, vacuum-sealed, flown & shipped until it arrives an idle choice, one among many. Freeways carry us up and over poverty into downtown; blindness another choice made easier by diversions. A button - soon just a liquid shape on a screen - is pressed, and what we desire, happens.

July 3rd, Night

2007-07-04T12:45:00.000-04:00

"The Second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. [...] It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shrews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

- John Adams, letter to his wife Abigail, 3 July 1776.

Boston swelters in the heat and sweats liquor. Everyone on the street is drunk. The street littered with grease-stained pizza plates. I'm fortified with two glasses of bourbon on ice and walking down Tremont, hard and angry and feeling very clear about things. An Eastern European man, bullet head, nervous glances, hears the firecrackers and goes for the gun in his pants. He's been holding it under his shirt for the entire block like a rosary. A guy across the street throws a punch. Somebody's set off a box of fireworks in the intersection. They shoot off forty or fifty feet into the air, popping; cars swerve to avoid the burning box in the street. The explosions are reflected in the glass & steel buildings around them, a simulacra of fire.

II.

Catholics around the 19th century iron fountain in the Common have put up fervent hand-painted signs: JESUS IS THE ONLY TRUE WAY TO GOD. A living statue, painted bone white, covered in tin foil and newspaper, stands on the fountain over a blown-out television set. Chinese atrocities against the Falun Gong are displayed by activists on yellowed posterboard, years-old pictures, the same as last summer, kept up lovingly, like heirlooms: stress positions, prisoners tied in front of barking dogs, bruises displayed. A man shot in the head. On one of the bricks in a flower planter, in small, carefully rounded letters, someone has written fuck the u.s. govt in yellow ink.

III.

Adams would have known, before he died: history is a moving target, and none of us know what will be commemorated in time.

Sufjan Stevens' "Chicago"

2007-06-28T19:37:00.000-04:00

Revisitation, rememory: a feedback loop.

Sufjan Stevens grew up in the far north of the Lower Peninsula; he went to school in the lonely arts academy Interlochen, its cabins amidst pine forest, and to the college in my hometown, sleeping on Lake Michigan / factories and marching bands - memorialized in 3:26 on Michigan. The college station played it the last time I was home, driving through the old Victorian downtown with my sister, listening over the car radio to the overcast piano, melancholy and quiet.

I listened to "Chicago" looped again, today - the three versions off of Avalanche (the collection of outtakes and extras from Illinois. 48 other states have been promised, but are not expected) and I'm trying now to write around the unwritable feeling of recognition, of complicity, I get listening to Sufjan Stevens at all, to talk about the song itself for a moment.

"Chicago" lends itself to repetition, to revisitation. No wonder Sufjan Stevens recorded so many variations - "Acoustic"; "Adult Contemporary Easy Listening"; "Multiple Personality Disorder". Listen to all of them and each return, each version, does not detract. They pile on one another, cumulative.

You hear for the first time: I fell in love again / all things go, all things go / drove to Chicago / all things known, all things known. The song repeats itself internally, its refrains suffused with nostalgia: All things go, all things go. The complicity - I grew up where he did, I left as well. I've made a lot of mistakes, I've made a lot of mistakes / I've made a lot of mistakes, I've made a lot of mistakes. The song is a memory that resurfaces, a late-night kind of song, a song that by the end, whatever the version, becomes wordless - a trumpet repeating the theme, halfway triumphant.

And then, twice: I fell in love, again - but already in the past tense, another one already gone.

Three times: the "Multiple Personality Disorder Version," all buzzing synth and handclaps, and you're guilelessly optimistic, punch-drunk: I fell in love, again, - but we all know how this ends.

Somehow, though, you keep listening, you go through it all one more time, you recreate the song again, you cue that trumpet and multitracked voices, an implacable chorus that sings, comfortingly, over and over, All things go, all things go.

I can't quite describe to my satisfaction the feeling I get as the song loops around, draws a breath, repeats, that song sung by a man who grew up in the places I've driven to and camped in, the arts school my Upper Penninsula cousin attended, the college I played piano recitals at when I was little and passed every day, who traveled as I do to Chicago and espouses the quiet, taciturn Christianity of my neighbors - who left, as I did. I am hard pressed. The song comes up again over my speakers, cued up three or four times by accident, and starting again it hits me sideways, again.

Identical Hogs, & Eroded Memory

2007-05-26T12:25:00.000-04:00

When nothing will ever be the same again

In May of last year, Harper's published an article, "Swine of the Times: The Makings of the Modern Pig," by Nathanael Johnson. Laid up with summer fever, phlegmatic and aching, I'm catching up on reading and re-reading, though the pressure pooling behind my eyes makes writing about it difficult.

(Above the blogs I frequent, ranging from academia - to the arts - to cinema, [with some imponderables], you'll find a list of Readings: a brief, luminous 1982 essay on aesthetics by John Berger; a discursive post at A Lake Country Point of View that begins with a small flower and spirals outward, gathering in linguistics, myth, history, touching on Persia, soil chemistry, wolves - ; a New Yorker profile of the ruler of former-Soviet Kalmykia, an autocratic Buddhist millionaire chess master; a Discover article on exotic fungal parasites & their control of hosts' minds. I'll be adding to the list in the future. If I don't have anything new up, you might try one of these.)

Parenthetical housekeeping put aside, let's turn to Nathanael Johnson and swine.

The modern hog farm depends on artificial insemination: boars must be coaxed into ejaculating into jars, sows stimulated and encouraged by lined workers and then injected as though a pastry were being filled. 'It all seems,' Johnson writes, 'an awful lot of trouble for something creatures normally do without encouragement.' It is a recent development:

In 1990 artificial insemination accounted for only 7 percent of America's swine breeding. At that time large confinement operations were just emerging as industry leaders. These big operations aimed to maximise their efficiency by producing standardized pigs, which grew at predictable rates and produced predictably uniform meat. To make a standardized pig pig, these companies needed standardized genetics, which they could most easily distribute in the form of semen. According to the most recent count, more than 90 percent of large hog farms used artificial insemination.

Pork, like every other American agricultural commodity, has become centralized & standardized along industrial lines; techne provides the means to maximise efficiency and profit. The number of hog farms in America has decreased by a factor of ten (more than 650,00 to less than 70,000) in the last twenty years. In packing plants, swine carcasses are moved via conveyor into a machinated curved knife, which 'slices the cylindrical loin from inside of the body cavity. If the animals aren't just the right proportions, the knife will hit the wrong spot, wasting meat or cutting into bone.' The demand for uniformity ('cookie-cutter perfection') outweighs the risk: A herd of standard pigs can now be devastated by a single pathogen because of their genetic uniformity; pigs are kept hermetically sealed, behind razor wire, filtered air, concrete, filed in close together, fed antibiotics that grow the pig faster but also breed resistant disease. They never leave the barn. In group pens, 'pigs sometimes go a little crazy. They often attack one another, at times killing and eating their pen mates.'

The reason? Stress. Johnson:

Pigs are, after all, highly intelligent animals - probably more intelligent than dogs - and, like dogs, they grow restless without anything to do. When swine cannot so much as turn around in their crates, they often develop repetitive movements, biting at the air and swinging their heads from side to side - movements that some students of animal behavior say signal frustration or neurosis.

As breeders have pushed for efficiency, they have also relaxed the standards for physical traits that allow pigs to stand on concrete their whole lives without going lame. Hogs can live up to twenty years in the wild, but large pork producers usually cull sows after less than four years. Sows can produce more than ten litters, and older sows birth larger, healthier pigs. In confinement a sow's health won't hold up much past three litters.

Some pigs tremble all their lives in confinement or die of shock when a barn door closes; they go lame in crates or insane with boredom. Stress produces acid, breaking down the muscle tissue, turning it to mush, bleaching it of color, souring the taste; this only became a problem after a combination of overbreeding and cramped living conditions lived out on a 2'x7' rectangle of concrete.

The industry has responded admirably to the demand for consistent, copious, and cheap pork. But in satisfying those desires, it has done away with the other qualities that once distinguished pork, like flavor and variety.

II.

Believing in Progress makes it difficult to consider anything irretrievably lost; certainly not in our lifetime. In one that has been so short as mine. We are accustomed to considering modernity an expansion of options, not a winnowing. We are self-conscious, self-aware - of ourselves, of our place in history. As Emerson wrote of his time, 'Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism' - with the exception that we are too self-are to build sepulchres, or to reverence. We know more than they, after all.

We do not consider, by and large, any experience to be inaccessible to us. One of the things that strikes me about the piece above is the thought that what I am eating is in some fundamental way different from what a person ate a century ago, or even fifty years ago - or twenty. That in reading an account of a man eating pork I think I understand, but I don't: the substance of the thing, the taste, has changed.

That the category still exists makes it worse. Maybe the danger isn't in losing things forever - all things fade; there is remembrance. The danger, perhaps, is that we won't even notice they've gone - will think that we still have what in reality is a pale copy, a substitute.

III.

This is a passage taken from Erik Fosnes Hansen's segmented and wandering novel Tales of Protection (translated from the Norwegian by Nadia Christensen):

He sat down with difficult, stretched out his leg again, raised his glass, sniffed down into it.

"I tell you, there's a great deal of re-creation in the mere atmosphere of a glass of brandy like this. But what am I thinking of - wouldn't you like a glass too?"

"Yes, thank you."

He started to get up from the chair again, but this time she forestalled him. He let it happen.

"Re-creation, yes," he said, as she went to the cupboard to fill a glass. "That means to restore. No, no, don't take from the fancy bottle, take from the little ugly one. That's the best."

"This one?" She held up a dark bottle with no label.

"Yes, that's right."

A dark brown fluid ran thickly into the glass. She corked the bottle, sat down with him, they raised their glasses to each other.

A stream of warmth and light rose from her abdomen to her head.

"Well?" he smiled.

" - powerful!" she said, when she caught her breath again.

"That's a Madeira from the West Indies," he said, "from 1828, if I remember correctly. Just taste that, it was made when Goethe was still alive, and Beethoven had died only the year before."

She drank some more. A sunny landscape rose in her, she seemed to see hands, brown hands, in the sunlight, green leaves, a yellow beach, a blue sea.

"Since then it's been drawn again and again, almost every twenty years, so it would keep. Quite unique, isn't it?"

"It tastes absolutely pure," she said, "and yet heavy."

"Yes," he said, "you can truly talk about restoring something when you drink an elixir like that." He leaned back, suddenly seemed very young, very dreamy. "Eighteen twenty-eight - tastes like a good year for people," he said. "No chemicals in the alcoholic beverages, no pollution in the grapes." He sighed. "Besides, it's good for the thighbone. Best medicine to be found."

IV.

Lamenting what is lost is inherently conservative in both of the word's senses: longing after a lost Eden; trying to conserve the Garden. It does not trust that the future will bring better things, or that something lost can be replaced by another of merely equal value.

Perhaps it's appropriate, tangentially, that the nearest equivalent to the passage quoted above happened to a former teacher at my California boarding school (having been invited, and somewhat bewildered): it was in an idyllic retreat north of San Francisco called the Bohemian Club, a campground in a redwood grove where rich and powerful men - business leaders, politicians, cabinet officers, think tank trustees, solidly Republican and conservative - Clarence Thomas was among those present - mingle with artists and intellectuals in a secluded natural setting, Jimmy Buffet playing guitar on a porch, alcohol trucked in by the barrel. One night, he shared his cabin with a Southern gentleman who had a bottle of Kentucky bourbon dating to 1861, before the Civil War. He insisted on opening it; my teacher remembered it as 'pretty good, though I don't know bourbon.'

Emerson is correct - we are a retrospective age - but we're less interested in sepulchre than in a kind of endless historical taxonomy. Never has there been more media, more to read, to view - more historians working, more critics writing. The retrospect grows shorter and shorter. Popularly, the news cycle creates instant nostalgia - twenty years ago, ten, last year (best ever!), a month, a week.

Sick as I am, I'll end with the questions these fragments raise in me: whether substitution erodes our memory, makes us unable to imagine the world as fully as we had; how what we consume literally composes us and more broadly composes our world; what standardization and copying implies for nature as in food as in art.

And, as much as I think that we are less aware of history than we should be, less fully aware of our place in things, too indifferent to the way things have been - is Emerson right, following the passage I quoted, when he calls on us to 'cast off the dry bones of the past' and 'enjoy an original relation to the universe?' Is it simply that we need less of this endless citation, of the Anxiety of Influence? Or do we need reminders that the world was not always this way?

Asked & Answered

2007-05-20T02:15:00.000-04:00

Commencement Edition

Today, with commencement on the mind of anyone tied to the academic calendar and the onset of spring - look below for two iterations of that death/rebirth jazz to see how omnipresent it is here - I'm addressing questions posed by John B. over at Blog Meridian. His questions to others displayed his characteristic thoughtfulness and attention; a flurry of volunteers made it something of a repeat feature, and though late to the party I couldn't help but bite. (The conditions stipulate I pass it on, but I know the size of my readership).

Here, below the fold, are five questions, taken, one concludes, from the very ceremony John has just attended:

1. Do you like the phrase 'appertaining thereto'? Would you consider registering a complaint if the dean or the president didn't use it in the course of certifying the graduates?

Phrase strikes me as a bit dry and lifeless; it certainly lacks the beauty of that old chestnut cellar door, and even its utility is dubious, the syllables ungainly and inefficient, better in the original Latin. Registering a complaint is the sort of legalist solution favored by those who covet words like appertaining thereto, which have the power to reduce the world around us to something that smells faintly of stone dust and dry water. (Register a complaint? No: direct action, lunch with the dean, well-placed bribes, a handshake. These things change worlds.)

David Simon, creator of HBO's incomparable The Wire, now remarks as a matter of course that it shows how institutions make human beings worth less every day. Surely, to conceive of the world as a place that appertains, (and thence to where, exactly?) is to begin building a clausal edifice that renders any one of us childlike and bankrupt beneath it. Appertaining thereto is cousin to boilerplate and euphemism (ex. 'pacification'; it's what we trot out to paper over horror, discount human life, make difficult little particulars into empty banalities.

I might instead certify graduates by apologizing for eating the plums in the icebox.

2. Which seems more like something you would do while attending commencement:
a) Bringing a copy of Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind;
b) Actually approve the daring of your colleage's attempt to rap for part of the commencement address, even if less than successful;
c) Make origami swans out of your program.

C, realistically. I am always at a loss for what to do with my hands. I prefer something to occupy them: a gin & tonic, a piano, a silver dollar. I do not yet know how to make a reliable origami swan; programs that fall into my hands are twisted into wreckage, ugly paper ducklings. Somebody, I will learn, and my fidgeted programs will grow up beautiful.

B brings up nothing but bad memories of Karl Rove at this year's White House Press Correspondent's dinner.

A, I harbor affection for; A Coney Island of the Mind is on my window sill at this very moment, wedged to the left of a collected Borges, Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony, a King James Bible, a bottle of wine, a broken tea glass, and a dead basil plant. Anybody attending commencement with paperback Ferlinghetti tucked into their back pocket I suspect of waiting for a rebirth of wonder / and I am waiting for someone / to really discover America / and wail - all that Turner new symbolic western frontier jazz and who knows how much of it is tongue in cheek? - because with the Beats, you could never tell, but at least either way they weren't apathetic and that's more than you can say these days (even discounting the kids these days!). Beautiful dream or not, I'm not there with poetry - it's impractical - but my heart goes out a little bit to somebody who is, who's bothered to clutch at Ferlinghetti and a rebirth of wonder and go with their hands full to an event where a handshake is all that's required and jazz is being bulldozed by appertaining thereto.

3. As a faculty member, how would you determine which students, apart from those you know well (sotto voce: and think deserve to graduate), you will applaud for?

I'm faced with several options: I can be selective, and glower stone-faced at the mass of students not fortunate enough to have basked in the light of my favor; democratic and exhausted, giving uncritical and unstinting applause to everyone; superficial along several different axis - applaud only the pretty ones, or only the good walkers, or only those with interesting first/last names; mathematical, applauding every fourth student, or using an algorithm I derive, brilliantly, from the letters of their name; supportive - of that young graduate, Ferlinghetti improbably clutched to chest, say; or the inevitable streaker; or the one who trips, or whose name is mispronounced, or who fumbles the diploma hand-off.

I'm most likely to try all of these things - indecision being one of my flaws - before giving up on each in turn for stoicism, which is only fatigue by any other name.

4. Out on the lawn after the second ceremony, you see that Kevin Durant is here (his brother graduated from the college) and hear that he has signed some autographs. Do you:
a) Go up to him and ask for one as well;
b) Watch from a distance and even wish people would leave him alone;
c) Ask, 'Kevin who?!'

C, I don't know who Kevin Durant is.

B, If I did, I still find college basketball more interesting on a tactical level than the NBA, because they're operating on a plane I can actually comprehend, technically.

I also feel reticent when it comes to any kind of fame; I don't like to feel as though I'm forcing attention on them, even though most of the people I admire creatively are only celebrities if the word is stretched thin. It really has nothing to do with celebrity at all; I do the same thing with professors I like after class, when they're being mobbed by students (the most persistant of whom also seem to be the most obnoxious and least discerning; why lump myself in with them?)

This is rather self-centered of me.

5. You've been asked to deliver a commencement address. What is one thing you know you would want to say to the graduates?

Besides appertaining thereto and apologizing for the plums I ate in the icebox? The words don't matter, of course; commencement is ritual, the speech some Latin mumbled over the blessing: Endings are a new beginning. Your generation faces a unique challenge. One in which all of you will play your part, as future leaders of this country. Do not forget the things you've learned here, that will stay with you for the rest of your life. Your apathy, apertaining thereto political hegemony, is pacification collateral damage less than four not to exceed more than five, hope, future, Our Nation's Children, Enjoy Coca-Cola.

One thing I might say? Wake up.

May in Boston: Commencement

2007-05-16T10:07:00.000-04:00

May in Boston: sunlight, flower blossoms, green shade. A Red Sox fan from Minnesota pays the T driver with a ten dollar bill. In Somerville, outside a 19th century Victorian painted moss green, five young men grill hot dogs and smoke marijuana from a small threaded piece of copper tubing. The kids staying for the summer pick up two, three jobs, wait tables, pour sangria on the patios, throw back 2 a.m. shift drinks. An actor friend gets work – and his SAG card – hand doubling for second unit photography in a Kevin Spacey film about blackjack. College students commence, in one way or another; they begin something different.

The city, though, stays the same. It has been raining for five days – one of those pitch-black nor’easters that sweep the city annually in the middle of May, forty degree caprice, ill will, fine mist that freezes midair. Joan Didion writes, in an essay about Los Angeles I’ll be quoting later to different ends, that New England winters determine how life is lived here: long, bitter, cold. Boston shivers the fuck out of itself six months out of the year, smokes cigarettes down to the filter, chokes down its drink and says too loudly it’s the best possible city on Earth, fuck anyone who says different. Blue laws, curfew, cost of living, racial divide and shoddy light rail aside. It’s a city you love like those aging couples who enjoy tearing into each other too much to get a divorce.

My father went to graduate school at Boston College in the 70s; back then, a bus ad gave comical directions to Hollywood in a way that encapsulates the city’s provincialism. It was a map of the United States, Boston bulging out front and center, the rest of the country reduced to an appendage the size of Florida. It read, approximately: Directions to California. Turn left onto Mass Pike. Take Mass Pike to Newton Center. Continue west.

And meanwhile, while the weather defeats my optimistic use of the word fecund and keeps me indoors, Emerson College, arts school for careerists, has graduated another senior class: goateed Spielberg-cap director; Midwest marketer/beauty pageant queen; Brazilian conga drummer cum film producer; Harvard-hopping French socialite; Jewish editor in black sedan; blonde Buddhist artist in handlebar mustache; Irish all-singing all-dancing revue; melancholy improvisatory comedian; lumberjack IT technician; actor recently fined for unarmed nighttime B&E; Croatian femme fatale; Jersey Model UN-type assistant director; poets, gaffers, film geeks, trash novelists, associate producers, news anchors, disc jockeys, and others too numerous to mention.

Most are fleeing this little city. Many are going to Los Angeles.

For them: good-bye, good luck, directions above.

Enigmatic Fragments from my Notebooks

2007-05-04T17:43:00.000-04:00

A Year in Retrospect

Early May inspires nostalgia and hope in equal measure; for those of us still on the academic calendar, trees start to uncurl in the sun and flowers blossom just as everything comes to an end. The blood fizzes, rebels. People disappear suddenly. Everything is in flux. We throw out stacks of paper, pack up boxes, we move to other apartments, other cities, we leave the country.

End something in Spring and you feel the death/rebirth jazz in tripletime, the fecund: ends begetting beginnings, decay and growth intertwined, the snake eating its own tail. End a school year and you're connected to the phases of the moon, illiterate astronomers, pre-Hellenistic Greece, the dawn of agriculture.

It all leads to a certain amount of naval-gazing. I'm no different. I don't take notes in any coherent or helpful sense, but after a year of class and jottings and writing workshops I somehow end with two or three full volumes, filled with cryptic epigrams. I'd forgotten writing most of them, or why I'd written them in the first place. Quotations are marked, but not cited.

I'll ask you to consider what these fragments, stripped of explication or context, suggest to you; in the coming months, among other things, I'll be using them as seeds for future work, some of which will appear here. So you might think of this also as a kind of map, or a preview. Below the fold:

Writing is a tomb.

Blindness as revelation /
madness.
Gloucester's heart 'burst smilingly.'

Kozintsev, 1969.

A junkyard in an endless forest. A crabapple tree to steal from, whipping the apples a hundred yards away using green branches.

Palimpast.

Her uncle the doctor goes to the gym every afternoon; when business is slow, he goes spear-fishing instead. He tells a new dirty joke each time she visits. His receptionist's husband used to be a painter; she did not know this until one day, when she found a charcoal sketch on brown paper rolled up in a desk drawer. It was a young, very pretty woman; she stood in front of a blue window. The window was the only color in the drawing. The receptionist has never discovered who the woman was. Today, her husband spends months refurbishing antique toys. This month, he has provided a Dracula with a real red silk cape. He has carved a tiny spiral staircase, and a small marble column. He has taped Dracula's line from the Bram Stoker movie and rigged a pen cap to trigger a speaker, so that when pressed, the toy will say his line. It has taken him weeks of work.

Is Richard human enough?

Emphasis by development /
by repetition.

The enemy was coming soon. Past the heap, with the sinister, gaping/grappling, the junk run and bicycles, the rusted meadow whoknows what - the enemy was moving, invisible and silent. We had little time.

Outrage us into idealism.

1972
armchair
Thanksgiving
Red
attic
Blood orange
bullhorns
songbird
dogwood
tomato
secondhand hardcover, heavily annotated
a street on the Lower East Side
the Tango

I wore a very sincere tie. /
A nice blue suit.

Nonfiction a way to wrestle parse digest reality, which is more and more incoherent, strange, and variable.

Milan Airport: cigarette butts drown en masse in each urinal. A sign in English and Italian that requests objects not be placed there has been creatively defaced.

You must take care to write nonfiction as carefully as if you're lying.

The Carlyle Group
'Ysreal,' by Diaz
uninflected
5 Cummings

He told me later, dead drunk in a stateside bar. They'd ridden in, camel-mounted & carrying government guns, and he & the rest had watched it like a Western from the tent flaps until one the locals realized and the screaming started. He told me he'd carried a .45 but had only ever thought to use it on himself, and that he had pictures of the aftermath in his jacket pocket if I wanted to see.

'We feel it sweet to behold
sailors in distress - the vexéd sea -
not out of pleasure in the distress
of others, but because their distress
is the measure of our security.

- Lucretius

Police procedurals provide a feeling of security that life itself cannot offer.

'a battery of men and machines /
conclusions based on fact.'

Taxi drivers stopped to salute him. When he entered highway restaurants, people stood up.

O false Cressid,
Let all untruths stand by thy stainéd name, & they'll seem glorious.

& Chaos is come.

Editing dictates meaning in the cinema.

- How can millions of people, their homes & streets, be unreal?
- Very easily. A big city must be like a dream.

Allegory: To speak openly in public otherwise.

French lends itself to abstraction.

Synesthesia,
Speak Memory, Nabokov
Hear color; orange popping
why we like our artificial flavors colored.
'this tastes red.'

Carpeting everywhere; big plastic crates in the living room; the furnace hissing in the laundry; a lambskin rug; Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow" on the turntable; somebody practicing piano; model sailboats; bleach stains; china dolls; an old television with rabbit ears; a blue Volvo station wagon; a brown refrigerator.

Ideology = the imaginary relationship I have to my real condition.

Romeo & Juliet, unlike its source, is not an admonition, nor is it a warning.

'The white race stood upon this undeveloped continent ready and willing to execute the Divine injunction, to replenish the earth and SUBDUE it. The savage race in possession either refused or imperfectly obeyed this first law of the Creator. On the one side stood the white race in the command of God, armed with his law; on the other, the savage resisted the execution of that law.'

We find ourselves in the eye of the Other.

'For that which is unclean by nature thou canst entertain no
hope: no washing will turn the Gipsy white.'

Nondescript: Animal not yet classified or described by science.

Hearst company mining town, biggest claim in the Western Hemisphere: Lead, Dakota - nothing gold can stay.

There is no gap that prose cannot bridge.

Today I saw a man sitting in Boylston station pouring Colt .45 into a gatorade bottle while he did whiskey shots from a turkey baster.

a matter of emphasis: Goddammit v. God-damn it. Thoughts?

Postmodern
Tomato
Grammatology

'Amen, even so come, Lord Jesus!'

How The West Was Won By Atari

2007-04-18T19:30:00.000-04:00

The Past Isn't Dead; It's Not Even Past

Custer, that golden self-dramatist, was butchered wholesale along with his men in 1876, on the centennial. That year, the states and territories that he served celebrated a hundred years of nationhood and Union - through war, having cowed rebellions in the south and the west; and by rail, the Atlantic and Pacific now linked in steel.

The dead at Little Bighorn were mutilated: castrated, scalped, defaced, teeth taken, the wounded killed. This was commonplace. U.S. cavalry cut out the sexual organs of Indian women and stitched them to their hatbands. Custer had died in part because the Dakota gold rush had reached the Black Hills: sacred land and, incidentally, foreign soil.

I've been researching background for a Western screenplay set in Lead in 1877, just a year later; this is on my mind, as is Deadwood (written about previously here).

Below the fold: American exceptionalism, rape, and Atari.

The Black Hills are the profaned holy ground that David Milch's Deadwood rests on. Custer's defeat looms over the mining camp; everything here could be swept away in an instant. This terror pervades the first four-episode arc. The Sioux, bogeymen & scapegoats - and invisible - lurk at the edges of every utterance, every profanity.

And in the face of a newly centennial Union - the capitalization matters; Harper's Weekly wrote during the Civil War, "the Union is only another name for freedom, progress, & civilization" - the Sioux are not just impediments, they are in breach of covenant with God Himself, who said: Replenish the earth and subdue it.

When Swearengen says heathens, says dirt-worshippers, when road agents leave families massacred in the Indian style, we see the stamp of fear, but also of transference: we carry whiteness and civilization because They do not.

The Sioux wars across the Plains weren't setpiece battles but spasms of massacre and butchery. They inspired a Western literature of terror. Writers cried quite consciously for wholesale extermination; it was historical inevitability. This from a speech by Governor Ramsey of Minnesota in 1862, fifteen years earlier in a St. Petersburg newspaper at the onset of the Sioux uprisings:

Infants hewn into bloody chips of flesh [...]; rape joined to murder in one awful tragedy; young girls, even children of tender years, outraged by these brutal ravishers till death ended their shame; [...] whole families burned alive[...]. Such are the spectacles, and a thousand nameless horrors besides, which this first experience of Indian warfare has burned into the minds and hearts of our frontier people; and such the enemy with whom we have to deal.

That year, on the day after Christmas, in the largest mass execution in U.S. history, 38 Dakota men were hanged to death in Mankato for murder and rape.

All of this only touches the surface of history; what it should also do is explain, why, in light of my reading, the fact that yesterday night I was forwarded this Wikipedia article seems exceptionally perverse.

It's a link to a 1982 video game for the Atari called Custer's Revenge, a pornographic side-scroller that has our hero back from the dead, naked save for bandanna, phallus, and cavalry hat, dodging arrows and other obstacles in order to reach a large-breasted Sioux woman tied to a cactus named Revenge, in order to force sex upon her.

Let me be clear: There is a way to personify an American Hero and enact the rape of a subdued native - over and over again - that was mass-produced as a consumer good in the United States of America in the last quarter of the 20th century, just after the bicentennial.

When Turner said the frontier was closed, he never could have envisioned this kind of reopening.

Like, PoMo

2007-04-09T23:05:00.000-04:00

Occasioned By A College Seminar

If there's one thing that separates the language of even our articulate young people from their parents and grandparents, it's that equivocating verbal tic: like. Sentences dissolve into them. They loop around only to get lost in their own chaff. I feel like, I mean, it's like that other - basically, like - Sometimes in class I'll listen to somebody and become meditative, entranced. I keep a little tally in pen in the margins. Like replaces said in our oral histories.

It's inexplicable, and it is everywhere. And in my media criticism & theory class today, halfway through a lecture on postmodernity, I realized that like isn't just a verbal tic, it's a symptom.

PoMo: There is no universal truth, Enlightenment rationalism has delivered not progress but barbarism, science has unearthed an inexplicable world. Electrons dissapear, the building blocks of nature change speed when measured, light can be slowed down and bent into a soup. Chaos has come again. We are surrounded not by reality but by images of reality and finally by images of images, art not a mirror held to nature but a mirror held to a mirror, like in a cheap motel. We live amidst simulacra, artificial stimulai that are better, faster, more vibrant than reality. We have access to all choices and many are illusory.

Meaning is variable, the reader creates the text, environment determines our consciousness, our consciousness acts out the unknowable impulses of our subconscious, and progress is only apparent, like workers on a treadmill.

Pastiche is the rule of the day, as is (witness) reductive simplification.

Who wouldn't, conditioned by all of this, speak in fragments linked by equivocation? Or in the self-referential language of comparison? Who wouldn't, when everything is replicated and replicable, a copy of a copy, use a word that seems and replicates in kind as a rhythmic device? Is it, like, a coincidence?

Fortifying Oneself With Words

2007-04-06T15:52:00.000-04:00

Poetics, the Utility of Fiction, & Hemingway

I spent last Sunday at the John F. Kennedy Museum & Library, attending the Hemingway Awards for best first work of fiction. The library is a tall white building like a NASA hanger perched on the edge of the Bay, windows looking out over the long stretch of downtown skyline. I rode South, clattering, on the Red Line, and from there on a bus past the U Mass campus, built along hospital lines, the open spaces pocked by large contemporary artworks: deformed plastic birds, roosting; a giant rusting girder like an L; a small stone grotto.

This is by way of telling you why certain things have been on my mind. But first:

Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrán detener la primavera.

It was a cool, clean day, the sun out and throwing everything into a clear light. At the bus stop while I waited, high schoolers in matching red sweatshirts sang angelic chamber music. While they sung I watched the trains pass, and the grafitti on sides of the highway overpass, and the rusted-out factories. Rounded, Latin words hung in the air in three part harmony. Afterwards there was a sudden rush of giggles and self-conscious gossipy chatter to fill the silence, awkward, half-formed.

If you wanted you could detect a kind of throughline in the better speeches and in some of the readings during the award, which encompassed too the L.L. Winship/PEN New England.

Fiction, it was said, is necessary. We tell stories to help ourselves get by. We - K.C. Frederick said this before his reading - are like Whitman's noiseless patient spider, casting filiment after filiment into the void, desperate for a response.

I won't give you the ceremony; I'll leave it to you to imagine the short introductory speakers, the varying quality of the speeches, the applause, the airy new-looking auditorium, the Hemingway-themed programs, the reception after, three kinds of dip, pita triangles, fruit and cheese and wine served in plastic glasses, tiny pieces of cork bobbing in Cabernet Sauvignon.

Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World, gave the keynote; it was he, among others, who said we tell stories to help ourselves get by. He ended with a story - one about Hemingway.

"I don't know whether this one is true," Jones said. "I don't think that it matters." Hemingway's grandson chuckled onstage. I thought about a man down the row from me who I'll describe later.

It seems, he said, that Hemingway was in a bar in Key West with a bunch of friends. They'd spent the afternoon competing to see who could tell a story in the fewest words possible. It came to Hemingway. He took a drink, and said:

For sale: Baby booties, never worn.

All of this is a long way of saying, I came back from the awards and sat down with a book of poetry by Louise Glück, who'd just gotten the L.L. Winship for Averno.

And it occured to me that I treat poetry differently than, say, novels - I pick my way through it piecemeal, disregarding wholeness. I scavange my way through books of poetry, looking for pieces to steal, a line, a stanza to take with me. I say, a noiseless patient spider, and hold on to that scrap and what it meant.

Novels have a wholeness that makes this difficult - Glück, incidentally, does too, which is what struck me. Reading Vita Nova or The Seven Ages it's hard to treat that unadorned language as parts to be stripped. The writing less epigrammatic, the images inextricable.

Perhaps there is a way in which lyrical poetry's I, or its we - the anonymity of it, makes it easier to hold on to as a keepsake. Almost as a diagnostic. A scrap of poetry could be seen to trap a particular moment, a particular feeling, as though it were being bottled - distilling to essence in precisely the way a perfumer would, boiling down and condensing into three words that stand for a meadow, a particular day in spring, the feeling of being in love for the first time.

Fiction you can't do that with, generally; it's a story, not an image, and the characters however identifiable are not ourselves. Unless I'm missing the diagnosis.

I'll translate, taking liberties, that scrap above the fold: They may behead all flowers, but they cannot detain the spring.

It was a piece of graffiti I saw, written in thick black marker on a white plaster wall in in an alley in the old Jewish quarter in Córdoba. It's by Pablo Neruda, originally. It's something I hold on to shorn from context.

Is there a way in which being torn from context diminishes something, takes meaning from it? Does pastiche reduce what was better whole?

There's a separate issue here that I won't even touch - a man in black cowboy boots down the row from me confessed halfway through a story about his father's heart attack - a baker, a large man who loved Italian cigars, red wine, meats, who catered for Clint Eastwood during Mystic River - that he hadn't read fiction since he was in college. "Clint Eastwood will live forever," he said. "For twenty years more at least. I saw him once behind the restaurant. You know how some people have that aura? He had it. My father, a great man in many ways, he didn't have that when he was that age. I saw Clint Eastwood when he was 72. My father, God rest his soul, was 72 when he died." He went on: "I don't read fiction anymore. Haven't since college. There's too much in the world to know about. I just finished reading about the incident in the 70s, the U2 spy plane that crashed in Soviet Russia - "

Does fiction help us get by? Does fiction inform how we make sense of a world that is not made up out of nothing?

I titled this piece a while ago - I had other things on my mind, mix tapes, juxtaposition, raiding the storehouses of a decadent culture. But for now, though I'd said it's difficult, I want to give you a fragment of Louise Glück's work, torn out of context from a poem entitled "The Sensual World," and judge for yourself whether it helps you get by, in its spare admonition, the wide feeling I get reading it, as though the air were thinning.

I caution you as I was never cautioned:

you will never let go, you will never be satiated.
You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger.

Your body will age, you will continue to need.
You will want the earth, then more of the earth -

Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond.
It is encompassing, it will not minister.

Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,
it will not keep you alive.

Notes from Madrid

2007-03-30T18:54:00.000-04:00

Little Bears, Guérnica, and the Memory of War

Madrid is built along the same triumphal lines as all capitals by fiat - St. Petersburg; Washington, D.C. There are palaces, Bourbon and Habsburg, royal gardens, wide boulevards suited for processions and troop movements.

The melancholy and fanatic Philip II came to it in the middle of the sixteenth century and found a small provincial town alone amidst the endless arid plain and the wind. He declared his reign from there, in that place, whose only virtue was its location - at the center of a stubborn and fractured peninsula. For years the only business of Madrid was the Court.

In January, when I was there, the Jardines Botánicas - a walled garden next to the Prado - lie shrouded in a ghostly white haze pierced by sunlight and made luminous. The trees are leafless and mournful. The hedges and the cyprus still bloom green, amidst the dry branches and the old stone and the careful rows where little grows. Its beauty is still evident but it is subdued, autumnal, as something in long decline. Dry leaves cluster the hardbeaten dirt paths. Benches sit empty.

Nearby is the Reína Sofia, the contemporary art museum whose fame rests in the huge tormented howl that is Picasso's Guérnica. In a long hall devoted to the deconstruction of the immortal painting is Dora Maar's series of photographs of the painting's creation in stages - the thing that strikes you is its revision. At the very center, leaping up from the middle of the canvas, an arm thrusts a torch aloft. A bull in the corner gazes placidly. But Picasso continues, filling in - details are changed, places painted over. Slowly the bull's face contorts, twists. The arm is broken and then - suddenly - it is removed entirely. The torch - that organic, classical sign of hope and knowledge - is erased and replaced by a bare electric lightbulb. The bull has dropped its mouth down: it is screaming.

Guérnica commemorates the first time flights of mechanized bombers began in a systemic way to target civilian populations. Late in the April afternoon, on market day, in 1937, the Basque town was razed to the ground by German and Italian planes under Nationalist command. Incendiaries and explosive shrapnel were used; escort planes strafed the fleeing survivors. The men and boys were at the front; of the ten thousand old men, women, and children in the town, a third were killed and more mutilated.

Down the hall, past the compositions, there is a room with pictures from the Civil War. Whole streets are rubble. I recognize the corner my hotel is on; it is cratered. A child stumbles into the frame.

I read, recently, Martha Gellhorn's moving wartime dispatch from Barcelona in 1938 - "The Third Winter." By this time the bombings have become matter-of-fact:

"In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather. The cafes along the Ramblas were crowded. There was nothing much to drink; a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out enjoying the afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come over for at least two hours."

Art & The Price of Success

2007-03-24T13:53:00.000-04:00

One Hundred Fifty-Nine A.V. Club Commentators Are Wrong

Steve Hyden of The Onion A.V. Club asks the perennial indie rock question of artistic merit vs. mainstream success. To wit:

"Do you really want your favorite cult indie artist to be commercially successful?"

Below the fold: why this is really more than one question, Hazlitt on the pleasures of hating, and how upwards of a dozen dozen commentators are missing a central point, Hyden included.

Like I just said: Hyden's one question implies several - whether obscurity and the instant community of fellow listeners is as important to the medium of indie rock as the music itself; whether commercial success = overexposure, crowding (that is, whether a fan base is like a common pasture that can be overgrazed); whether it is possible to debase good art by stripping it of context and attaching it to something deplorable - like a commercial or an American Idol cover. (Theodor Adorno, that dialectic philosopher and dour Frankfurt School media theorist, argued a half century ago that art is only art - as opposed to kitsch - if it is autonomous, indigestible to mainstream society; anything else is false consciousness. Of course, Adorno hated jazz, and died before rock n' roll supposedly brought the revolutionary and the popular together in the 60s).

Meanwhile, the comments thread erupted in tangential debates - what music snobs are, or how much people hate hipsters. Capitalist boosters of the smug sort (I know; I was one of them in middle school) asked sardonically why anybody would begrudge indie rockers money when money was the entire point of popular music, and whether anybody could possibly be unhappy with that much green. Society was accused of not really listening to music, of being 'music likers' who just need a backbeat to work out to. The Arcade Fire had been mentioned, and so devotees lept to the defense of Neon Bible, which after four or five listens I'm suspecting is good-but-not-great. A lone voice deplored all of this as posturing and listed a series of avant-garde artists and composers that were 'truly original' - a la Adorno, who would have sympathized.

Before we go on to question some basic assumptions of the debate itself, here's a passage from William Hazlitt's c. 1826 essay "On the Pleasures of Hating":

The popularity of the most successful writers operates to wean us from them, by the cant and fuss that is made about them, by hearing their names everlastingly repeated, and by the number of ignorant and indiscriminate admirers they draw after them: - we as little like to have to drag others from their unmerited obscurity, lest we should be exposed to the charge of affectation and singularity of taste.

In some respects, this worry may be universal, as Hazlitt illustrates; certainly, it predates scruffy base-drums-guitar foursomes.

In others, though, it's very new. The iron-clad divide that indie rock posits between popularity and integrity - unquestioned in Hyden's essay - may be characteristic of fringe groups anywhere, but indie rock isn't a fringe group. To steal a term from Robert Christgau, it's 'semipopular music': certainly not highbrow or esoteric, but not mainstream the way $300 million blockbusters or multiplatinum big-voiced pop is mainstream. I keep referring in a kind of offhand way to a fragmentation of culture; this is what I mean. There's no longer a universal listening experience like there was briefly in the late 60s, when every bestselling artist seemed important to boot (or maybe that's a utopian fallacy).

Curiously, the beginning assumption of most unreflective indie rockers is that widespread popular culture is pap, and the assumption itself is common enough to have created an entire alternative popular culture: music joins movies, internet applications, video games (and boutique stores). Niche is everything today, perhaps in part because of population growth - there are enough people in each niche to market to - or perhaps because of the way in which identity has transformed over the last century, from something shared in common to something defined against the common.

All that said, the second thing overlooked in all this palaver about creative genius and commercial success and cult groups and indie snobs might be the price, not of wealth, but of fame. To go back, as Hazlitt does, to writing: read Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up" or Lillian Ross' unintentionally damning portrait of a drunk, monosyllabic Hemingway. The problem of wide success, I think - and in all the 159 comments I found not one mention of it - isn't listeners no longer being able to use a certain band name as a surefire pick-up line, or crowded Superdomes, but the toll widespread public recognition and the surreal airtight world of the famous takes on artistic endevour.

Hyden worries from the perspective of a fan; perhaps a little egotistically, I'm worrying about the artist. Sure, you can snot that they had it coming, that they all want fame - hell, everybody today wants fame more than money; the things people say unprompted when they know cameras are present are unbelievable, and maybe that's the consequence of a culture (cf. Facebook) that trains us to preen in the public eye and pay special attention to appearences (blogs?).

But I don't think that excuses us. The weight of meaning and expectation we put onto our public artists - writers, painters, filmmakers, actors, musicians - corrodes. People collapse after they make it 'big' for a reason. Entertainers are held to the stage by the press of the crowd.

These are unformed thoughts. Comments - though I doubt I'll get 159 of them - welcome.

Get Out While You Still Can

2007-03-22T17:37:00.000-04:00

End Times in the American Republic

Two weeks ago, I was in a bar in the Netherlands drinking a half-and-half mix of Brand beer with a friend of mine from the States; she was out on a semester abroad. At some point during the night, she lit a cigarette and took an emphatic pull of her glass and said, "I'm leaving the country after graduation if I can help it. The entire thing's going to fall apart soon and I don't want to be there when it comes down."

In an accident of release dates that may be more symptomatic than prophetic, indie rock - that favored musical mode of the young college-educated middle class - has seconded. The Arcade Fire's Neon Bible is paranoid and clanging; when it is hopeful, it is hopeful with the sort of ecstatic despair of revivalist tent camps - praising in the teeth of horror - and no coincidence that the thing was recorded in a 19th-century church. They don't know where and they don't when it's comin', Win Butler sings on "Keep the Car Running," and then continues plaintively: Oh, when is it coming? There are vague and troubled allusions to torture, names and addresses, black tides rising, bombs that whistle down in the background - this is an age that calls darkness light.

An entire track is devoted to expatriatism: on "Windowsill," which is flawed but instructive for our purposes, Butler repeats the refrain - I don't want to live in my father's house no more - until the music crests and he can no longer tolerate even oblique metaphor: I don't want to live in America no more!

Meanwhile, on the first track of Armchair Apocrypha, violinist-turned-cryptic Andrew Bird sings quietly, I feel a premonition that we've got to envision the fiery crash.

There is something about the times that seems to say, Surely I come quickly.

II.

It may be the feeling of gathering speed - that things are moving at a faster and faster rate, outpacing our own abilities of comprehension, that what Wendell Berry (who I quoted at length just days ago) called 'the machine of human history' is 'a huge flywheel building speed until finally the force of its whirling will break it into pieces.'

Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence, also referenced here (it is a day for retrospection), is almost without a fault lucid, tightly wound, analytic, breathtaking in its compression and the connections made, even if it tends reactionary and is sometimes contestable - but when Barzun reaches the century in which he lived and worked for almost every year it lasted, he throws up his hands. The prose becomes indirect, impressionistic, exhausted, and behind it all is something lurking and unclear, like the bottom of a muddy pool: we are reaching the end of something, and the beginning; we are living in a decadent era, where 'decadent' is not a value judgement but a description of an age whose options and ideas have been evolved and refined until exhausted.

Jonathan Huebner, working from a few endlessly debatable methodologies, concluded in a study two years ago in July that the per capita rate of human innovation peaked a century ago, that knowledge has become specialized and arcane, that it takes us years and years longer just to achieve basic intellectual fluency, or to know our disciplines (Barzun puts the trend in small capitals and names it: specialization; there are no more Renaissance men, and even the notion of the educated layperson may be dying). We are, he asserts, coming to a long decline; all of this exponential progress is illusory, a busyness. Emerson wrote that progress is 'only apparent, like workers on a treadmill.' The treadmill runs faster than ever.

Even the futurists in their optimism note this speed, but for them the flywheel does not fly apart but transforms itself, spins until it becomes a singularity, an event horizon, beyond which everything is changed; in their rhetoric of nanoengineering and cheap energy and instantaneous travel one sees reflected the gleaming walls of the New Jerusalem, the jeweled streets, crystal rivers - 'new heaven, new earth.'

But all of this seems insufficient - or a little grandiose - to describe the feeling of my friend in that Netherlands bar, or the two expatriates I shared sangria with over playing cards on a rooftop in Granada this Christmas. It's not the world they see ending - though some environmentalists join the Christian right in demurring - but American hegemony: in runaway inflation, economic collapse, military defeat, political repression.

III.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

- Robert Frost (December, 1920)

There is in some quarters a feeling that American power has run its course - or that American power as linked to a progress-oriented capitalist/consumerist liberal world order is an 'end of history' as temporary as the pax Romana. Maybe my privileged friends spouting expatriatism are just aping the art world of the 1920s and can afford plane tickets.

The world is always ending. As Diarmaid MacCullouch writes in his learned but quite readable history of The Reformation, that great religious convulsion would not have acquired the dimensions it did if all of the Christian Occident - wracked by unknown plague (syphilis) at the fulcrum of a millennium, threatened on every border by Turkish and North African Islamic power - had not been convinced that the Last Days were upon them, that this was the last chance for humanity to build the Kingdom of God on earth and prepare the way. The United States inherited this apocalyptic strain of Protestant thought, which was so compelling because in a very real way it screamed the world as it existed was false, the Pope was the Antichrist, we all had been taken in.

And paired with this is the idea that Protestant America is a city on a hill, an expression that has been distended far beyond its original intention as a link to a worldwide community of Protestants across the ocean in Europe. We are an example and an experiment. Our politics are perpetually, somebody has proposed, apocalyptic.

The world is always ending - read Jared Diamond's Collapse, which keeps almost suggesting a parallel between us and the Last Days of those that have come before. And what's frightening is that things fall apart so quickly, and at the height of their extravagance and sophistication. Athens (see Victor Davis Hansen's A War Like No Other, and marvel at his current politics considering) ruined itself on the heels of its Golden Age, its fleet larger than it had ever been, its buildings grander, its power at its apex.

But worlds are always ending somewhere, for someone - we all die, after all, and anybody who didn't live to see the world past 1950 or so might have thought it their last moments that it would all end shortly. It's a fluke of birthplace and property that I and my generation of indie-rock listening college peers who groove to The Arcade Fire's end times album haven't yet run into cataclysm ourselves.

Tomorrow, having piled all of this up, I'll try to make sense of it.

Notebooks Vo: 2

2007-03-19T10:53:00.000-04:00

Meetings: Three Characters Observed

1. He's wearing oxford lace-ups in black leather, and black socks, under frayed white pants and a shapeless pullover and a faded denim jacket, holding a legal pad crammed fat with stapled sheaves of paper - a professor, almost certainly, tenured and indifferent now to eccentricities. His wife left him seven years ago. He looks to his graduate students and tenderly unwraps baroque theory, historiography, builds clausal edifices and enunciates semicolons and thinks of himself as above such pedestrian emotions as regret. He shaves only rarely, but with a certain self-consciousness; he has tried and cannot manage a full beard.

He has a high voice, full lips, curly dark hair hidden underneath a footbaall cap. He affects an interest in professional athletics at cocktail parties, and to his students, pale and hatching into young academics. When they chide him, he clucks, "Not everything in life can be abstract, or intellectualized. You cannot discount the value of the physical, the tactile." He once seduced a student in this manner, a month after his wife left him.

He listens now on the subway, indulgently, to his female graduatee student relate to him the story of the man she is seeing, her fears that he is an alcoholic, the time he stilled whiskey-and-soda down her shirt on the sidewalk outside of a bar. He lit a cigarette and tried to give her one by way of apology. She worried he might set her on fire. She is wearing pink Chuck Taylors, which he finds both charming and contemptible, a little child-like for somebody her age, a little twee. She has a guileless lack of style. Her flaws charm him. Her unstable love life charms him. He thinks he cannot afford to get involved with a student, but there is no harm in listening, in being the voice of reason, in working out her problems for her. He chews his fingers in mock consternation. He speaks softly. The more hysterical she becomes, the softer he speaks.

2. She butters her toast delicately, like she is holding a paintbrush, and tosses her hair. She leans in while he points out something in the book she has propped on the narrow countertop of the café. She covers her mouth while she chews, pretending to brush away crumbs; her mother once said watching a woman chew was like watching a cow and its cud. While he speaks, she makes sure to look interested, to blink her eyes rapidly, to draw her shoulders back.

She is barely aware that she does this. She has forgotten completely her mother saying that it will be expected. She'd decided years before that her mother was a vain, shallow woman, that she had pushed parts of herself into the background for years until the only things left were a bright false smile, an almost imperceptible softness, the faint smell of martines. She'd felt that if she were to tap her mother there would be a hollow sound, that if she pushed too hard her mother might crack into fine shards of manicured glass. She resolved in high school to move away, to buy a shabby green coat, lose her virginity, pierce her naval.

She finds, now, no harm in flirting a little. She thinks, wouldn't it be easier to marry a rich man. She has become pretty without realizing it, and later that night she will regard her mother with a new and tempered understanding. She begins to understand the temptations.

3. He is exceedingly nervous, young, Vietnamese, in a white buttoon-down with thin stripes and jeans, hair carefully parted, alone and asking for a table for two. He feels as though he is being carried along on rails. He is rushing, his vision telescoped: the table is clear in front of him. The rest of the room recedes.

He sits, and forgets to the thank the hostess, and stares straight ahead, feeling as though he is traveling at great speed. He can barely catch a breath. The room to either side is a smear of color and movement. He remembers being little and on his first train, being walked to his seat by his mother, who flirted shamelessly with the conductor and was allowed to see him off, he remembers being left there and feeling as though he was sitting perfectly still and watching the world pull itself away from him. He remembers trying to catch a glimpse of his mother in the crowds and seeing nothing, and only hearing later what had happened.

He sists now in the small café chair, waiting for the woman he is to meet, the girl he knew, and feels again like that boy, feels again the world rushing by him, feels again helpless and abandoned by fate. He looks at his watch and gestures brusquely for tea and wonders what she will look like, wonders what he will look like to her.

Are Blogs Flawed As A Medium?

2007-03-17T13:07:00.000-04:00

Part (2)

At the risk of performing a perfunctory gloss on a tangled and ongoing debate, I'm directing you (and blogging only as a referer, with a minimum of original critical thought, which makes today's earlier post a self-indictment) to Scott Eric Kaufman's dissection of the dust-up surrounding this article in n+1 (link is to an excerpt). An original thought below the fold:

The entire debate's peculiar to lit-blogging as a subculture, which makes most of the particulars assume the towering proportions of storm-in-a-teacup, and anybody not in the know will have to work very hard not to be bewildered by some of the audience assumptions.

All of which makes me think (but not too hard!) about the fragmentation of culture, once so ostensibly hegemonic and universal, and the way that blogs, with their intersection of public discourse and private conversation, start to make the very notion of some sort of common public sphere impossible.

It makes a post like this difficult, since I'm not plugged into a prefab online community of blogrolls and ideological dispositions. Who am I couching this to? The debaters, who are exponentially better informed than I and locked in grudge matches? The limitless uninformed masses who couldn't care less?

This isn't (or didn't start to be) a theory blog, and God knows I'm not working on a dissertation, so academia itself seems impossibly esoteric. But restarting as I am requires questioning some basic assumptions, aloud and at length, and that's made even more difficult by the pint of Jameson on the windowsill next to my coffee this morning.

(to steal from Kaufman's links again, see Edward Champion's clever - but perhaps self-defeating - prefab blog post, which makes me feel cliché all over again).

Maybe I'd be better off keeping this to the level of link farming: just read Kaufman - he's put the time and sweat into the roundup, and I found the confluence (two conversations about blogging as a medium! two throwaway lines mocking Slate!) interesting enough to take a break from red cabbage and whiskey.

For those uninclined to work through storms in teacups, I'll quote from his conclusion, which dovetails (is there no original thought anymore?) with a post I've been working out in my head for some time, and which brings to mind Wendell Berry in his frequently anthologized find-nature essay "An Entrance to the Woods," from his Recollected Essays, 1965-1980.

Here's Berry first:

[...] For a solid hour or more I drove sixty or seventy miles an hour, hardly aware of the country I was passing through, because on the freeway one does not have to be. The landscape has been subdued so that one may drive over it at seventy miles per hour without any concession whatsoever to one's whereabouts. One might as well be flying.

[...] Our senses, after all, were developed to function at foot speeds, and the transition from foot travel to motor travel, in terms of evolutionary time, has been abrupt. The faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in, the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over - and the longer it takes to bring the mind to a stop in the presence of anything.

[...] The machine is running now with a speed that produces blindness.

With Berry in mind, take a look at Kaufman:

The entire “Intellectual Situation” is a meditation on the relation of speed and technology to the cultivation of thought:
The true mood of the form is spontaneity, alacrity—the right time to reply to a message is right away. But do that and your life is gone.
As with email, so too with cellphones and blogs. The dearth of analytic vim in any blogging community is not necessarily the fault of the individuals comprising it, but a symptom of the temptations of the genre. It is tempting to write book-chat. It is tempting to turn a blog into group therapy. It is tempting to post the same sort of fluff found in Slate. It is tempting to link to the same YouTube video everyone else has. Unless you consciously fight it, the inertia of generic norms will exert its influence on you ... and your blog’ll be the worse for it. That lit-blogs are singled out speaks to their potential—to the potential of people who are still devoted readers—to bring to their blogging the same spirit of resistance they demonstrate every time they choose to read instead of write an email, use their cellphone, or turn on their Wii.

And: is dipping into storms in teacups not my own a waste of time? That is, and a girl in the Art of Nonfiction asserted this three weeks ago: Is there no human common ground? "I don't believe that anything is universal," she said, by way of explanation for disliking Montaigne, who had written, "Every man has within him the entire human condition." If we have nothing in common, why bother to write (or read) at all?

Form Dictating Function

2007-03-17T01:04:00.000-04:00

A Note on Readership

If modernism's still gasping along - and there's enough hysteria over originality, plagiarism, copyright to lend credence - blogs aren't helping. The form is all pastiche - self-reflexive, scrapbooking - and impermanent to boot. Digital text is endlessly malleable. The narrow columns and itinerant readership encourage frequent posts, short length, unfinished and unguarded.

The blog (as a medium) practically begs us to combine advertisement and content - whatever we write we shape to preen in front of search engines and feed sifters, to reach out and touch other sources, to direct and redirect the reader and arrest a flitting, promiscuous gaze.

Cf. the way say, Slate Magazine solicits clicks as ends in themselves, and mixes content with solicitation - articles phrased as questions and endlessly repackaged, a revolving header that moves faster than the content changes, strategic hyperlinks.

That sentence, by way of contrast, has already gone on too long.

And all of this, perhaps, is only a roundabout way to get to intertextuality: Blog Meridian, who's been kind enough in the past to single out some of the work I've done here, fronts a clever video on Web 2.0 by a Kansas State professor of cultural anthropology. It does a good job of dramatizing the radical changes in composition that are accompanying this technology (you could almost call it the last, attenuated phase of moveable type's destruction of the illuminated manuscript and its immoveable, singular, hand-crafted text); I'm not sure I can share its unalloyed optimism at the changes being wrought, though - the music swells triumphal as it promises to sweep away of all that's come before, but that really begs the question.

How much does form dictate content? How much does technology shape perception, or social networking alter socialization? How much will blogging change the way we write - the way the cinema has affected juxtaposition, scene setting and cuts in literary fiction?

The reposted video is sandwiched between a detailed two-part parsing of the identity politics surrounding Barack Obama's candidacy, which makes any clear indictment of blogging as a medium look a little silly. But: the questions stand.

I have to face a Boston snowstorm on St. Patrick's Day in seven hours; these are best left rhetorical on my end. You readers, hypothetical or not, are welcome to take them up in my stead.

Notebooks Vo: 1

2007-03-16T17:31:00.000-04:00

The Cost of Silence

Yehuda Amichai writes that a man 'doesn't have seasons enough to have a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes was wrong about that.'

Here, in the twilight, against a windowsill, in the middle of a spring hailstorm, I might take some comfort in this: my long silence here has just been a time for gathering stones.

But I can't, of course; I know as well as Henry James that writing is mostly muscle memory, and we've all got to keep up the practice while we still can. The things we leave undone stay that way, and all memories fade. James wrote:

I have lost too much by losing, or rather by not having acquired, the note-taking habit. It might be of great profit to me; [...] I ought to endeavor to keep, to a certain extent, a record of passing impressions, of all that comes, that goes, that I see, and feel, and observe. To catch and keep something of life - that's what I mean.

Writing gains its power by making manifest: not for nothing did God speak the Word. Language makes things so. Thoughts are only feeble impressions, grey smoke, dreams. Writing forces us to unstop our mouths, make ourselves clear, render our ideas intelligible, spell out what otherwise we would tremblingly leave unsaid.

We write to be read. 'I can't write without a reader,' John Cheever wrote. 'It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.' The readership we carry awaiting us in our minds informs how much we explain ourselves, and in what language; it makes us think about whether we're being too obscure or too superficial, keeps us on deadline, worries us into greatness.

Nobody writes for themselves. Language, after all, that imperfect and baroque abstraction, only operates so that we might make ourselves understood. It automatically gestures towards a common humanity. Writing isn't for ourselves. It can't be. It's at least partly for what we hold in common, or think we hold. If we were alone in this world we wouldn't need to write, except in notes to aid our memory, rendered in shorthand, organized inscrutably in a manner tailored to our own inner workings.

All that said: I've been silent here too long, and refusing to document along the way has let me forget most of my best ideas, bottle up and block until the weight of everything I'm trying to keep in mind unwritten chokes me and I cease to be able to surprise myself. Thinking is all well and good, but the thing about writing is that after a few minutes you're taking a mysterious sort of dictation. Thought has nothing to do with it. Muses be damned. To realize the implications of a little sentence you've thoughtlessly spilled is more rewarding than sitting around with pursed lips, contemplating, in that showy and half-asleep way. Inspiration happens halfway through; it's not a thunderbolt.

Henry James and I both: we've been cowards, or unprofilgate, and we've both agonized over it, the gap in talent and renown notwithstanding. Jacques Barzun writes somewhere in the thick, magisterial, invaluable From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life that the 20th century has irreparably damaged a writer's output; we live too well-connected, surrounded by distraction. The world, as Woodsworth might say, is too much with us. François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand - a man from an earlier time - began his career in travel-writing shipboard on the Atlantic Ocean over a period of months. He wrote volumes. I'd like to meet the person capable of sustaining a single thought in an airplane at cruising altitude.

This is all by way of a reintroduction, with more to come. If it seems dense, overthought - didn't I just make clear that's the danger of hiatus? The form can't bear too much weight - is already overburdened - so I'll leave my thoughts here, with a last impression, some months old, caught in one of my notebooks:

On a bus at night in the South End. A man boarded - he was shouting at his own reflection in the window, spitting on the floor, the people around him, well trained, staring into the middle distance impassively. The seven or eight youths behind me, who had been joking about gay bars and faggots in a way that was making the well-dressed man in front of me flinch, decided to rile him. They started shouting they were with him, shouted go on, say it - his face relaxed into an expression, he raised his fist in a Black Panther salute and suddenly you could see his life arc for decades, you got a vision of him as a boy, his father, you felt the frame expanding, on the verge of some kind of revelation - he got off the bus, he was pounding on the windows, happy to have made friends. The boys were suddenly uncomfortable. They made 'v' signs, laughed uneasily. He's fuckin crazy, one said, with too much force. They were glad to get away.

I won't unpack this here. I've written enough as it is. More to come.

A Man In His Life

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough
to have a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds,
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

- Yehuda Amichai

From The Archives

2006-08-22T09:38:00.000-04:00

This Time A Year Ago

Forgive the stopgap measures while I sign leases, write housing checks, hunt down boxes and collect recipes for quiche.

This time, one year ago, I was still packing, since I and everybody I know who's my age live our lives perpetually uprooted, wordly possessions split between two or three or four places to call home.

I wrote too, last summer, about being pursued by a collection agency, working for Banana Republic, and the origins of the New York Minute.

I compared life to toothpaste, and exposed Osama bin Laden's nefarious plot to poison America.

I uncovered the history of a mysterious and broken sea captain sitting on my street's stoop and profiled an ex-Cuban Cold War bagman named Luis Posada Carriles.

New material to come soon.

Washington, D.C.

2006-08-18T16:31:00.000-04:00

Lessons Learned on The Hill

For a little more than two months I have worked inside the sausage factory of high government, trussed in neckties, sealed and hog-tied in that airtight vessel known as Washington, D.C.*

*With apologies to Michael Chabon & his army of paid attorneys.

I made my escape four days ago, in the manner of the East Germans. Still wrapped in a swaddling grey flannel suit, I exited the District as an infant awaiting birth, folded into the back bench of a cherry-red Mini Cooper, bent double between suitcases, bedding, a six-pack of Blue Moon, a plastic jug of windshield wiper fluid, and a box filled to overflowing with spice bottles and dozens of secondhand paperbacks.

Most of the contents of my George Washington University apartment had been thrown down chutes in black bags some hours earlier. The walls are white, recently repainted; the windows are suicide-proof and hermetic. The view stretches out over boulevards and beached tourists and heaps of white stone. In recent years, the roads have been bifucated by fences, guardhouse checkpoints and concrete barriers.

Outside, the Watergate complex is drooping in the heat like a melting wedding cake. Condi Rice keeps an apartment there. The Hon. Duke Cunningham enjoyed liquor and prostitutes there, courtesy of defense companies who bribed him millions (and bought him a yacht) to divert a river of arms contracts, new bases, and federal lucre their way. Four hundred years ago, it was maize fields grown by the Algonquin Pascataway.

Somewhere boiling on the horizon, near the Capitol, is the intersection of New Jersey and Louisiana that L'Enfant drew up in 1800, and maybe this unlikely collision of boardwalk saltwater taffy and jazzed-up catfish, of Creole and Newark, of Garden and wetlands, of spit-can Southern politicking and immigrant gangsters running the horse odds - maybe this corner is as good a place as any to try to illustrate the District by way of example.

It's just a few blocks away, through chain-link, snipers, Congressional parking and verdant undergrowth, from the Capitol building, which sits heavily over the skyline like an egg. On a particular day of the week, staff are encouraged to wear seersucker.

Interns, working for nothing, half of them the children of major campaign donors, answer phones from psychotic or terrified constituents who rave about the neighbor's sex habits, the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the failure of local hospitals. They are instructed to tell the constituent that they are writing down everything they are hearing. They are forbidden to talk policy or answer direct questions, even if they know the answer.

Outside, a cart full of bricks collected from border state offices truddles by.

In August, Congress is in recess, wilting from the choleric heat that seeps marshy under windows and, insidiously, into the omnipresent air conditioning. The offices are quiet. Interns and staff assistants make out in storage cages, concoct elaborate social vendettas, scheme as if in high school. There are cliques in the Longworth cafeteria. All involved pray for Happy Hour. Seven days a week, Hill bars offer the most competitive drink specials on the Eastern seaboard. By eight, people in suits or improbable heels are stumbling out into the midsummer sunlight, soused to the gills.

Meanwhile, the business of government continues. Representatives hurl profanity and invective on the House floor while stenographers race to scrub the record for public consumption and, across the way, Senator-only elevators are being vigorously defended from interlopers. I found myself sharing a ride with John McCain, once. I was wearing a pink tie.

"Nice tie," he said to me. "A little faggy."

Playlist

2006-07-27T14:28:00.000-04:00

Eight Anti-Government Songs To Play In A Senate Office Building

Welcome back to the monumental expanse of Washington, D.C., currently shimmering like a god-damned mirage amidst heat that melts marble into taffy. Intern for a public policy think tank, you stalk the high marble hallways and polished hardwood of, say, Dirksen, briefcase in hand, tailored into a grey suit, hair shorn, shoes polished, a folded copy of Roll Call or The Hill in the crook of your arm. You are the model of colorless establishment.

And so there's a sneaking and indulgent feeling of subversion to letting the six inches between your ears shudder to private and anarchic cacophony - in wearing earbuds at all. In a city built on dry and faded restraint, on old suits, shoulders flecked with dandruff, on sagging folds of skin, overripe power, itching wool - on an aching indifference to chic - these songs can remind you that, in theory at least, you haven't yet sold out.

1. "All You Fascists," Mermaid Avenue Vo: II. Billy Bragg & Wilco.
Woody Guthrie rails from the grave against fascism, Jim Crow, union-busters. Jeff Tweedy strangles a harmonica, and guitars squeal cathartic fury. All you fascists, we are told, are bound to lose. And: You fascists are bound to lose. And: You're bound to lose, you fascists, bound to lose. Why? People over this world are getting organized. Would that it were so.

2. "The Big Three Killed My Baby," The White Stripes. The White Stripes.
Jack White screams over plugged-in dirty blues stomp that shambles monster-like and bereved. Sinister and obtuse allusions to war in the Middle East abound: "Don't let them tell you the future's electric - 'cause gasoline's not measured in metric! Thirty thousand wheels are spinnin' - and oil company faces are grinnin'! And now my hands are turnin' red! And I found out my baby is dead!"

3. "16 Military Wives," Picaresque. The Decemberists.
An electric piano bounces along infectiously while a brass band hits the exclamation points and Colin Maloy cheerfully proclaims If America says it's so - it's so!, and impersonates a media babbling affirmative nonsense for the chorus. Meanwhile, soldiers die abroad and their wives are served up on beds of lettuce. It may be the catchiest anti-war song ever.

4. "Plymouth Rock," Pixel Damage. John Vanderslice.
John Vanderslice, sobering us up, sings a burbling and immaculate eulogy narrated by an American soldier shot in the throat while he jumps off a helicopter deck into a moonless Tuwaitha night. Sew me up again, he gasps. Get me out of here. And then, quietly, to us: I lost the reason - I lost the reason I'm here.

5. "Taxman," Revolver. The Beatles.
The Beatles are comfort food. Shake off violent death. Swallow three-part harmony and syrupy pop hooks while taxmen Mssrs. Wilson and Heath continue politely to bleed you dry. Their position on the estate tax? For those who die: declare the pennies on your eyes.

6. "Fight the Power," Fear of a Black Planet. Public Enemy.
Whether your idea of the powers that be is the patriarchy, the white establishment, the monied classes, the educated elite, or the people with the guns & money, if you're walking down Dirksen's halls on a weekday, you're right there with them. It's hard not to shout along to the chorus, especially since Chuck D lays on some constitutional law to bring us in: Our freedom of speech is freedom or death. Thing is, that's true, especially with the snipers up top.

7. "Good Morning," Hell's Winter. Cage.
Fuzzing electronica and a guitar build up a post-apocalyptic, swaggering paranoid howl of a song that cracks open with Cage spitting out disjointed couplets - Homeless cardboard cribs, cops shoot civilians / Vendors rap stars Wall Street billions, he shouts headlong. Skyscrapes - planes hit 'em / Army in the subway High risk / Orange alert everyday. Don't worry, though; Cage says somewhere near the end that he's got room for a few of you in his car when martial law hits.

8. "Subterranean Homesick Blues," Bringing It All Back Home. Bob Dylan.
Feel that paranoia creep over your head like a skullcap while the gui-tar plays. D.A.'s and wiretaps are everywhere, there's bomb-throwers, fire hoses, dirty cops and jailhouses. Bust's coming early May and your crime's unknown, but you're doing it again. Meanwhile, president says he can still waterboard you 'til you spit up blood. Keep a clean nose. Watch the plainclothes. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Missed a song? Ideas for another list? Post in the comments section.

In The News

2006-07-13T11:06:00.000-04:00

A History of Violence

Hezbollah militants on the Lebanese border ambushed two Israeli Humvees at 9 in the morning with antitank rockets and smallarms fire, and abducted the survivors. The capture was announced on Hezbollah's Al Manar network, and in the southern slums of Beruit guns were fired in celebration. Israel began a general air and naval bombardment of Beruit's international airport and other targets, killing dozens of civilians, and sent infantry and armor units deep inside Lebanon for the first time in 6 years.* A former Israeli intelligence officer fingered Iran - "Hezbollah is an Iranian tool. It answers to Iranian concerns." - and the White House implicated Syria as well.* Others theorized that Hezbollah and Hamas were collaborating.

Tanks, armored personnel carriers and armored bulldozers moved into central Gaza for the first time. Bombing continued, and a strike that targetted a house in Gaza City where the head of Hamas' armed wing was rumored to be meeting killed 9 members of the Salmiyeh family instead, included 7 of the couple's 10 children, ages 7 to 18, and if you were there, if you were an accountant living across the street you saw the olive grove behind the house, shredded and hung with headless torsos, the body of a small child ragged among the gnarled trunks, black smoke filling the block.*

Armed Shiite men wearing dark clothes and masks flooded Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad at dawn on Sunday, kicked in doors and set up barricades in the streets, torturing handcuffed Sunnis with power drills, bolts, and nails before shooting them.* Two car bombs exploded outside of a Shiite mosque, and religious leaders went door to door in Sunni neighborhoods organizing defense militias and handing out AK-47s. Gunmen pulled ten Sunnis out of a minibus and executed them while an Iraqi Army unit stood by, and twenty people were abducted later at random from the same bus station and executed, apparently in reprisal. A Shiite family of five was found beheaded. Mortar grenades hit a Shiite mosque in Dora.

Seven bombs exploded on commuter trains during rush hour in Bombay, renamed Mumbai by the ruling conservative Hindu party. Hundreds were killed, though saying that hardly does justice to the smell, or the ragged clumps of twisted metal and strewn limbs, or spots of blood and pockmarked walls and quiet musk of fear.* In Sri Lanka, the government fired on a Tamil Tiger PT boat.

Pedestrians wearing explosive vests blew themselves up in front of a restaurant outside the Green Zone walls, and a bomb hidden nearby followed suit; the Islamic Army called it revenge for U.S. military attrocities. A half-dozen American soldiers are now charged in the gang rape of a 14 year-old Iraqi girl and the murders of her family, including her 5 year-old sister.*

The Supreme Court struck down the tribunals being used to try Guantanamo prisoners, Bush declared he had been vindicated, and it was discovered the prisoners had basic human rights. Shortly thereafter, the White House demured, and asked for legislation to limit those rights. The prohibition in Common Article Three of “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment” was, the administration said, "too vague."* The military currently holds over 1,000 terror suspects in Guantanamo and in bases in Afghanistan, holds more in secret CIA sites, or by proxy in jails in Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Syria.

Reporting, by nature of its careful objectivity and scientific detachment, leaves out most of the truth. Truth being by nature hidden and unknowable, or at least as tangled and vast in its appearance as the world itself, such that to report truly one would, like Borges' imperial cartographers, have to duplicate creation.

And so instead we are given numbers and half-truths. Over beers in a college pub in Foggy Bottom last night, a friend told me what it meant when American soldiers, or Iraqi civilians were found dead, what the papers call found bodies: "We saw the pictures in the oversight committee," she said. "They'd been tortured, they'd been burned with cigarettes, cut, they'd had their fingers cut off, they'd had their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths. While they were still alive."

Today an Israeli tank rolled over explosives. Four inside died, the papers say. A fifth died trying to rescue them. Verbs and subjects barely scrape the hissing pop of burning ammunition, the crackle of metal and skin, the screams, the sudden shock of the blast. The papers report "clashes with militants," and not the hallucinatory terror of combat, or the boredom, or the desert heat boiling the pan of the skull or the weight of armor. They do this so that we can read about all of the manifold horrors that consume the world and forget about them, so that we can feel connected and indifferent to all of humanity, so that we can sit, complacent and unmoved, above creation, and look with placid eyes at the little fires that burn below.

Pennsylvania Avenue

2006-07-10T21:46:00.000-04:00

10:32 a.m.

Walk down Pennsylvannia Avenue towards the Treasury Building at 10:32 in the morning, in the wet heat. The sidewalks are empty. There are tall buildings, steel & glass, shining like bones. There are strips of grass wilting between the lanes on the boulevard. The only things moving are cars, empty taxis gunning streetlights. The world is metal and concrete and glass, and the strips of grass that wilt in the sun. Walk down Pennsylvania Avenue before lunchtime and the only living things in the world are you and the sunparched grass strips and the ragged dozens of homeless, prone on the benches, asleep in little grassy triangles at the end of the block underneath saplings, staring out into nothing. All else is roaring machinery and distant buildings, marble lobbies. The buildings and the cars gaze down coolly, the sky mirrored in their gaze, and outside in the roaring quiet before the lunch hour a ragged and desperate little clutch of humanity bleaches in the wet heat.

In The News

2006-07-07T16:25:00.000-04:00

Today's Papers

Israeli tanks and mechanized infantry rolled into northern Gaza while armed drones buzzed over bombed homes and Palestinians buried their dead wrapped in Fatah and Hamas flags. A sniper shot an Israeli soldier in the head. Several dozen Palestinians were killed or wounded throughout Gaza, a fifth of them boys under the age of 17. Militants carrying Klashnikovs and RPGs set roadside bombs and patrolled streetcorners while the Interior Minister, a member of Hamas, called on all Palestinians to "defend our people." Fourteen Qassam missiles were launched into Israel, though all but three landed on open ground.*

It was announced that a professor of computer studies was arrested in Beruit for planning over the Internet to bomb the Lincoln Tunnel and flood Lower Manhattan, and that Los Angeles street gangs like the Crips and Bloods had discovered blogging. A U.S. soldier, who had what his brother called "mental problems" after his service in Iraq, charged a cockpit door on an airplane en route to Tampa and was tackled by passengers who thought he was a terrorist.

Health experts argued about when it was appropriate to call children obese, and a study linked obesity with depression and other mood disorders. A group of scientists found that factors besides diet and exercise might play a role in America's obesity epidemic, including inadequate sleep, air conditioned workplaces, aging mothers and decreases in cigarette smoking.

A Memphis preacher's wife shot her husband at the Church of Christ after losing $17,500 to a Nigerian check scam, and a father was charged with poisoning his children's soup in a scheme to sue Campbell for damages. A survey found that daughters in West African towns commonly have their breasts bound and burned with hot stones in order to make them less attractive and protect them from rape.* Scientists designed a 50-yard wide folding plastic shade that would open up over a space telescope to block out distracting starlight, and expressed hope that this would allow them to find life on Earth-like planets trillions of miles away.

At a red carpet ceremony in the Himalayas amidst frozen drizzle at fourteen thousand feet, China and India agreed to reopen the Silk Road, closed for 44 years after a brutal series of border wars. A media leak gave away the Canadian prime minister's 60th birthday gift to President Bush before he could unwrap it.

Ashes of American Flags

2006-07-04T22:08:00.000-04:00

(I am large, I contain multitudes.) - Walt Whitman

It's the Fourth of July in Washington, D.C. and amid the brassy echo of the Army Corps Blues & Jazz Band, three Civil War fife players, curdling ranks of portable toilets, and the Washington Monument - lit up by searchlights - a red, mottled expanse of American citizenry prepare to celebrate the nation's birth. I'm with a Guatemalan friend of mine, and, looking at the spectacle with her in mind, feeling a foreigner myself. On a day like today, here on the Mall, surrounded ostensibly by that wisp of indefinable national spirit Whitman heard singing, you can't help but look around you and think, This is America. This, in some way, defines us.

A revivalist preacher screams "Know Jesus!" under a white tent onstage with a band covering the Beatles, rewritten with God in mind: "Come Together (For the Power of Christ)." Twelve women in saris are walking by, next to a knot of the ubiquitous Midwestern family, in matching t-shirts, kids mewling in the heat. A burkha-clad woman with two thoroughly secular friends is saying something about the police. Checkpoints are up at all of the entrances; purses searched, cell phones inspected. I wonder out loud how easy it would be for somebody with pancaked plastic explosive sweating on their chest to jump a fence, and where the Secret Service snipers on the rooftops are posted. A friend tells me he hears there are plainclothes cops in the crowd. An old man sneaks a nip out of a flask in his coat pocket. Six sunburned & drunk college students try to buy hotdogs from a gauntlet of mustard-yellow carts hawking ice cream, water, soda, egg rolls, Polish sausage, candy, frozen coconut balls, Italian ices. Men sell glow sticks, Nationals tickets, hats, shirts, water bottles.

What are we to make of any of this - of this infinite expanse of cotton and skin, this impossible cultural mash, this extravagant, expensive triumphalism? What one thing can we say about a nation that comprises a tent of Indian aesthetics teaching mantra yoga and a tent that preaches the Gospel and a tent that sells reheated bison burgers and Molson Light?

The sun falls and the bombardment begins. Fireworks boom, deafen, echo off of the distant buildings, timed to music drowned out by the explosions. The clouds glow red and orange. The skyline is on fire. There is something perverse about the idea of a mock cannonade, when real skylines light up with real flames. Children play with sparklers. The smoke fills the streets of the Northwest, creeps along the ground like fog. Walking back, afterwards, backlit by the spotlights, we are shadows amidst the ink-green grass. Three hundred thousand of us crowd the streets, blocked off with empty Metro buses, windows gaping out, breaching the mist. It looks for a moment like the aftermath of some cataclysm.

Elsewhere, long-range North Korean missiles splash into the Pacific or disintegrate on launch. Hamas fires a rocket into an abandoned Israeli elementary school. Israel bombs a Palestinian government building and kills a couple kids.

The American flag continues to wave, over embassies, hotel rooms, Ohio porches, outposts of far-flung empire, sits somewhere, I suppose, amid the detritus of our secret and hidden tortures, flutters tiny on the radials of our ironclad military expeditions, and, oversized, above a used-car lot in Michigan. By a narrow margin, it continues to burn, once or twice a year.

From the air, flying over America today in a plane, you'd see every town's little fireworks display, the rockets glaring thousands of feet below, splashing colorful and harmless, each an island of quiet light and fury, invincible and alone.

One year earlier: Fourth of July in Boston.

Kung Pao & Nativist Fury

2006-06-30T14:18:00.000-04:00

Talking Immigration at the Federalist Society

The Republican Party continued to tear itself apart today, amidst the wreckage of a six-course luncheon on the third floor of a Chinese restaurant a block past the Friendship Arch, courtesy of CNN, the Federalist Society, and Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez.

Gutierrez had been invited by the Federalist Society, a clubby group of conservative lawyers whose symbol is the purple silhouette of James Madison, to deliver the administration line on immigration to a divided and rebellious base. I was there with two tables of Cato interns who had gotten a forwarded invite that promised free lunch and a trade talk, Cato being a public policy think tank, which is like an aquarium for reasons I've already explained.

The Secretary arrived late into plattered ruins of spring rolls, dumplings, fried rice, chicken or pork shining sticky with sweet & sour or choked in teriyaki, amid red Chinese lanterns, and red lacquered woodwork, and baroque chairs, and banquet tables. James Madison's purple visage was flanked at the podium by two bejeweled and golden dragons. He trailed Secret Service, a cameraman, staff assistants. An introduction by the D.C. chapter president included jokes about the astrological signs of Democratic congressmen and a crack at Senator Joe Biden.

Gutierrez's speech was an odd mixture of realistic policy goals, technophilia and calls for tolerance. He pushed unmanned drone patrols on the border and, most disturbingly, a national biometric identification card without which nobody would be able to seek employment. He spoke of his own experiences coming to the US as an immigrant from Cuba via Mexico forty years before, and got a sudden, brittle flourish of applause after calling for new arrivals to learn English, as he had. The microphone volume cut in and out, the CNN cameraman looked bemused and swore, shuffling in orange polo, smiling an odd sick sort of smile everytime the audio failure obliterated a sentence.

The Secretary gently denounced deportation by pointing out the logistic and moral pitfalls of expelling 12 million people from the country - "Are we going to use buses? A fleet of 747s? Where will we send them?" - and raised the question of the 3 million children born to them here, now US citizens. He mentioned amnesty and claimed Bush's plan was far more rigorous, pleading for a middle ground between the extremes of amnesty and deportation. A dozen people, their faces compressed with inchoate rage, got up and walked out of the room. "Nation of immigrants" was used at least four times, and contrasted to "nation of law." He asked that this "emotional" issue not be clouded by antagonistic and disruptive rhetoric, meaning nativist posturing, though not in so many words. He invoked the President, underlining his status as messenger.

Questions came, and the room, between the crackling and sudden hush of the microphones, the rebellious hum of exiting suits, felt stretched tight as a balloon. An old, old man, shrunken into hollow collapse with his age, asked, or tried to ask, a question that circled and circled around the unnamable. He tried to say, Perhaps immigration is a good thing, or was, at the turn of the century. When immigrants could be counted on to espouse American values of hard work, advancement. But what does what do? - he paused. What does one do about a collection of immigrants who do not share these values? Who do not have the education - or perhaps the drive - to succeed, quite, like - and he trailed off. The suggestion hung in the air like cigarette smoke. Lazy Mexicans. It had a physical presence. You could reach out and touch the curdled racial tension in the room.

Gutierrez swallowed it. He adopted the reasonable, businesslike tone he'd followed for the duration of the speech. He suggested that perhaps those people working ten, twelve hours a day to put their children through school and send home remittances were in fact hardworking. He mentioned the overwhelming consensus of economists that immigration was good for the economy. He repeated that unemployment was the lowest in four decades, and that unemployment among illegal immigrants was even lower. He pointed out the wave of Irish immigrants at the turn of the century had not exactly been a wave of doctors and lawyers, and that this did not mean that they could not rise. He did not say, Give me your poor, your huddled masses, and given the room that was probably for the best.

He fielded one last question that saw the questioner attempting to strip citizenship from children born on US soil. There was applause, and he was presented with a leatherbound edition of James Madison's writings.

Meanwhile, across the country, Republican border state constituents are mailing their Congressional representatives bricks. Three different friends in three different offices confirm them piling up in the mailslots. One staffer has started building a wall around her desk. Another, working, to her eternal shame, at the RNC fundraising commission, makes calls and hits registered party members who tremble with righteous anger at Bush's immigration policy. "I'm not sending you a god-damned dime," one said, "until you build that wall."

In The News

2006-06-29T14:03:00.000-04:00

The World At Large

A drunk Axl Rose bit a Swede in the leg, Muhammed Ali introduced a line of health snacks baked in the shape of boxing gloves, and scientists discovered that coffee can decrease the harmful affects of heavy drinking. An astronomer announced a plan to scatter trillions of butterfly-thin lenses into orbit to bend sunlight and cool the planet. At least one Chinese cosmetics company was found to be using skin from executed criminals in collagen exported for lip enhancement surgery in Europe and America.

Israeli warplanes buzzed the home of the Syrian president and bombed a refugee camp, the Popular Resistance Committee executed an 18-year-old Israeli settler, and five hundred thousand people in Gaza City lit candles in the dark. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia's secret services to find and kill those responsible for the kidnapping deaths of four Russian embassy employees in Iraq. A man was found in Baghdad handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the back of the head.

The Surgeon General warned that the hazards of second-hand smoke were indisputable. A study reported that Aymaran speakers in the high Andes think of the future as behind them.

Hail to the Chief

2006-06-27T16:45:00.000-04:00

The Pneumatic Applauding Machine

It's sometime before eleven in the morning and I'm sitting in a red velvet chair in a ballroom in the George Washington Marriott, 1331 Pennsylvania, down the hall from the annual meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution. I'm sitting in a field of dark suits dotted with blouses, waiting for the President of the United States.

The gold braid on the top of the chairs is covered in a clear plastic tube to prevent rubbing. There are velvet ropes, and three sets of double doors, and velvet curtains behind the stage. There are chandeliers, but they've been recessed and cut down because of the height of the ceiling, and art deco wall sconces that contain Capitol Police or light fixtures. Outside is a continental buffet dressed in silver and white linen, a metal detector, a police checkpoint, caterers, Secret Service, a pile of confiscated umbrellas underneath a coffee table, thirty pounds of precut cantaloupe. Behind the podium hangs the Manhattan Institute logo in maroon and white.

I'm with one other intern, in whose purse I've stored, without a hint of shame, two blueberry muffins and a croissant wrapped in napkins. She's economics and history at Oberlin, but all of her friends are graphic designers. She looks at the cheap accents on the cut-off chandaliers. "It's kind of art deco," she says to me. "Like really fake art deco."

Behind us are four more Cato fellows, Cato being a public policy think tank, which as you know is an aquarium stocked with professors instead of carp. They're providing a kind of whispered Greek chorus to the entire event - currently to the tune of Roman consuls, plebian veto power, and Caligula's madness. The President is here on behalf of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research - another aquarium - to push the line item veto. The room isn't quite full, and everyone is told to move up and fill the gaps. There are fish wholesalers - Brookings, Heritage, AEI - congressional staffers, a bank of reserved chairs up front for congressmen and senators, several television camera crews. Photographers are taking pictures of the empty stage to get the exposure right.

Meanwhile, a Secret Service man does a microphone check, though whether it's for sound or bombs is difficult to tell. There are, if my personal history with potboiler novels can be believed, zip-bags cradling hidden and restful Uzi submachine guns, and snipers on the roof of the hotel, and contingency plans. The man's suitcoat, I decide, has been tailored loose to hide the bulge of a shoulder holster.

Suddenly, the doors open and a phalanx of reporters and cameramen doubletime it in, circling around to the aisles, baggy pleated khakis, rumpled polo shirts, acting as a kind of advance guard for the notables, who are gladhanding the front three rows. I see the back of McCain's head. "Nobody in Washington can dress," my companion says, and sighs.

And then, Bush sneaks in behind the Manhattan Institute speaker, who gives an introduction while he looks on. There is a standing ovation. He steps up, thanks the host, thanks the Institute, the board of directors, contributors. His drawl is laid on thick this morning, much thicker than in his national speeches.

"It's a flag amendment for the fiscal conservatives," my boss had said, in the cab. The line item veto was passed under Clinton and then declared unconstitutional in 1996. The current incarnation isn't really a line item veto at all, since to allow the president to change laws himself would effectively transfer Congressional power to the executive branch - to pass constitutional muster, the president, instead of being able to veto items in the bill line by line, redlines elements he doesn't like and sends them back to Congress, where a simple majority can knock them off.

It's touted as a way to reduce earmarks and unnecessary discretionary spending. As such it's one of a number of ways election-year Republican congressmen are scrambling to renew their credentials as the party of smaller government in the face of the most profligately spendthrift president in American history, a vast and yawning deficit, and emergency wartime appropriations to keep our various armed expeditions in the field. Last week's meeting of the Fiscal Action Team, which saw Republican staffers throwing out budget process reform amendments with a peculiar kind of desperation, is symptomatic - of one, a staffer said: "My Senator came into the office after reading this one and said, 'I'm no longer ashamed to call myself a Republican. I feel clean.'"

As with any other event in Washington, where applause is a speech act, the clapping here is strategic. You chart political standing by intensity and duration, by who and where, the northwest corner of the room being the most steadfast in their support. Cato, southeast and in the last row, keeps hands folded quietly. A woman across the aisle in cream and black pinstripes who I think I recognize as Heritage from the Action Team meeting almost throws her elbows out at one point when she claps in the middle of a Social Security bit that wasn't an applause line, the applause lines being telegraphed by lean and volume. It continues stridently, by sheer force of will, for three or four seconds until it's picked up by the northwest.

Beside the podium, a blocky lady in Southern blonde curls signs along for the benefit of the crowd, her face curled in imitation of the President, her hands, if possible, drawling Texan.

Bush talks resolve on the War on Terror, talks mandatory program reform, talks budget process reform, talks lower taxes leading to bigger economy and higher Treasury revenues, talks deficit reduced in half by 2009.

It's worth noting: the deficit, not the debt, is being reduced; the debt, which will continue to increase, is effectively a delayed tax, which renders today's cuts illusory; paradoxically, the official Republican line is that they have and will continue to be the party of smaller government - see Tom "The Hammer" DeLay's farewell speech - even as every office knows that's disingenuous at best.

He gets, after the preliminaries and the thanks, to line item veto. He talks constitutional merit, mentions its effect at the state level, says it's an important tool for fiscal restraint, says we should be more careful in spending the citizens' money. Says we owe it to the American people. Closes on a big applause line.

"Hail to the Chief" plays to a standing ovation and he ducks out behind curtains. Secret Service spring into action. Everybody stays standing.

Rising, the four Cato fellows talk briefly.

"It still appropriates the power of Congress, the veto supersedes the way you make a bill into -"

"The current one's actually looks to be pretty good, constitutionally."

"Got three federal judges to sign off on it, one of whom voted against it in '96."

"It's not actually a genuine line item veto, it's more a - "

"The question's not constitutionality, it's effectiveness. Will this actually reduce spending?"

"You grew up in a line item veto state, didn't you?"

"I did."

"It's interesting he singled out [Senator], since his is one of the weakest - but in states where it's been implemented, it's not used as a tool for fiscal restraint at all."

"It's a political cudgel - toe the line, or we'll redline your district's projects and not ours."

"You use it on people you have grudges against."

"I've run regressions, looked at the data comparatively at the state level and there's no - in a statistically robust sense - there's no significant effect on spending - the amount of spending."

"Anyway, - what is it, for approval, two thirds or - ?"

"Simple majority."

"Simple majority, right. That's the question. Whether you'll actually get that vote in this Congress."

"In any Congress. District appropriations get you elected."

"Targeting these things has been already tried - look at Jeff Flake's amendments to strip earmarks. All of those were defeated by at least two thirds."

"Went down in flames."

"Not even close to even a simple majority."

"To be fair, the vote is slightly different, which might change it. Voting against earmarks that have already been approved is one thing; voting for veto is just a little different, qualitatively."

"Well."

"So."

"It's purely symbolic."

"Flag amendment."

"Gay marriage ban."

"It won't change a thing."

"Do you think those Secret Service guys at the door will let us out yet, or what?"

"I don't know. Has Elvis left the building?"

Federal Wetlands

2006-06-26T09:35:00.000-04:00

The first good thunderstorm of the season rolled through yesterday in the evening twilight. Black clouds hanging swollen beat sunset to snuff out the last of the day. The rain rolled over the Watergate from the West, in sheets, rang beaten and thundering, shook windows, cracked the sky open like a morning egg or overripe fruit, blood and pulp and rainwater. There was lightening. The city lit up blind and white as a body on an operating table.

Washington D.C. is always one good rain away from reverting to swampland. Today, marble sweats. Flooding from last night sops up beneath overpasses, fills the Metro like a pint glass, splits four lines and engineers a massive snarl in outlying districts and through Capitol South. Fifty thousand Congressional interns, policy wonks, lobbyist mules, pages and other fresh-faced collegiate swarms stand in front of empty tracks in dark suits and negotiate split cabs to the Hill or roll in at eleven, sweating from a two hour train ride. There's a mudslide on Constitution and water in my office basement and a 100 year-old elm tree down on the White House lawn. It's the kind of downpour that almost invariably is called torrential, even though 'torrent' and 'downpour' are synynoms and Torrential Downpour anyway is a hardcore band whose profile picture is a nervous-looking middle management type staking himself in the stomach.

I digress. For now, I'm keeping myself occupied at home with Nabokov, the new Harper's, and the first season of Veronica Mars, a clever and audacious little gem of a show (on UPN? who knew?) that's like Nancy Drew trapped in The Big Sleep. I have my excuses; it's a rainy day.

How The West Was Won

2006-06-21T10:34:00.000-04:00

Discussed in this essay:

The Searchers (1956), dir. John Ford
Dead Man (1996), dir. Jim Jarmusch
Deadwood - Season One (2004), cr. David Milch

John Wayne, Dead Poets & Whorehouses

The iconic final shot of John Ford's The Searchers frames John Wayne in a doorway against an infinite and Technicolor expanse of hard packed earth and bluing mountains, he and the mountains both a sliver of uncivilized trammel being swallowed up and rendered small by the encroaching darkness. The frame narrows Ford's saturated primary colors, his Monument Valley photography to an eclipsed pinprick. The Searchers itself is a kind of twilight over our popular image of the Western - cowboys fighting Indians with dry bloodless pops of toy guns, black & white morality, an uncomplaining heroism. It is too brutal, too ambivalent. Its hero is a ruthless and alienated man who spends years pursuing a white girl captured by Comanches, not to save her, but to kill her to avenge the threat of rape and miscegenation. (Cf. A.O. Scott's piece in the June 11 Sunday New York Times for a fuller retrospective.)

The Searchers sends us into the wilderness, but not into darkness; the darkness we bring along with us. Its final sliver of light amidst the enroaching frame is both the death and rebirth of the Western. With it rises the revisionist Western, the Western that eats its own tail in reimagining the past to mirror our compromised, fragmented, and brutal present. And eating its own tail - there are masterpieces, here, Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller being one of them - the Western lost its formerly wide and credulous public. So today, a hack over at Entertainment Weekly can mention offhandedly in an article that Westerns have been dead for years.

In that spirit, then - because God knows I play well with Entertainment Weekly - here are two dead Westerns from the modern era, with all the self-doubt, second-guessing, blurring ethics, slaughter and collapse that modernity has taught us to know so well.

Forty years after The Searchers, Jim Jarmusch, a Swede, will shoot another film that collapses into an untracked wilderness: a short, black & white film called Dead Man. If The Searchers signals somehow the twilight of the traditional Western then here and now it is midnight and a new moon. Words cannot quite capture what it feels like to watch the movie. The score, written and performed special by Neil Young, sounds like an old, old man dropping an electric guitar in shock over and over again while trapped in a coal-burning tube amplifier the size of a farmhouse. It circles itself like Borges in a bramble maze, comes back to the same modal phrase like a rosary rubbed, covered in dried blood. The theme never quite resolves. It approaches itself by halved steps. It grows, infernally, between the cracks of the movie.

Johnny Depp wanders in and out, dazed, devolving from an accountant's checked Cleveland suit into a Bowie glam-era fur coat, acquiring Amerindian ochre lighting bolts on his cheeks and dying by inches from a gut wound while you lose track of how many men he's poetically killed. Buildings gape with grotesque rot. Mud is everywhere, and skulls. A trading post preacher leers about smallpox blankets. Indians stare out from the corners of new towns, sap still bleeding from the cabin planks. A trainload of passengers - themselves slowly devolving into fur-decked barbarian hunters as the tracks continue west - acquire Winchesters and fire blindly out into an unseen herd of buffalo while a coal-faced engineer talks about Hell. There is a cannibal bounty hunter who wears black, and one of William Blake's infernal mills. The movie collapses in on itself like a burning building, but slowly. It's the damnedest thing to watch.

The Western, even in revising, embodies not historic specificity but - to use Jay Fred MacDonald's words - a 'memory and vision of the deepest meaning of America.' Dead Man is a fever dream, but the genre itself is a vision of the past in essence. Civilization is reduced to its bare particulars on the frontier, the edge of all things, so that each object that rises in the empty country acquires a weight in isolation verging on the symbolic.

The Western is a man standing framed in a doorway, alone looking out at desolate expanse; the line that separates the wilderness and the garden; the cost of violence; the moment at which society's foundations are laid over blood and sand.

A Western will be hailed from time to time as 'realistic' - Deadwood, discussed in a moment, is one of these. But Gunsmoke too was 'realistic' 50 years ago - Dodge City, circa 1875 a waypoint for boozing Texas drovers, was the 'Gommorah of the Plains' just as Deadwood was Sodom of the Black Hills, and Gunsmoke was considered notable for its hard-bitten fidelity.

Realism - to digress briefly - is just an aesthetic, and an unattainable one at that. All art is artiface. In claiming realism and, in their time, being hailed for historical truth, they speak volumes about their own times. History is a story we tell ourselves, and it is self-revealing. The Western does not just distill the American dream, it reflects on it: the racial terror underlying 1956's The Searchers, the progressive and scientific march against ignorance and 'medieval cruelty' that preocupies the civilizing sheriff of Gunsmoke, and, finally, Deadwood, inheritor of the revisionist Western and of all our modern discontents.

Neither as inscrutable, or as self-contained, as Jarmusch's concussed picaresque, Deadwood coils up and out from the same mulch, like a nightflower. Resolutely prosaic where Dead Man is dream-like and surreal, expansive and detailed where the other is compressed and poetic, Deadwood benefits from the unspooling and compounding incident afforded by its medium. In the Black Hills of Dakota Territory, in Sioux country, gold is discovered and illegal squatters flood mining camps outide United States jurisdiction and, consequently, without rule of law. There is no open range in the Black Hills, no Monument Valley photography; the action is set indoors or else in mud and piss and tumult of the thoroughfare. In 14 months, the camp - Deadwood - has telegraph service, beating out San Francisco. Chinese immigrants set up shop and pogrom is threatened. The dusty blue reach of the US Cavalry, Custer's avengers, arrives choking and heat-mad on the border to effect reprisal massacres against the 'dirt-worshipers,' the Sioux who loom invisibly over the camp like a shroud, unchristian, irrational, capable of anything.

Noting that the ecstatically profane dialogue unfurls, curls around itself in the Baroque with Shakesperean cadance is by now a cliche. 'Cocksucker' becomes punctuation; the dialogue is anarchic in its assault on the viewer. Motives are concealed, multifarious, oblique.

A.O. Scott - I referenced the article and now, in rereading it, have found a few unconscious apropriations - claims Deadwood as unremitting in its sordid violence, primarily as an aside to offer up Ford as a contrast, but to do so ignores the careful evolution of the town towards a civil society founded on a kind of gradual realization, colored and kept tamped down by blind rage and ten a.m. whiskeys, that random killings won't be good for business. Spontaneous order coalesces in the blood and shit and backrooms of society; it is opposed to the civilization brought as a beacon by Dodge City's sheriff, unquestioned in his righteousness. Gunsmoke circa 1956, whatever the hardscrabble realities of frontier life that it depicts, sees the past as ignorance and history as a march of progress. Society, it follows, is perfectible.

Deadwood is not unremittingly sordid; it is deeply suspicious of progress. The civilized commit the worst atrocities. In the pilot, our erudite newsman, A.W. Merrick, opines that the treaty with the Sioux will inevitably be ripped up as scrap paper, that it is America's manifest destiny to swell to encompass the land - the Sioux are an unlucky impediment. A.O. Scott writes about an original sin at the foundation of civilization, a worm in the apple, a body in the concrete pilings. Conrad's Heart of Darkness ends with darkness rising, not over a ruined and enslaved graveyard in the Congo, but on the Thames. The unnamed Belgian city is a sugar-white masouleum. The heark of darkness is not in the wild but among us. Deadwood may be run by pimps, killers and thieves, but their operations are small-scale and benign compared to the civilized types that encroach - dusty, sun-mad cavalry units riding out for genocidal vengeance, mightily corrupt magistrates. The show gains a good deal of its power from the marriage of rhetoric and the spotless marble halls of culture to grit, blood, madness. They are locked in an embrace personified by Swearengen and Bullock, opposed sides of the same coin, necessary to one another.

If civilization is founded on an original sin or the necessary lie that births the tall buildings and the truth & beauty - and Deadwood can be read as the first half of a grand thesis and indictment of American institutions (cf. second half: The Wire) - then the Western takes us back to that moment of creation, breathes life into it, stands it up and makes everything that follows seem uncertain and transparent by comparison. You look at the buildings and they flicker. The present fades, and suddenly time is a line of arid brown hills, empty, and the empty vastness swallows up the lived-in specks, and you wonder at how brief they are.

The fate of the western proceeds from an uncomplicated myth of America to one that, in trying to account for the suppressed, the forgotten, and the distance between rhetoric and reality, confronts vast and insoluble contradictions played out in despairing violence. There is no solution; The Searchers, Deadwood and Dead Man are composed of endless questions, interrogations of our unspoken and unspeakable past.

State of the Nation

2006-06-17T17:30:00.000-04:00

Dispatches from an Ivory Tower

This broadcast coming to you live from George Washington University's Ivory Tower, an antiseptic motel of apartment-styled dorm rooms presiding regally over Foggy Bottom and, visible through the morning fog, the Watergate hotel, odd brutalist modern concrete slabs sticking out from its prow like a sinking cruise ship. We go there for groceries and outgoing mail and consequently it's a rare day I'm not reminded of illegal B&E and Nixon swearing at the Chinese.

Meanwhile, my internship continues apace at the Cato Institute, which is a public policy think tank, which is like an aquarium stocked with professors instead of carp. My department is Government Relations. At a libertarian institute that agitates for individual liberty, government restraint, free trade and peace, you can imagine how the two teams playing political rugby up on the Hill must love us; since my department largely consists of communicating with the rugby players, and since the message is mainly that they're fucking their citizens blind, we find ourselves in the socially awkward position of attending, say, Republican Fiscal Action Team meetings to cheer on budget restraint while shuffling our feat when the Values Action Team gets up to crow about sodomy.

Washington D.C. is an odd, howling monument strip of a city, a grass-and-marble jumble surrounded by an unacknowledged mass of criminalized poverty where abstract power sits atop a strict, uniform hierarchy that doesn't exist anywhere else in America. Other places, money might mean class - but here the top people are making peanuts. It's the title, the size of the entourage, the people you know, the pull, the handshakes. If you're an aide for a superstar - McCain, Clinton - you are God by any other name. The place is, as has been observed before, Los Angeles for ugly people, and it means that the city is run by old, greying men with red ties who import the young and the hungry. In the course of wandering the high marble halls of, say, the Dirksen Senate Office Building, in navy pinstripes with a briefcase full of policy papers, you learn dogma: the older and more southern the Senator, the younger, taller, and blonder his female interns. Get down to Bill Frist's door and none of his debutantes are over 24 or under 5'10".

In the course of my duties, I've brushed with an insane authorial hack demanding critique on the first 100 pages of a book whose plot consists of a professor at George Mason assassinating Congressmen until term limits get passed, and with a smirking U Penn asshole interning for Tom "The Hammer" DeLay, drunk on lime rickeys at 2 in the afternoon after a day of tearful back-slapping and congratulations over the death of liberalism; he was smoking cigarettes and wobbling in the sunlight. The office was being packed up, and greeting cards were being signed.

I've also met a former Cato guy who's a Senate staffer now. He's a disillusioned, bitterly sarcastic boiled egg of a man in rumpling button-down, losing his hair. "I just read the dumbest god-damned editorial in the National Review Online," he says, roughly fifteen seconds after meeting me. "Guy took DeLay's line and said that the Republicans had reduced the size of government because there are fewer federal employees now than there were five years ago." He rolls his eyes.

My boss, his face drooping in sympathy, nods. "Which is ridiculous - "

"Which is ridiculous exactly, because all they're doing is outsourcing. You're still spending just as much money, probably more - "

"Right - "

"It's the bottom goddamn line. Check expenditures, then tell me government's smaller." This is outside the Fiscal Action Team meeting room, which sounds like a superhero league, if superhero leagues came filled with Republican Congressional staffers and Heritage Foundation fellows thickening at the waist. Heritage hosted, and so they provided the Chick-Fil-A catered lunch, provided free of charge thanks to Chick-Fil-A's raving and wealthy Southern Baptist owner. The room was silent outside of the moist crunch and mash of reheated chicken breast and tiny fried chicken giblets, and the sucking fizz of soda. My boss had pulled me aside before coming in. "It gets a little awkward to be Cato in this room. Just sit in the back, take notes and ignore 90% of what you hear."

Later, down the hall, the former Cato staffer is regaling us: "Take my [senator]."

My boss: "He's good fiscally."

"He's marginalized, is what he is. You think he's listened to, around here? He votes 'no,' they mark it down, and the bill gets passed. I'm telling you, man, every U.S. citizen should spend a year working in government, just so they can see the shit that goes on here."

He lowers his voice while a tourist family wades through security, folds of dairy-fed Midwestern flab sagging over elastic, wrapped in cotton red-white-blue or lime green, visors and souvenir baseball caps, cameras and children on straps dangling from necks and wrists, staring slack-jawed at the oak doors and being bustled past by important young staffers in slender suiting. "Principled representatives rot alive in this place," he says, after a moment. "They don't have influence. Anyway, everybody wants something. You give it to them, you get another term."

Before he leaves, sounding resigned, he says, "The only way real, comprehensive change is going to come," and he sighs, "is armed revolution...or, shit, I don't know. Some cataclysmic event, tears apart the social fabric of the nation, collapses civilization. Remnants flee to an island somewhere and live free and peaceful, out from under the heel of government."

My boss shakes his hand. "Well," he says.

"Yeah," he says. "I've got a policy study to get on for the Senator. By next week, if the revolution doesn't come first."

Packard's Corner, Green Line

2006-03-18T07:04:00.000-05:00

Saturday morning, 7:04 a.m.

This is what Allston looks like at 7:04 on a Saturday morning: The air is empty and cool and damp. There are thick white paper plates flattened on the sidewalk, and a broken beer bottle in the gutter. Pizza & sub joints are shuttered. Old napkins are blowing in the wind across the tram tracks like a Western picture. The streets are empty too and blinking in the sudden light. There are no signs of life. In one or two houses, paint peeling, screen doors hanging loosely on hinges, a boy or a girl exits, door closed carefully behind them, rubbing eyes, wearing last night’s clothing, hair stuck on end by fingers’-lengths, stale beer dried on their jeans. They are waiting for the T, two or three of them. They sneak glances at one another. An ancient Chinese woman, hair wrapped carefully in a frayed silk scarf, made small by an enormous and rough coat, pushes a cart filled with plastic and cans across the intersection.

Link Farming

2006-02-12T21:17:00.000-05:00

Leave It To The Film Students

While a proper snowstorm finally sacks Boston indoors, leaving Dunkin Donuts shuttered & vacant, streets deserted, collective life in the dorms reduced to furtive scrabblings in campus stores for hot chocolate, bottled water, and condoms, it's worth noting that out in the wider world Emerson's made the news for - what else? - Brokeback Mountain.

The Globe, Salon.com, and NPR - respectable mainstreams all, excepting perhaps the staff-hemorrhaging Globe - have all cottoned on to the new spate of inverted trailers hitting the link-happy internet (see The Shining recut as a feel-good family film a few posts back). And while this isn't anything particularly new, I hadn't realized that gay cowboys, already reduced to Leno staples, were the new hatstands for the movement. This could be because my television comes exclusively now from DVDs. I haven't even seen The Daily Show in weeks, which means that world news is passing me by and fast.

The gist of all this is that now, for every J-horror retouch of Sleepless in Seattle or West Side Story zombie flick, there's a Top Gun montage of significant glances and lazy intertitles pasted underneath that damned lilting guitar theme. Literally dozens. And then, just when it was starting to get old - and I wouldn't even have heard of this were it not for fellow transcendentalist collegiate Matthew William Stenovec, 3,000 miles at Whitman, who roused himself from byzantine Jordanian fantasy to tell me my own school was getting press - Emerson kids pulled out Brokeback to the Future. Just move down to the bottom of the videos section to watch. Puts the others to shame. It's not new news, but I'm not exactly paid to keep up with the cutting edge of link forwarding.

Strictly speaking, actually, I'm paid to sell cakes to Valentine's Day couples and give the middle finger to love in the kitchen while I and the rest of the staff swill champagne post-shift.

Anyway, that's my Emerson spirit bender. Go Lions and long live Truth & Beauty. It was a good storm, folks. I'm off to watch John Ford's The Searchers, made in an era when Western male sexual tension was only consummated offscreen. Say what you will about the prejudices of the time - they didn't have link farming, and I think they were probably the better for it.

Writing Exercise, Jan 30

2006-02-02T19:44:00.000-05:00

On The Corner of Boylston & Tremont

We’re underneath a damp green streetsign on a foggy day in January. We are standing on the inside of a cloud. Rain wobbles on the verge of condensing out of the air, gets us wet by pinpricks. We can’t see the tops of the buildings. The bigger ones dissolve upwards, their 23rd floor windows continuing on into infinity. Sunset isn’t for another half hour, but the streetlamps are already on and bright white and making little halos in the fine mist. We consider opening the umbrellas we have packed collapsed in handbags or stuffed into coat pockets, but the mist renders them ridiculous. We soften in the air like molding biscuits.

At the corner next to the yawning brass subway doors is a line of newspaper boxes. There’s a damp front page sticking to the curb. On the side of the orange one in the center some fresh graffiti is running like eyeliner.

And Time Marches On

2006-01-15T19:26:00.000-05:00

Death, Weather, & Mistletoe

It's been a fall shrouded in an endless night of blackberry cabernet sorbet, tourist mag punning, rock 'n roll accordian players, and a thirty-three hour, eight day week furnished with a diet of coffee and chewable vitamins. I've been living in the international airports of Boston, Chicago, San Juan and Tortola, on the deck of a catamaran off the coast of Jost Van Dyke, in an empty historical landmark facing an 18th century Revolutionary obelisk, and on a red couch in Beacon Hill.

I've been occupied pretty effectively, as the ominous silence here should indicate. And now the new year's here, surfing in on a tide of tall green hats and champagne. High time, what with all the retrospect, to face up and call off the hiatus. Welcome back, travelers. Don't turn that dial. We'll be back with more soon.

An Old Proud History

2005-12-01T21:16:00.000-05:00

The birth myth of The New York Minute

It began as the New Amsterdamme Minute, a British-sponsored New World daily est. 1642. Handed down through years of war and colonial expansion, a rough-and-ready New York publishing tycoon resurrected the faded paper in 1901 and used it to lambast the war in the Philippines. It went under, casualty of the patriotic fervor of the War to End All Wars.

After a long fallow period during the Depression, it surfaced again as a film company in the 40s, smuggled into shack offices in Santa Barbara orange groves. Its New York moniker more a metaphor than an actual geographic statement, it became synonomous with a series of smartly written French comedies filmed in San Francisco and an epic German-financed adaptation of Hamlet, made a trilogy and set in the Old American West.

1954: Blacklisted. J. Edgar Hoover's file on The New York Minute said to run to ten hundred pages. FBI wiretap transcripts of its editorial meetings still classified and unavailable to the general public.

Jun 25, 1967. The Beatles sing "All You Need Is Love" live on television. New York Minute pamphlets found read and discarded backstage.

In '72, name-checked in a forgotten Bob Dylan single titled Ramblin' Sam's Dogs of War. All copies of the EP since destroyed in a warehouse fire.

September, 1975: A little-known Irish author lauds its work before quietly vanishing under suspicions that he is the reincarnation of James Joyce. The IRA, Black & Tans, Ulster Loyalists and British paramilitaries conduct an aggressive manhunt but find nothing.

03/11/87- Long exiled in Oklahoma, it runs into trouble with the law over junk bonds and anti-Reagan pamphlets. Accused of running a militia funded by Mexican drug money smuggled through Texas.

18 March 1987. SEVILLE - A newborn orphan named James Sligh somehow acquires the disputed rights to the name. The child, brought up in a succession of wandering gypsy caravans after the mysterious death of his parents, is found playing with the documents one morning. Eyewitnesses report a strange yet friendly bearded man nervous in the vicinity.

Sixteen years later, come of age, he crosses the ocean, browned and tattered papers in hand, and arrives on Californian soil to avenge the death of his parents and bring the written word to the blank page. A journey across the country lands him in Boston. Shivering, he commences the heart of the tale.

A Beggar's History

2005-11-01T11:59:00.000-05:00

The True birth myth of the New York Minute

We none of us are as we seem. History, personal or national, is a story we tell ourself. Sometimes these stories are outrageous falsehoods. Sometimes we tell pretty girls at parties that we are surgeons, or hang-gliding instructors, or currently publishing critically acclaimed novels. We tell people that we are twenty-two and working in Boston as a screenwriter. We say that we're originally from Delaware, like it says on the license. We say how about another martini.

And the New York Minute? Slang for a gang of Dublin street urchins in the 30s. They were thin and ragged street thieves. They stole pocket change and copies of Ulysses. They stole umbrellas in the sunshine and parasols when it rained. They lived in damp fog and cold old stones, alleys that smelled sticky of drying whiskey. They turned corners and wore caps and covered their faces with coal. They collected American vinyls and hid tubercular coughs. When they dreamed it was of steaming broth and warm weather and soft cloth. When they talked it was of gold covered streets and emerald baths, whole roasted pork, English servants, motorcars. They were as quick as New York and wanted the boats and the fast streets. Some of them sailed. A few of them made it. And one of them started stealing words instead of wallets. He horded them. He lived old. He had sons. His sons had sons. And when the old man died - and he died in an Irish way, upright and drinking in an Boston pub, singing one of the old songs on New Year's - when he died, he passed his ragged collection of stolen words on to one child. A boy.

Now, the boy never amounted to much. His good fortune made him indolent. He hadn't cupped small white hands over a guttering candle on an uncharitable Christmas morning. He hadn't needed his fingers to be warm enough to steal with; desperation had never been his game. And so he let the name fade. He lost track of it. He was careless with the words.

And when they slipped, I stole them. All writers are street urchins at heart.

Clark Kent & The Recent Census

2005-10-30T14:59:00.000-05:00

Halloween Numbers

Welcome back. Things have been irrevocably delayed. There's restauranteering, of course, which leaves me with bakery tips - folded stacks of ones slipped to me in white unmarked envelopes that make me feel like a mobster or an East German operative in 1963. And the 14 episode DVD set to Firefly, Joss Whedon's Fox-aborted drawling Anglo-Sino space cowboy masterpiece. And papers on art and story assignments about lobsters and Thom Dunn wearing a lampshade and a guitar on top of a Little Building common room table singing Weezer.

But these aren't excuses, just reasons. In the meantime, here I was Halloween Saturday, dressed as Clark Kent in front of my host stand being called a 'fucking prick' by a fat southern man in a tweed jacket while, outside through doublepaned windows, Boston, land of a quarter million college students, was erupting into debauchery. At last count, the numbers break down something like this:

Twelve hundred twenty nine naval officers, Mavericks from Top Gun, Rambos, and assorted men in uniform.

Nine hundred and two Catholic schoolgirls.

Eight hundred ninety nurses, lady sailors, secretarys, policewomen, or stewardesses whose on-duty uniforms require lace stockings and garter belts.

Nearly four hundred cowgirls.

Two hundred seventy five potheads sporting tie-dyes and saucepan hats.

One gross assorted superheroes.

Eighteen Jesus and/or Johnny Damons.

Two MIT kids going as Myspace.com and cold fusion, respectively.

One bedsheet ghost.

For The Film Majors

2005-10-06T14:33:00.000-04:00

Notes From Lowes & the Coolidge Corner

After a few weeks of working night shifts amid bubbling chocolate and scraping forks, calling French etiquette consultants and New England craft brewery owners, pounding Tsing-Tao over chopsticks at Yan's Best Place Restaraunt, and watching Joaquin Poblate think he's Spiderman and climb a Beacon Hill brick wall while citing Boston housing statistics in a 50s radio announcer voice, let's review a few lessons learned from the cinematic experiences of the past several days, snatched amid all of this chaos, now that we have fifteen minutes to breathe.

Not more than fifteen minutes, though. Soon I have to put on a monkey suit and listen to Steve Schipps blow my mind at The Artist And The Making Of Meaning in a voice eerily reminiscent of the Big Lebowski.

Film reviews are not the province of this publication, though print & music reviews are, and so gleefully I can cast aside the pretense of critical detachment while saying three (3) - at most four (4) - things.

First, Josh Whedon's Serenity - Whedon being the script doctor for Waterworld and Toy Story as well as a writer, producer, and director for television shows that include "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Firefly," the Fox-aborted 11-episode series that Serenity continues - puts a boyish grin on my face so fucking big that even now, a week later, when Thom Fucking Dunn and I look at each other across burrito bar lunches and cranberry smoothies we will occasionally get giddy and start quoting lines. I haven't been this geeked out since I was 12, man. This is the biggest kick in the balls to George Lucas and shittily written pretense I've ever seen. I mean - and I say this as somebody who saw The Aristocrats last night, which also puts a big smile on my face - this is a Bob Saget detached-retina skullfuck to the Star Wars prequels and anybody who ever convinced themselves they were good. The writing's awesome, it lives inside out genre convention, it never takes itself too seriously, and in the end it's a Western-in-space with Chinese cursing, which is a dubious mouthful that turns into a great time. Sure, the trailer sucked, but isn't that always the case?

I mean, take National Lampoon's new movie, Pledge This!. Note the exclamation mark. If you're ever feeling really, really happy - like, post-Serenity happy - watching this trailer is a great way to sink you right back down to earth and make you go back to wanting to pull a Cobain. Pledge This! makes me fantasize about taking a time machine back to just after the premier of Animal House and throwing molotov cocktails into National Lampoon's central headquarters. Though if I had a time machine I probably wouldn't waste it on dreck like preventing Paris Hilton in a sorority movie. I'd be too busy hosting World Leader Boxing Matches and trying to convice Napolean to take the fall v. Gandhi.

Third and finally is something I hope you've seen already. Plunged into existential despair by shitty trailers? Seeing The Shining recut as a feel-good foster father drama might just save your life.

That's all for now. I've got work until midnight and a holiday to celebrate about a syphilitic European who enslaved a race.

Commonwealth Ave.

2005-09-17T16:07:00.000-04:00

3:56 p.m.

Down the boulevard green center strip of Comm Ave, underneath an impending thunderstorm and tall leafy trees, lovers are sitting on marble stoops below statues of Hope and Victory. A little girl pushing her sister in a stroller is trying to touch William Lloyd Garrison's big bronzed feet.

A President's Welcome

2005-09-12T23:08:00.000-04:00

To The Class of 2009

With Piano Row again under a perpetual cloud of cigarette smoke and the per capita population of tight jeans and iPods skyrocketing, it's time for an official welcome to Emerson College. For the new among you, we'll trot out the hoary old jokes one last time. That's hoary with an H, folks. Stop tittering.

EXT. CORNER OF BOYLSTON AND TREMONT - DAY

A taxi mows down a pedestrian. Duck Boats are pointing as they roar past. Five thousand cigarettes glow underneath that early 20th century Little Building facade. The one with the fake columns and the cornice. Dean of Students Ron Ludman, Ph.D., has just issued his annual plea to refrain from smoking during posted hours under the archway. It will be flatly ignored. This is partly because the high administration are widely considered armband-wearing fascists who would stand on the backs of orphans at Christmastime in spotless black leather jackboots if they could ensure there would be no outcry.

An EMERSON FILM MAJOR is sucking down a cigarette before class. The world is gray under sunglasses. He turns to another Emerson student, who's adjusting the skirt she's wearing over her jeans.

EMERSON FILM MAJOR: You know, I think Quentin Tarantino is totally more respected than Andrew Lloyd Webber.

THE END

So. To continue. Lest we be accused of unoriginality, we're going to take a deep breath, collect our stereotypes, and get all of this out of our system now. We're dumping this shit like an oil tanker off the Alaskan coast.

Remember, kids. Emerson is a fake college. Emerson math is 1+1=Jazz Hands. Emerson science? That Nutrition course the dancers have to take. Emerson language? Sign language. And above all, let's not forget TH123: Movement.

Emerson fraternity? It's co-ed. Our quad? Out on the Commons. Watch for the homeless heroin addicts. Give a quarter to the Weatherman and find out how the Sox did.

We salute the bisexual chainsmoking chick with the dyed red hair and the tongue stud we met at that one party up in a Newbury St. apartment with roof access. We salute the LA acting major in the Seth Cohen blazer namedropping the producers he's smarmed his way into shaking hands with. We salute the gay musical theatre boy making out with the girl in the corner. We salute the pale film major in the emo glasses sweating in front of a blue computer screen in Ansin and the writers who are putting on thrift store suits and skinny ties and the set designers who are the only people in the entire dorm to have a set of screwdrivers and the theatre studies boys who are secretly rock gods and the broadcast journalism majors who, bless their hearts, have enough makeup on to be television-ready always.

We salute the Swiss Harvard student inbound on the T who, in conversation with two other Harvard students said - and I quote - "I actually have never dropped my pants at MIT. I may or may not have dropped them at Harvard."

But it's a quarter salute, because honestly, they're fucking Harvard students, and they don't need to feel any more goddamn important than they already feel.

Above all, we salute you the incoming freshmen, the most academically advanced class ever to grace the strip of tarmac and car exhaust and discarded Dunkin Donuts bags that is our campus. One of you, rumor has it, scored a perfect on the fucking Math section of the SATs. And that's great. But put the smiles away. The old-timers are already suspicious of this sort of counting prowess. Don't make it worse by bragging.

And so welcome, Class of 2009, to Emerson College. Do you have a light?

Your Fall Orientation

2005-09-07T12:22:00.000-04:00

Ringing in the New Year

Today the city of Boston swells by two hundred and fifty thousand. Cobblestones and gas lamps and chowder halls strain under the weight. The impact sends the Charles sloshing. Harvard spats are splattered at the boathouse. Waves roll in on a breezeless day at the end of summer. It's warm out, but there's something crisp and cold lurking in the shade. A few of the leaves have already curled and turned.

And two hundred and fifty thousand college students sling cumbersome pieces of luggage and brown cardboard boxes and leather satchels and scuffed black shoulder bags that sport vintage indie button pins and denim backpacks and giant sturdy plastic bins with self sealing lids and totes and shoeboxes and garbage bags full of clothing and a laundry basket with a stereo balanced inside it and garment bags and duffels and carryons and rented moving trucks full of secondhand dented furniture and floral couches into dorm singles, doubles, triples, quads, clusters, suites, on-campus apartments, off-campus apartments, Allston houses, Beacon Hill ancien regime closets, Cambridge lofts, and Symphony stop brownstones.

New freshmen wander around in knots of fifteen talking excitedly about T tokens and getting lost on the B line while they try to get to the Fenway stop where the Bed Bath & Beyond is and join the other hundred and fifty thousand people shopping for throw pillows floor lamps area rugs and flatware sets. The city is bursting at the seams. The sophomores are putting pained looks of sophistication on and claiming to need a drink.

The school year has begun. Tomorrow we'll start the introductions.

A Short History of Air Travel

2005-09-06T21:40:00.000-04:00

Flight #1801: GRD to ORD to BOS. 6 a.m.

Filtrated stale air. Florescent white brights. Beige plastic. Folding trays. Blue upholstery. Broken departure moniters. Lines. Tile. The scent of coffee. A yellow life vest that you can inflate by blowing through the red tubes. Moving walkways, bright advertisements, an M16. Lite jazz filtering through hidden speakers. WELCOME in twenty one languages. A last boarding call.

For The Ninth Ward of New Orleans

2005-08-31T19:54:00.000-04:00

5:30 a.m.

Three or four people on top of a rooftop flooded to the eves sit atop their worldly possessions, repining somewhere silty and coroded beneath the water. An old varnished dresser full of family photos floats past curling and cracking in the riptide. They're shivering in the bible-black predawn, waiting for the sun to break.

My friend calls from a pay phone in Texas from the white truck he evacuated in and says he's not stopping until he hits California.

Review Desk

2005-08-30T17:13:00.000-04:00

Dug up and reanimated: Woodhouse and Orwell.

Books

Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames
The great British comic writer P. G. Wodehouse's enduring creation, Jeeves is a gentleman's gentleman, ever reliable, whose locomotion seems to reside on a plane somewhere above or behind our own - he trickles through doors, wafts in, materializes. When he appears at the side of a digressive alcoholic writer named Alan Blair in Jonathan Ames' new and very funny Wake Up, Sir! we may be forgiven the sneaking suspicion that Jeeves is - maybe always has been - imaginary. He is - assuming he exists - nominally in the employ of the orphaned 30-year-old Blair, a neurotic who wears a necktie every day working on a follow-up to his first novel, "I Pity I," independently wealthy for the moment thanks to the insurance settlement from a nasty spill on a patch of ice. Blair's tortuous attempts to render life into art, or at least artistic theory, lean pleasingly against Jeeves' cool, professional reassurances. The plot is largely superfluous. The journey, though, is a delight.

Finding George Orwell In Burma, by Emma Larkin
Before he became George Orwell, the young Eric Blair spent five years fresh out of Eton in Burma as an imperial policeman. His first novel, Burmese Days was set there, as was an unfinished novella, 'A Smoking Room Story,' left behind when he died. Emma Larkin, in revisiting the places where Orwell lived and worked, writes too under a pseudonym - this to ensure that the generals who rule Burma today under the ironically Orwellian aegis of the State Peace and Development Council will not bar her from the country. The book is not just a look at Orwell's life, but a window into a shuttered police state, a travelogue through crumbling old British buildings and abject poverty and quietly desperate human encounters, from a fading Anglo-Burmese woman admiring her old porcelain; to a teacher who was fired by the government and now lives playing Scrabble with private students, surrounded by world maps and mountains of books; to a man who comes up to our author on her first visit to Mandalay twirling a black umbrella, smiles, says, "Spread our need of democracy to the rest of the world - the people are so tired." - turns and walks away. In Burma they joke that Orwell wrote not one book set in Burma, but three - a trilogy composed of Burmese Days, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Larkin's book is like a message stuffed into a bottle, sent floating from that closed-off world.

More Reviews

A Career In Demolitions

2005-08-29T12:52:00.000-04:00

The strange tale of Luis Posada Carriles.

His features have thickened and mottled over the years like sunspotted leather. His teeth straight if a little yellow. Hair graying in streaks combed back on a clean part. He's wearing a smart cream suit and a crisp blue shirt and black tortoiseshell glasses. He looks worried and very much his age as he issues categorical denial.

Luis Posada Carriles is one of those hunted and suave men of the world who can claim to have lived most of their lives flitting from shadow to shadow. He's being held in a federal immigration detention center in El Paso, giving testimony in front of a deportation judge as he attempts to avoid extradition to Venezuela. He was arrested in Miami last May after getting into the States with a fake passport through Mexico. Allegedly. He is 77 years old.

Born February 15, 1928 in Cienfuegos, in southern Cuba, he emigrated to Florida in 1961, two years after Castro came to power on the crest of the Movimiento 26 de Julio and overthrew Fulgencio Batista, in the heady days of U.S. anti-communism, when the prospect of a Red island a stone's throw from America's southern shores was new and bright and terrifying.

Shortly thereafter, around about the time of his birthday - and just a week after The Beatles played their first Cavern Club gig, a lunchtime performance - he signed on to return to Cuba, albeit in CIA-issued fatigues onboard the leaking military surplus transports of Brigade 2506, set that year for an amphibious assault at the Bay of Pigs.

As fate would have it, though, the ship to which he was assigned never landed. During a subsequent two year stint in the U.S. military, he was recruited by the CIA and trained in demolitions. In the early 1970s he moved to Venzuela and became a naturalized citizen of the country, where he was run as an CIA asset while rising to a high level in the Venezuelan intelligence service, the DISIP.

Dates and facts now are matters of opinion. There are plans to blow up Soviet ships in the Mexican port of Veracruz, ties to a Miami mafia figure named Lefty Rosenthal, and a heavily-armed conspiracy to overthrow the government of Guatemala interdicted by U.S. Customs, who force Posada and his associates to turn over a cache of weapons, a detailed inventory of which includes but is not limited to: .30 cal. M-1919A4 machine guns; M2A1 flame throwers; .30 cal. M-1 carbines; a Thompson .45 cal. 1928 model submachine gun; a .45 cal. Colt automatic pistol; ten .45 cal. M-3 grease guns; one 3.5" M-20 rocket launcher (bazooka); two 60mm M-5 tripod mortars; fifteen M-1 Garand rifles; one thousand five hundred M-2 30.06 ball linked armor piercing rounds; eighty pounds of C-4; twenty-eight pounds of C-3; twenty-four pounds of TNT; eight pounds of pinolite; two cans, napalm; sixteen 3.5 inch dia. high explosive rockets; forty-four sticks of dynamite; one 12 gauge Winchester semi-auto. shotgun, loaded; and five rolls of orange-wax fuse clover brand.

In '76, two years off CIA payroll, he is overheard at a dinner party by an unnamed Venezualan government official quoted in a Central Intelligence brief: "We are going to hit a Cuban airplane." On October 6th, 1976 a Cubana Airlines plane traveling from Barbados explodes, killing all 73 passengers aboard. A military tribunal acquits him. A commission several years later finds the tribunal inadequate and a trial is slated. In 1985, in jail pending a new trial of the Cubana bombing, he escapes - some allege thanks to a bribe from Jorge Mas Canosa, founder and head of the Cuban-American National Foundation, one of the most powerful lobbyist groups in the United States and a man who amassed a personal fortune in excess of $100 million during the course of political dealings in Florida and the rest of the nation before his death in in the mid-90s.

Now a fugitive, Posada finds work supplying arms to the CIA-backed contras of Southern Nicaragua. Working out of El Salvador under the alias "Ramon Medina," he is second-in-charge of a contra ressuply operation at Ilopango Air Force Base, under his friend and fellow Cuban exile Felix Rodriguez code name Max Gomez, who was among other things the CIA liason with the Bolivian soldiers that captured and executed Che Guevara. More allegations: he ran cocaine imports in addition to guns, supplies, and money.

Nothing can be proven. We see the vaguest of outlines in smoke and darkness. We read James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand, with its plausibly deniable and underground history, its links to drugs, the Mafia, the CIA, Latin America, leashed blackbook terrorism, front groups, we find ourselves imagining conspiracy and suddenly less sure of the preposterousness of Ellroy's pulp noir America.

A world of conspiracy attracts because it is a world, however sinister, in which everything happens for a reason. It is a world without accidents. It is a world trembling on the edge of revelation, filled with signs that none of us can ignore.

We know this: He survives an assassination attempt in Guatemala in 1990 that leaves him with a shattered jaw, and helps organize a string of 1997 bombings of Havana luxury hotels, injuring eleven people and killing an Italian businessman. Still hale and keeping active, in 2000 he is convicted in Panama with three others for attempting to assissinate Fidel Castro in Panama with 33 pounds of C-4 explosive. Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso, in the final days of her term in office, suddenly - (allegations: mysteriously) - pardons all four. Three return to the United States. Posada goes to Honduras, dissapears from mention for another five years, and eventually shows up in Miami.

Today, both Cuba and Venezuela demand extradition rights so that he can be tried. U.S. officials, aware that the current administration has vowed to seek out terrorists wherever they are harbored, shuffle their feet embarassedly when Posada's alleged - we must remember that it is alleged - career as a Central American demolitions expert is brought up. A week before Posada's arrest in Miami, Roger Noriega, State Department Assistant Secretary, Buerau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, said gamely that Posada might not be in the country and added that the charges against him "may be a completely manufactured issue."

Posada himself - he's been married at least twice. He has one son that we know of, named Jorge. He may be undergoing treatment for skin cancer. He gave a detailed account of his off-the-books life in a 1998 New York Times interview at an undisclosed location in Aruba and now denies it is true and that the interview took place. The Department of Homeland Security judge down in Texas has instructed both lawyers to draw up briefs as to whether or not the Bay of Pigs was a terrorist incident. Posada's lawyers have entered a plea of 'not guilty.'

We are left, after all of the dates and calibres and records have been entered, with sneaking suspicions, the product of our long history with John le Carre novels and the stories related to us by his granddaughter.

Writing them down seems ludicrous. I can only give impressions - ties to the same organized criminals whose operations were used to great effect in our previous Great War of ideology, informal commitments to field agents in Latin America, a deniable termination, a quixotic and fixed personal hatred used from a distance as a convenient tool of public policy, a life lived in the invisible and violent marginalia of history.

It is embarassing, now - what with our new Great War of ideology being against a tactic (though recent cries of Islamofascism seem to be testing a new label) - it embarassing to dwell on this man's career in demolitions, on broken pieces of airliner boiling warm patches of the Caribbean, on blocks of plastic explosive sweating damply in a back room in Panama. It is almost as embarassing as dwelling on the other men, in other places, whose careers in demolitions, sponsored by we the people, have caused so much bother and recrimation.

Luis Posada Carriles, for these reasons and those we cannot even guess at, seems a man destined to be put out of sight and mind.

Becalmed And Waiting

2005-08-28T14:38:00.000-04:00

August Slumbers On

It's the kind of day in high summer so lazy that the only sound outside is the buzz of afternoon cicadas and low-flying planes. A bird-cry in the distance. Dark green leaves turning transparent in the sunlight. A clock in the living room ticking. The reluctant sound of a lawnmower a block down.

August is the month that overstays its welcome. Days stretch like white taffy. It's all anticipation - kids going off to college for the first time, or getting ready to move into new apartments. Cities empty out like an exhale before fall starts. In New York, a black SUV stuffed with Belvedere and coke drags a cop down Broadway through six pedestriations and an armored car before crashing into the Mercedes-Benz of hip-hop mogul Damon Dash, probably out of boredom more than anything else. NYC gets all excited a few days later over some heroin overdoses in the hopes that it's an epidemic of viciously poisoned smack, but it turns out it was just Belushi speedballs killing a couple college kids, and not Osama Bin-Laden at it again.

Elsewhere, my local paper reports that down in East Texas dueling pro- and anti-war rallies are facing each other down like some dusty southern West Side Story, if the Jets and the Sharks had seven fewer years of jazz tap and relatives dodging bullets in the Middle East. August strikes in Texas too, and so mostly folks are scrambling for shade like scrambled tricolor eggs in the sun, ocassionally mustering the strength to wave a sign for the news cameras. Some barre chords drift through the air. A couple pro-war Jets with a satirical bit of placarding - "Say No to War - Unless A Democrat Is President" - get misread by about three hundred flagwavers squinting in the sun who can only read the top half, and so the greater part of the afternoon is taken up by a circus-type chase involving Bush supporters catching up to and tearing up the signs of two more Bush supporters over protestations that they're all on the same side.

I pop another painkiller and adjust the frozen vegetables on my face.

Billboards On The I-94

2005-08-27T23:19:00.000-04:00

Driving To Chicago

You forget how flat and wide open it is. After coming home in two or three week segments for five years. After living in the shadows of mountains browned by sunlight and under the tall buildings. You get used to having something cut off your horizon. Here there's nothing but clouds and clumps of forest that bunch on the horizon. The tops of immature corn over green stalks. A line of bleached fencing. A splintered barn with the roof caved in. A corrugated steel greenhouse. An old cherry-red tractor. Wildfloers lining the A-2.

NILES SOUTH BEND EXIT 30. AMTRACK BLUE WATER SERVICE KALAMAZOO TO CHICAGO. KOEGEL'S VIENNA FRANKFURTERS

And so my head's propped up against the window and I'm watching the yellow lines tick by. I'm listening to Sufjan Steven's Michigan and feeling queasy from the painkillers and scrubbed raw and early with shower water, in a van on the way to Chicago. We take the exit to Benton Harbor and I remember hearing about the riots. I was in California at the time.

BLUE CHIP CASINO: "REEL" COMFORT! COME CELEBRATE CHRIST WITH US! FIRST ASSEMBLY OF GOD. DAYS INN EMPIRE BUFFET. BURGER KING EXIT 29 BURGER KING EXIT 28 BURGER KING EXIT 27 BURGER KING EXIT 23.

I'm listening to Sufjan Steven's Michigan and feeling - not like a tourist, exactly. But like I've been gone quite a while. The town's changed since I was last here for more than a few days. A year ago, now. Downtown is brightly lit and hopping. There's a music club called Lemoncello's where the high school kids hang out now. Knots of people on the summer night streets at night. It wasn't like this when I was growing up here. I feel vaguely like I'm missing out.

RED ARROW HWY STEVENSVILLE. SMOKE SHOP: DISCOUNT CIGARETTES PREMIUM CIGARS. ROAD WORK AHEAD ROAD WORK AHEAD ROAD WORK AHEAD RAMP NARROWS. JOHN BEERS RD EXIT 22

I'm here listening to another former native since removed to the East Coast, singing a song named after my hometown over fingerpicked guitar and a few single piano notes carried with a sustain peddle and breathy backing vocals. He sounds tired, and a little sad. He knows home never leaves you. He knows that once you go you can never really come back and have it be the same.

LA PORTE COUNTY: REJUVINATE. ELKHART RV OUTFIT. KRAZY KAPLAN'S FIREWORKS. REDAMARKS BUFFALO WINGS. LIQUOR AT DISCOUNT PRICES. GET THE US OUT OF THE UNITED NATIONS. RISING SUN GENTLEMEN'S CLUB.

In the meantime, I'm here, where you can see the storm fronts two miles away, see the fat raindrops and the blue-black of low clouds before you're in it, before the sun's snuffed out. It's a short visit. It's home. There's a handpainted set of signs next to a patch of orchard: Cold Pop. Handpicked Apples. Fresh Pie. Next Right.

The Vicodin Blues

2005-08-25T21:25:00.000-04:00

Wisdom & Laughing Gas

So I'm sitting here with a slowly melting family pack of frozen corn on my face five hours after getting my wisdom teeth out, popping painkillers like skittles, carefully spooning in gazpacho between lips still numb from the intravenous anesthesia, watching The Terminal with one eye and reading Finding George Orwell In Burma with the other. There's a bath towel wrapped around my shoulders like a heavyweight boxer so that the corn pack doesn't melt over my t-shirt.

I am home for the first time in six months. I am home until the Tuesday after next. I have just taken a vicodin. We will table discussion over whether this can be legitimately referred to as coming home to anywhere or whether it's just a visit - and if so, a visit to what? And from where? What is home? - we will table these questions until the holes in my mouth fill and the drugs wear off.

Tom Hanks talks gibberish in the background. I read a web transcription of Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of the Venezuelan president. The corn melts onto my towel.

On An Airplane Back To Michigan

2005-08-22T00:29:00.000-04:00

Boxing Up A Sublet

There's a garbage bag full of folded schedules and old receipts and ticket stubs. Stacks of books and split cardboard and shoeboxes filled with albums. Empty hangers. Tossed drawers. Excavated space that's lain undisturbed for four months. A pile of clothes for the red neon art deco Salvation Army a block away - the 1950's concrete up high and martial, the faded bronze crest over the door etched underneath the seal: "Blood and Iron." I have twenty-four hours.

I've lived in one house, one apartment, and seven different dorm rooms in the last four years. Packing up and moving out of a lived-in place gets faster with practice, but it doesn't get any easier.

While Packing

2005-08-21T16:53:00.000-04:00

A book called Collapse just fell off of my bookshelf.

Review Desk

2005-08-15T20:38:00.000-04:00

Today: music that demands exclamation marks.

Music

The Woods, Sleater-Kinney
Seven albums into a career made on a melodically punkish sound carried by duel guitars and female vocal harmonies, Sleater-Kinney's sound on The Woods disintegrates into something altogether darker, knotted, and primeval. Formerly clean and crisp sounds push past the red line and fuzz louder than, it seems, modern sound equipment is meant to go. Lyrics fight to be heard over wailing cacaphony. Hooks unspool into blurry instrumental breaks. This is a loud, loud record. If I just said that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah rocked like some freaks at a circus, Sleater-Kinney here is a two-story jetliner, wings flaming, crashing the fuck into the tent. The album's a triumph of excess - carefully controlled, maybe, but always about to snap undone, flip off of the rails, spin out and lose a hubcap. It's also running away as one of the best albums of the year to date. Medically declared corpses will feel their hearts beating faster after this record. If you buy anything reviewed in today's column, buy this. No joke. This is the sound of three girls so good it's a kick in the balls to every rock god ever.

In Case We Die, Architecture in Helsinki
There are a fair number of really good indie rock albums out there trying to fight off mortality with lo-fi blurps, grand orchestration, and vocals that are acts of defiance themselves, from Arcade Fire's Funeral to The Unicorns' Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? Architecture in Helsinki, eight kids brandishing toy instruments and sweetly sung nonsense, join up this year with kitchen-sink songs laden with more ideas and hooks than the Harvard adjunct faculty on a bass fishing trip. Horns bleat. Saxophones sneak in through the window. Things whir and clack. Bass and drums push everyone out the door as male and female vocals duel and choir up. The entire apparatus shudders to a halt and starts up again. It's danceable, in that thin indie kid kind of way, and joyful, and even childlike, until after a few listens the pale undercurrent to it all sinks in and you start to think that maybe dancing is the only thing keeping us all upright. And so it's as happy as you can get while being as sad as you can take. It's carpe diem in a clear glass bottle with three X's.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
With the kids in the trenches proclaiming this album a second coming of the indie rock messiah, the suspicious among you are probably wondering if the world needs another hand-illustrated lo-fi piece of obscurist cachet. Would it surprise you, then, to learn that the answer is God, yes? Clap Your Hands Say Yeah rocks like a chainsmoking yodeler backed by the Walkmen covering Sly & the Family Stone. It rocks like a dancing bear beating the shit out of a left-handed guitar while a carnie plays harmonica. Check album highlight “The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth." Let it sink in. It's a grower. It grows like stop-motion thunderheads. Pretty soon you’ve got a shit-eating grin on your face and you’re dancing out the door to join that choir singing gospel on the bandwagon. Swallow your pride. You might as well give in now.

More Reviews

Kid Stuff

2005-08-14T00:39:00.000-04:00

Relationship Questions? Solved.

So it's six o'clock at the Finale desserterie and the theatre crowds aren't due for another three hours. Forks scrape plates and some inoffensive jazz dresses up the last of the day's full sunlight. The wait staff are leaning against the host stand and shooting the shit in between water pitchers and check-ups, and somewhere along the line a game of Flames gets started.

Do you remember Flames? It was a middle school thing you did with peoples' names. You picked two people and spelled out their names and crossed off all of the letters in common and then took the remainder and counted down the acrynom: Friends - Lovers - Acquaintances - Marriage - Enemies - Sexual.

That's right, kids: Sexual. What you landed on determined your relationship with the person you were paired with.

We're doing this for a little bit in between intravenous injections of molten chocolate cake and the ocassional customer, and after a while I start to get bored with the options. Everyone's just friends. The girls keep getting paired up sexual. I get married to my manager. B-o-ring. I want more. Those middle school kids didn't have a handle on what relationships were like in the real world, I think to myself. And so I decide then and there I'm making my own version of Flames. Same system. Take the number of letters you don't have in common and count down the list. Middle names may help. And there it is: your future. It's not done or anything, but this is what I got written down on a wait sheet before the tables started filling up:

FLAMES OR SOMETHING: FFBBTGDBFMGF

Friends
Friends With Benefits
BFF
Bit On The Side
Trapped In A Loveless Marriage
Drinking Buddies
Growing Old In A Non-Loveless Marriage, On Golden Pond Style
Blood Feud
Friends Until You Come Home From College And Realize That You've "Grown Apart" i.e. They've Become Shallow Fucks, Or Maybe Always Were
Gay Boyfriend
Friends As In We Roll Together, Like Fucking Buddy Cops Or Some Shit. I Mean, I Would Take A Bullet For You, Man. Totally.

I may be going out on a limb here, but I'm betting on my version sweeping the American Seventh Grade. Keep your eyes out.

Arlington Noir

2005-08-13T00:33:00.000-04:00

12:17 a.m.

The night's dark and wet balmy. The lights are diffusing soft under the humidity. Clouds stare poker-faced. Air's hung with water, so that every so often you get pricked by a tiny raindrop half in your imagination. It's an evening that has you flinching at the signs of rain. The kind of night that has you too nervous about the prospect of showers and thunderstorms to enjoy the breeze and the heat in the darkness. It's not quite as pleasant out as it should be.

A 1987 Volvo sits next to the curb, peeling white paint off into the air like cancer. It has Cadillac rims, painstakingly installed - rims that look to be at least a decade older than the car.

A biker chick wearing a wedding dress is being helped out of a rented limo by a thick-looking groom with a cue ball head and swollen knuckles. There is a thorn tatooed around her left bicep. It is as big around as my head.

A West African woman in a headwrap and a colorful skirt and traditional-looking beads leans up against a car park chain link to take a smoke break.

Steam and smoke both rise into the jaundiced night air.

Mushrooms in Babel

2005-08-10T13:09:00.000-04:00

Love the smell of napalm in the morning.

So with luck we'll be living the Cold War American Dream soon. According to an article published in the August 1 issue of American Conservative, orders stemming from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney have tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan in the event of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The plan includes "a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons....As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States."

The tactical nuclear option is being pushed because of Iran's numerous (more than 450) major strategic targets, many of which are hardened against conventional weapons or deep underground. Several of the senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of unprovoked nuclear attack, but afraid of retaliation if they voice objections.

Picture them - aging men with good posture greying at the temples, brows more or less permanantly furrowed. The younger ones are middle-aged fathers who run in the mornings and keep freeweights in the basement to stay trim. They will have just enough to retire on if they keep through until their pension comes due. They come home at night from the planning sessions and the sober, calm invocation of the unthinkable to look in at sleeping children from bedroom doors, or call the them on a telephone that sits on an endtable next to a small glass of hard liquor that they sip slowly as darkness falls.

Curiosities Of The Modern Era

2005-08-09T22:15:00.000-04:00

Mercenaries, Whole Grains & Moscow Beauty Queens

First things first: Popcorn is a whole grain. Which is obvious, I suppose, if you stop to think about it. Whole grains explode into exploded whole grains; they're still whole, at least in a dietary sense.

We'd like to think that everything worthwhile would be as obvious and unheralded as whole grain popcorn. But you and I both know that the world works on a level less clear-cut. It's hard to quite put this into words, but it's a feeling most of us share, though we keep it unspoken. Things don't just happen. There are people and forces that smoke cigars in wood-panelled back room, talking decisively. There are a great many things in life whose reasons are unknowable. And yet they make a kind of perverse sense.

Exhibit: Born in Uzbekistan, Russian mobster Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov currently languishes in an Italian jail. This is mainly on account of his single-handed rigging of the French-Russian vote swap at the 2002 Winter Olympic figure skating games. A Knight of the Order of St. Constantine in France as of 1999, Tokhtakhounov was previously known for fixing Moscow beauty pageants, in addition to the less interesting laundry list of alleged ties to loan sharking, extortion, money laundering, racketeering, and a handful of unexplained deaths in East Germany. A Soviet expatriate knight with three homes in Rome, Milan, and Forte dei Marmi has given the course of his life over to bars and thick walls for the sake of ice skates. Say what you will about the Russian mafia; they have a taste for beauty, even if the delicacy best used to express it falls out of their thick-fingered, quietly desperate reach.

Exhibit: Executive Outcomes, a mercenary firm based out of Pretoria between 1989 and 1999. Comprised mainly of ex-South African Defense Force special forces, it took contracts in Angola, Sierra Leone, and Papa New Guinea and grew during the decade into a complex web of shell companies and subsidieries like Ibis Air, owned by founder and former South African intelligence officer Luther Barlow under his umbrella company, Strategic Resources Corporation. Links to SA's Civil Co-operation Bureau and a number of mineral companies, including DeBeers, have been put forth but never proven. Certainly the organization was effective. After Sierra Leone ejected UN peacekeepers in 1995 in favor of a EO contract during their protracted and bloody civil war, less than 300 mercenaries routed the Revolutionary United Front and paved the way for elections, doing in a period of weeks - and for less than US$20 million - what the UN was unable to accomplish in three years with an occupation force of 18,000 that cost up to a billion dollars annually. In 1997, between negotiations with the RUF that called for the removal of all foreign troops and UN discomfort with the EO - who had been accused of making a play for African diamond wealth - the contract was terminated.

Meanwhile, unless you were there, scuffing rubber boots on the sides of a rusting old Russian military helicopter that leaked when it rained, privy to deadly complicated financial games, running Eastern European guns into Zimbabwe under triple-registered bush planes - unless you sat in on board meetings and had known the men involved since when you were twenty-two and doing things that demand black grease paint and piano wire - well, how can any of us say for certain who's right, and who did what?

The New York Post Saves Democracy

2005-08-08T16:52:00.000-04:00

Cocaine On The Brain

So I'm rocking a sea-green rocking chair in my newly reconstituted living room today, waiting for the heat to die down. My apartment is newly filled with Cape Cod furniture culled, I suppose, from elderly cottage owners without heirs, courtesy of the girl moving in this fall.

I'm rocking in a sea-green rocking chair (upholstered in what I believe is courderoy) but that, of course, is not the story. The story, which I can't really believe I missed, was printed here about two weeks ago in the indefatiguable NY Post. It describes a plot, which I imagine taking place in a hacienda somewhere secluded, perhaps with a helicopter landing pad and expensive black and silver cars in the driveway that winds for three and a half miles through virgin forest. Cicadas are beginning to chirp in the distance. Dinner and drinks have been served. Nervous young men with guns are darting eyes and staying as still as possible. Now, as dusk falls, the men are getting down to business.

The plot is this: Osama Bin Ladin tries to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cocaína from Columbian drug lords, have it poisoned, and then funnel it into the U.S.

A balmy South American breeze wafts through imported palms. The Columbian drug lords in the hacienda thank Bin Ladin for his time and say they'll get back to him. There are cordial handshakes.

Several weeks later, in a We regret to inform you... the Columbians graciously decline the offer to poison the United States' cocaine supply, citing concerns that this could effectively destroy the market for coke in the US and invite military retaliation, and tell Bin Ladin they hope he understands that, while the offer is a unique and interesting one, it doesn't mesh with their current organizational goals.

Imagine, if you will, the terrifying alternative. With eighties nostalgia shrugging Members Only jackets onto O.C. cast members and eightballs being razored and stacked into lines on celebrity mirrors, the plot conjures up images of the Olsen twins dying horrifically over a glass coffeetable in New York while, across the country, child actors, hardcore investment bankers, indolent trust fund children and most of LA county meet a similar fate.

To some of you, this may be a comfort. For me, I refuse to give in to the easy laugh. The Olsen twins can foam at the mouth and twitch from poisoned cocaine all they want, but what about the millions of ordinary Americans who aren't emaciated faux-boho NYU billionaires? What about my neighbor with the taste for blow?

Tonight In The News

2005-08-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

Suffocation & The Utter Darkness

Boston. Breeze is funneled through the tall buildings, still smelling of salt over and above the car exhaust and the cigarette smoke. It's a clammy summer night. I carry two bags of groceries home past little knots of people walking off dinner and drinks and trying to find their way back to their hotels.

In New York, Peter Jennings rasps painfully into the silent hiss and pop of clinical white machines before falling into oblivion.

Six Russian submariners shiver with thanks in another hospital on the coast in Kamchatka, and share a flask of fine vodka smuggled in. They don't talk about the three days they spent expecting to choke to death themselves, waiting on the ocean floor packed into a little steel shell that seemed always to be on the verge of collapse, of popping under the pressure like a soap bubble. They go to bed early, a little drunk, spinning in their beds. A sea breeze like Boston's sea breeze billows up against their open double-paned windows. Interfax reports their condition as "satisfactory."

In the Guangdong, one hundred and two Chinese miners lie broken and submerged a quarter mile below the earth, trapped in mud and water, calling to each other through the pitch black and wondering, as the submariners wondered, as Peter Jennings wondered as he tried to breathe through cancerous lungs, whether anything or anyone would split the darkness and pluck them out, safe and newborn.

Sixteen Millimeter Snapshot

2005-08-06T14:17:00.000-04:00

A White Petal On A Wet, Black Bough

12:25 am: Corner of Park Plaza and Columbus. From the street the bakery window of the Finale Desserterie is soft gold cut out of a night like scissored black curtains. Inside, cakes and pastries sit plump behind glass. The last patrons linger over coffee and dessert plates scuffed with chocolate. The lighting is moody. Candles soften dark red booths.

Through the window, you can see three servers in black, wielding mail-order lightsabers, dueling next to the bar.

A Vaquero's History

2005-08-05T12:40:00.000-04:00

A birth myth of the New York Minute

It was roundabout the 4th of July down in Pueblo – that’s Oklahoma territory – when the man they called the New York Minute came through. Pueblo being a chalky little shit-heap of a town where the cattle die in dust storms, their bellies full of mud. The railroads had passed it by, prospectors too. Even the Indians hadn’t done well, and that was before the plague took them. By the time the first settlers came and put down stakes – and who knows why – they were mud-covered and wandering. You’d stumble over two or three of them sitting in the center of an empty village, just staring. I heard more than one say it was God clearing the land, though as far as that particular stretch is concerned God and the dumb sonnofabitches both are welcome to it.

So. Independence celebrations tend to be muted in Pueblo. The War wasn’t that long over, and a lot of the bone-tired men rocking soused in front of the general store down the street through town were Southern veterans anyway, moved up there out of disappointment or on the run – from skip tracers, freed slaves, and the like. Nothing helps forgetfulness like a good move. There was one boy from Atlanta who’d gone home come peacetime to find his street dead ashes in the wet Georgia sun, and his ma and sisters ashes too. Being that Sherman’d razed the place down and good.

And so the bunting and the flags set a lot of people’s teeth on edge, and tended to be kept to a minimum. It didn’t help that most of the vaqueros were black or Mexican, either, and what with five or seven of them in from the range, buying up the general store and smiling white-toothed and celebratory in the saloons that day, the Southern boys ducked even further into the wide-mouthed glass jam jars they imbibed most days, rocked splintery little grey chairs and wore patched grey jackets and drawled too loud about how they’d stuck Yankees with the bay-o-nets, once upon a time, like squealing azure pigs.

It was still light at around eight o’clock – the time of day when the lightweight Southern boys had already passed out on account of nostalgia and the strong raw stuff was being slid down the bar counter in thick glass shots and the local working girls were figuring out between each other which of the vaqueros they were going to take – when the man folks called the New York Minute showed up in the center of town.

Some folk. Any that knew him at all knew him as Donovan. He was an Irishman from out East, and so ranked about on level with the blacks and the Mexicans. Coal-black hair he kept covered up with a battered widebrimmed leather hat set the way the vaqueros wear it, rubbed down and cracked from the sun. Shortish. Dirty as an old saint. Two shirts for the season, pants he’d wear until they were stiff. Packed muscle tucked up around his shoulders. Thick rider’s legs.

A lot of stories get told about Donovan. True or not, is a matter of opinion. Some of the things you hear in the papers, he and his buddies must have cornered a newspaperman, got him drunk, bought him off, had him write some true accounts. The writers are lightweights, usually, and they wear frock coats. Take the train in from the East, and the coach in from the station towns, and come back breathless with the frontier, shit leaking from their ears.

Reason they call him the New York Minute, anyways, is he was quick. Quicker than anybody. Road between the boxcars of a moving train. Ran on foot alongside a horse and broke it as it galloped. After a few drinks, he’d start yelling that give him one minute, he could do anything. He’d rob a bank in a minute and make it to the next state by nightfall. Bury some dynamite under a farmhouse and ride the flames to the moon. He’d call heads on a silver dollar and shoot the eagle while it flipped – this was a popular trick with the Southern boys, when they were awake. They said he’d run British guns for the Confederates during the War, pocketed the money upfront, seized his own cargo and turned it in to the Union for the reward. He’d set clockworks bombs on riverboats he owned to collect the insurance. He’d shot five cops during the Irish draft riots. He was a ganglord in the Five Points. He medicated opium to Beacon Hill ladies for their fainting spells. He stole cattle and rode them to Chicago ahead of the trains.

The stories mostly ended before they explained what he was doing in a shit-pile like Pueblo. But there were whispers about that, too. He was on the run, of course- he’d killed a man with powerful friends, or been a British spy, or been found out. The Southern boys liked to say he shot Lincoln. One of them got cut up pretty good in a barfight about it.

That night in the saloon, he had the barkeep toss him a full bottle of the local stuff. It’s homebrewed. It’s made with dust and Southern hate. It takes the varnish off the furniture next door. Spooks horses at twenty paces. He started in on it and yelled about downing it in a minute flat. Threw the empty bottle against the wall and said he was leaving for San Francisco. Last was heard of him, a trader gave out he’d been shot by that cold-blooded blue-eyed sonofabitch Billy the Kid.

There’s those that demur, though. He faked it – this is the other story – he faked the killing, and he’s in the Orient, right now, in the far East, in clean linens, surrounded in an opium cloud, lying in a steam bath, dictating his story to a credulous Englishman and having it sent to New York for publishing. That’s the other story. That’s what they believe in Pueblo – in Pueblo, where the day after he left the dust storm hit and afterwards, rattled by the ashes, that Georgia boy went and shot a pair of Mexicans standing with their horses outside the bar. Shot the backs of their heads right off. Story didn’t say whether or not they hung him.

Other Birth Myths

Review Desk

2005-08-04T20:02:00.000-04:00

Communists with guitars, folkists with maps, and mysteries without answers.

Music

LP III, The Soviettes
The Soviettes' third full-length, the helpfully named LP III, is the musical equivalent of doing teaspoon shots of lemonade concentrate. 14 tracks clock in at under thirty minutes. Bass and drums race along punkishly and dual guitars crunch and squeal. What makes the band better than average are the massed female vocals - (says the jacket, "Everybody Sings") - that race along breakneck, occasionally devolving into shout-and-response chants, as on the infectious "Roller Girls," which brings in an all-female roller derby crew to scream "We're the Weapons of Mass Destruction! Bombs Away!" Hooks stutter out the window and whoosh past. Every so often, the only guy in the group - back behind the drum kit - will join in. Some of their best tracks throw some political consciousness in with the vodka-and-punch, as on the album-opening anti-imperialist hard candy "Multiply and Divide." They sound like a crack cheerleading squad trained by the Ramones.

Illinois, Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens has stated in interviews his plans to record an album dedicated to each of the 50 states. Concerns about the Delaware EP aside, this year's follow-up to 2003's Michigan at least proves that whether or not he plans to finish, the project has already yielded strong fruit. On Illinois, Stevens, playing twenty-three instruments himself, assembles a sweeping collection of songs that turn alternately triumphant and mournful, carried by guitars, banjos, massed percussion, glockenspiels, ranks of horns, backing choirs, and muted keyboards. It is anchored, though, by Stevens' voice, which lends a whispered personal cast to the most celebratory orchestral numbers, like the propulsive, string-laden "Come On! Feel The Illinoise!" Like any good writer, Stevens sifts through history to pull the idiosyncratic details, patching together a version of Illinois more unique than it is comprehensive. Abraham Lincoln, Superman, Louis Armstrong, and Al Capone get nods, as do Chicago - City of Broad Shoulders - the Sear's Tower, Jacksonville, the Black Hawk Amerindians, serial killer John Wayne Gacy Jr., and an obscure state holiday for a Polish war hero, Casmir Pulaski Day. This last is one of the most affecting songs on the album, a hushed folk lament sung by a man watching a lover die slowly of bone cancer until she succumbs, "on the first of March, on the holiday." Moments of fragile emotion are strung together by minimalist-inspired horn parts and titles longer than some of the songs themselves. It all adds up to a compelling portrait of place, made stronger by its emotional heft.

Books

Bangkok 8, by John Burdett
Devout Buddhist, whore's son, and police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, one of two cops in Bangkok's District 8 not on the take - and our narrator - observes late on in the novel: "This isn't a whodunit, is it?" And in Burdett's Thailand, that'd be missing the point. Half the fun of the novel isn't in figuring out the answer, it's in realizing that in a Buddhist murder mystery, the answer might not matter at all. And so there's lurid deaths by snake bite - of an American marine and Sonchai's Thai partner, respectively, to jump-start our narrative. There's a big, complex view of prostitution in a country run by it. There's byzantine corruption, spicy food, solemn Americans, backroom deals, well-drawn characters, and a fair bit of reincarnation. The people matter more than the crime ever did, and even the ones that don't make it out alive have another shot. It's pulled off with darkly edged humor, with a compelling sense of place, and with the knowledge that things rarely, if ever, resolve as neatly as we'd like to suppose. There's a reason that Thai soap operas feature a skeleton following young lovers into the sunset.

Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson's new novel is haunted by loss and its collateral, formed out of three seemingly unrelated case histories - a missing three-year-old girl in 1970, a teenage daughter savagely murdered in '94, and the 1979 intersection of a postpartum depressed housewife, a domestic argument, and a woodaxe - told in impartially dated chapters that form the slender beginning. These unconnected mysteries collide and spool out in the present day under the investigation of police-turned-private investigator Jackson Brodie of Cambridge, England, recently divorced, a man who dreams of moving to France and whose own childhood forms a fourth, later case history that links him emotionally to the victims that employ him. Atkinson writes with a bleak, dry English wit that exposes bruises and cuts to the bone. What sets it apart sharply from your cut-rate procedurals is its emphasis, as much on the living as on those they've buried, and on the empty places where the missing should be but aren't.

More Reviews

Making Love With Your Ego

2005-08-04T16:53:00.000-04:00

Google Your Way to Personal Understanding

Tag can be played with flashlights, freezing, and televisions. It can be played on college campuses with foam guns and e-mails, and it can be played internationally with wire-guided missiles and 500 lb. bombs.

And as many variants as there are of tag, there must by now be just as many different ways of Googling shit and seeing what comes up - spinning a bank of computers in Mountain View CA like it was a roulette wheel. Type your initials into the Google image search – the picture that comes up first says something about you. Find alternate versions of yourself by searching your full name: well-regarded community theatre performers in North Carolina, or Oregon neurosurgeons, or data systems analysts in Chicago.

Here’s another one: Type “[your name] is…” and then pick a dozen or so of the little blurbs you get in the description boxes that come up in the search window. See how the world sees a parade of your alter egos and opposites. It’s quick and pointless, but hidden underneath it is the giddy feeling of looking into versions of yourself and your future, even if this feeling of kinship’s based on nothing more than the same first name. The descriptions have nothing to do with us – they’re separated by geography and profession, they pop up in laudatory speeches and essays, welcome packets and professional websites and reviews and forums – but because at bottom we really, really like mirrors, we imagine them taking place in an odd sort of parallel universe.

There we are, lumped in with Bizarro Superman and Spock With A Goatee, watching another one of us born in Florida instead, graduating from this college instead, praised instead at a regional conference dinner for automotive executives and thanking instead another set of wives or husbands or partners or live-ins. “Jim,” they say - for instance - “is a graduate of the University of North Alabama. One of the best cartoonists in the game today.”

You’ll note I’ve camouflaged the first person in plurals up until now, but there’s a point to all this, isn’t there? – more than just teaching you a new game. Ego isn't in the game for nothing. And so here's mine. Jim is...

'...the Mike Wallace of meteorology.'
'...a Chicago hero who has attracted global attention.'
'...a double-framed walking machine build by Carnegie Mellon Robotics.'
'...a creature of innocence, just like the birds he loves.'
'...a worm whose encounter with a bulky space suit led him to pursue adventures in outer space.'
'...an asshole!!!'
'...a cartoon universe, fantastic and horrifying.'
'...beyond flawed. Many of us felt he should have used the revolver on himself instead of on the assassins.'
'...an ex-con turned private detective.'
'...among the masterpieces of the French New Wave.'
'...with the Phantoms today after playing four seasons with Red Deer.'
'...an avid rollerblader who enjoys Indian food.'
'...a third generation Lubbockite and a graduate of Monteray High School.'
'...shooting these days with a D100.'

"He is also noted for hosting 'Over Easy' on PBS with Mary Martin."

Le Parisien: The Miracle

2005-08-03T12:52:00.000-04:00

Time, It Turns Out, Is Universal

I don't really keep up with the news - at least, not in a timely manner. I'll find out eventually that Putin pocketed an iced-out Superbowl ring out in Moscow, sure, but not in time enough to brag about keeping up with the pace of things. That said, by now doubtless you've all heard of the AirFrance Airbus A340 that skidded down a rainslick runway in Toronto and burst into into flames. You've heard that miraculously, nobody was killed. You and Le Parisien both have proclaimed, "The Miracle of the Air France Airbus."

It's the first A340 crash in 13 years of service. And amid disintegrating steel and burning fuel, you'd imagine three hundred and nine people vanishing into flame. Choking as the oxygen was consumed. Instead, they've all emerged virtually unscathed. This is heartening. Now here's why I'm thinking about the crash, when - after all - you could just be reading CNN.com.

The reason for the crash? The severe thunderstorm that rocked Toronto late yesterday. The same weather system, I'd imagine, that found its way over my apartment building last night. The same towers of clouds that cracked open a jet over concrete and set it on fire shook my windows just a few hours later. At 4:03 p.m., EST, August 2, 2005, at the same time that I was using a Laser Radio Transmission gun to scan men's pants in a rat-infested basement, three hundred-odd people were running for their lives on a little flat patch of rocky ground next to a gully.

And at the same time as three hundred people ran for their lives from an exploding airplane and lightening flashed, Christopher R. Hill and Akitaki Saiki ducked out of a North Korean conference room to grab some coffee as six nations continued largely unsuccessful nuclear proliferation talks.

At the same time as the lead American and Japanese negotiators took a coffee break in North Korea, police in Belarus had battered down the door of a dingy apartment decorated with the Polish flag, the headquarters of a cultural group of ethnic Poles. Minsk authorities worry that the Poles are fomenting revolution. At just about the same moment that Akitaki Saiki burned his tongue on black coffee and Roel Bramer's vision blurred as he ran from fire and I pulled another stack of Lightweight Dress Chinos, a police officer in Belarus who refuses to be named stood in the center of the apartment and pencilled an inventory of subversive items into a little black notebook he carried with bent steel spirals. Item number one was the flag. Behind him, somebody was getting hit in the face with a truncheon.

And at more or less the exact same time, Michael Roach, recently retired from Australia's Security Intelligence Organization, sweated under newsman lights and, reading from a prepared statement typed onto thin white computer paper, said that Australia faces an imminent risk of a terrorist attack. The reporter from the Australian Broadcasting Corp. nodded seriously as Christopher R. Hill picked up his coffee. "The threat," Michael Roach said, television makeup running on his forehead in more or less the same way that sweat salty with terror was runnning down the gasping face of Roel Bramer, "is real. It's a matter of when it will happen."

Four hours later, I saw the same lightening that split an A340 like an egg strike down in the South End. Christopher R. Hill waxed pessimistic to a reporter on the way back to his hotel room. Rain extinguished Toronto flames. Shock blankets were being wrapped around the survivors. Police tape fluttered across a kicked-in apartment door. Michael Roach woke up early to go running.

Thunderstorm Blues & The Art of War

2005-08-02T00:58:00.000-04:00

Signs, Portents, and Nonsense

Scientists tell us that when you get rain when the sun's out - that strange, bright, washed-out kind of day cut with raindrops that feel super-realistic, the kind of day where you feel like a grey film's been removed from your field of vision, that the world has been not polished but burnished into brighter color, the kind of day where edges lie sharp and every blade of grass and every shadowed pebble saws across your field of vision - scientists tell us that that is the Devil beating his wife.

And whether or not that's true - I'm told condensation is an old wive's tale - I hate to think what the Devil's doing to her during a thunderstorm like this. The head of it is directly over my building right now, the lightening hidden downtown so that the light's horizon to horizon and free of bolts, just a blinding flicker, like an ambulance on my street or a flashbulb in orbit or God's broken fluorescent light. The thunder crashes down on top of us in a strangely comforting way. It's a guilty comfort, like sleeping soundly while the neighbors are fighting, secure that they can't touch you through these walls. It punches through the soft music on the stereo and makes me worry about the TV exploding. I've heard this sort of thing happens. There's electricity in the air. I expect lightbulbs to burst. I expect the flatscreen monitor of this computer to melt and boil away into space.

I know as the rain patters I'll sleep soundly tonight.

I should mention at this point, as white light consumes the South End, that I dreamt last night of Los Angeles going up in a nuclear cloud tinged an ugly orange and red. I saw it mushroom up from the Valley soundlessly. I was on a sandstone-cobbled road next to a terraced cliffside cafe filled with the disapproving rich & elderly. They didn't seem to notice as I pointed. I thought it was strange and horrible at the time, but not wholly unexpected. My dream-self knew with quiet certainty that this had been coming for a while. L.A. was bound to end as ashes funnelled into aftermath or cracked down the middle and swimming. It was just a matter of when. Spanish tile learning how to fly. A half million outdoor swimming pools rising vaporous.

Steve Erickson's new novel, the irrational, beguiling Our Ecstatic Days, is set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. (Question: Can L.A. ever have been said not to be post-apocalyptic?) The city's drowning slowly underneath a lake that appears almost overnight in the middle of South Hollywood. And for our current purposes, we should note that at more than one point, we are told: "We are surrounded by signs. Ignore none of them."

And so we look for signs and portents: Walking through the South End today, I saw a banner draped against a row of townhouses: It Will Be 28 Degrees Before You Know It. There was no sponsor. It was professionally printed and glossy.

In the Banana Republic men's bathroom, the other side of the wall is the stockroom. The wall is paper thin. Walking into the breakroom to get some water, I heard stockers were playing death metal at full volume. As an uninformed customer, now, imagine walking through the quiet scuffed hardwood of our basement, into the restroom, and then hearing, faintly, but - yes, there it is - unmistakably, the sounds of somebody screaming to kill all god-maggots.

Finally, flipping through John Darnielle's Last Plane to Jakarta the other day, I came across a discovery of his that I'd like to share. As you look at this search page from the website of Charles Strousse, professional composer and architect of the theme to All In The Family as well as the musical Annie, I'd like you to note two things.

1) The deal Ebay is offering. In this End of Days, does the Internet ride a red horse?

2) Far more important, do you feel with me (and with John Darnielle) the weight of possibility snuffed and discarded? The trembling feeling of having seen an alternate future? - Don't get me wrong. I think (and hope) that this will never see the light of day. But it was done. The songs are already written. It exists, not just in potentia, but tantalizingly close to reality. And by the guy who wrote "Tomorrow." Imagine that. Over the years, I've more or less consciously decided that Star Wars can die lonely in the woods, but still. Tomorrow.

Think of how much has been done that we'll never know - and what could have been done but wasn't. Rumor attests to Robert Johnson, in the months before his death, touring the South with an electric guitar and a drummer. Shit, he was one scuffed left foot and a 'Yeah' away from rock & roll. Had he lived a year longer, he'd have been invited to Chicago, where the seminal live recorded blues festival of 1936 might have ignited the form twenty years early. Woody Guthrie could have gone post-punk in '63.

The thunder, by the way, recedes into the distance. Tomorrow - and there'll always be a tomorrow - it'll be like it never was.

Fortune Cookies Du Jour

2005-07-19T18:51:00.000-04:00

Afternoon Thunderstorms and Other Forecasts For Your Future

So I'm sitting here behind glass in an air-conditioned cafe waiting for the rain, chewing on a fortune cookie. Like anyone, I do a fair amount of thinking about the future. I imagine a tanned, grinning version of myself standing easily in expensive clothes, accepting the vague accolades of his peers. There is, perhaps, distant pattered applause. Or I fantasize about more prosaic things, like being able to order a nice glass of pinot noir with dinner.

Shoes are only sometimes the measure of a man.

The thing about fortune cookies is that they're deliberately unhelpful when it comes to the future. They like instead to convey a kind of omnipotent knowledge of the present.

Not all that glitters is jade

There's an art to these kind of vague reassurances. They seem to indicate that this is the way things are. Lucky numbers are lucky numbers always and forever.

35, 67, 68, 79, 2

I, according to the Chinese Horoscope - to change the subject slightly from fortune to destiny - am a Fire Rabbit. Picture that hopping down the lane, trailing smoke, glowing orange and cherry red into the distance. Always on the verge of exploding into white tufts and flecks of time. Singed and teetering on the edge of fatal disaster. They say mine's the lucky sign. And sure, that rabbit's lucky as hell. On fire for all this time and he's still not dead? One lucky fucking rabbit. You do the metaphor this time around - I'm tired and waiting for rain and you can fill in the blanks anyway.

Tonight you will find that flexibility entertains.

So all I'm saying - and it isn't all that much - is that if I had my own fortune cookie factory, we'd do things a little differently. We'd tell the future. Because we all know, don't we, what the future holds?

Tonight the ladies will drink for free.

Meanwhile - and there's always a meanwhile - the heat is asthmatic. Thunderheads hang low and swollen and wool-grey. They choke on the damp. The air is a wet cloth pushed into open mouths. It suffocates. Gasping, birds fall from the sky. Knees wobble and tongues hang. Fans strain and fail. Air conditioners cough. Ice melts on contact. Mold glories. It exults in dark crawlspaces. It spreads over towels and back-closet coats, squeezes between the pages of shelved books. It spreads overnight, arms itself, advances by hidden routes. It spreads like dye dropped in water, like stop-motion tree roots, like wine spilled on a white tablecloth. It a heat like this, suffocating underneath vengeful clouds pregnant with rain, brick becomes mud. Drywall, wetwall. Ice cream, soup. Eyes swim in their sockets. Veins engorge. The moist cauliflower of the brain turns to sponge.

It rains, like it should, briefly at six sharp.

Walker Associates, Inc.

2005-07-16T16:36:00.000-04:00

Death of a Credit Rating

There is a collection agency after me. They are the Walker Associates. They are still under the impression that I live in the Little Building, sliding down tile to pick up my mail on the way to the dining hall, counting the lunch bar rotations until burrito week, forced to sign guests in and out and present identification to clicking machines and ponderous, faulty elevators. Every so often Emerson forwards me another of their communications, dated several weeks previous.

I like to imagine their final retaliation will involve tracking me to Cortes via paycheck stubs and bank activity, where, unrepentant, I will be surrounded one muggy night. Curled up in the corner of the room farthest from the street, I will listen for sirens. Helicopter blades chopping above the rooftop. Unmarked cars zooming in from sidestreets and handbreaking to a vicious stop. Men in black suits piling out. Spotters glued to binoculars watching from the wide industrial windows of the offices across the highway. Climbers up the fire escape. Megaphones blaring to give up my $51.00 strep test bill to Quest Diagnostics before somebody gets hurt. I will wonder if I dare crawl across the living room on my belly and collect a few kitchen knives. Footsteps pound up the stairs. The door splinters. Smoke bombs smoke. Laser sights bifurcate the gloom. Radios crackle. They sweep through, leapfrogging, covering the exits. I yell they'll never take me alive. A man in a gray suit and cufflinks walks up polite and sinister. Looks around at all the mess. Says, looking me straight in the eye, "Taking you alive was never part of the plan." He turns. He has washed his hands of me. My glance moves from his smoothly exiting back to the muzzles of no fewer than thirty-seven large and small semi-automatic weapons. I close my eyes. There is a pause. I am dragged roughly to my feet. "You think we're going to shoot you now?" The captain whispers gutteral into my ear. "Shooting you," he says, and laughs once, "would be too quick."

Of course, I know that reality is more prosaic. The letters will - politely - become more firm. Eventually, I'll receive a court summons. I'll try to hand over the $51. I'll be fined legal fees. They'll take away my guitar as collateral. And so I'm stamping the addressed envelope they gave me. I'll eat the cost. I didn't even have strep, you know. I argued with the nurse. She'd just said I didn't have strep. I said, why test me then? She said we'd better be sure. It didn't even occur to me certitude costs money, though of course in this world of irrational change, surety is a luxury item.

This is the last time I do the cautious thing and visit a clinic if I think my inability to swallow food means I have something worse than a little virus. It's all fluids and bed rest from here on out. If I lose an arm, I'll drink some orange juice and sleep it off. Take some aspirin. It'll have to be CVS brand, though, even though I suspect that CVS brand aspirin is sugar pills and packaging. I can't afford the real stuff.

Review Desk

2005-07-11T02:30:00.000-04:00

A Review Desk shortstack. New music, two-year-old music, and a brand new Norwegian literary import. From Norway.

Music

The Sunset Tree, The Mountain Goats
For fourteen years, John Darnielle has been singing in a voice that wavers between anger, bitterness, humor and resolve, and he's been singing about people that don't exist, narratives that make him the closest thing to a novelist music has. Until recently he was accompanied only by an acoustic guitar and tape hiss. This is the third album he's recorded in a proper studio, backed by more or less a full band, but it's different than every one of his past efforts in more than instrumentation. The fiction, still clinging on in the semi-autobiographical We Shall All Be Healed, is gone. Darnielle writes now directly and indirectly about his childhood at the "strong and thick-veined hands" of his abusive stepfather, who died in 2004. Darnielle's fictions have always been raw and as likely to make you laugh as they are to make you crumble; here the humor is thinner, ready to give way. The album is not difficult to listen to - the arrangements are nearly flawless, from a textured mandolin to background piano to the choppy cello and violin on "Dilaudid" - and the story is gracefully told if wrenching. It's from the perspective of Darnielle's 17-year-old self, alternately rebellious, desperate, and cowed - a photo album of memories and moments. On "Dance Music," he retreats to his bedroom during an argument and, lying next to his small record player "learns what the volume knob is for." He plots ineffectual adolescent revenge. He drinks scotch and punches his videogame console. He drives home, knowing what waits for him every night. The songs stop abruptly, as if there is one more verse that he can't bring himself to sing. It is hard to think of another contemporary songwriter who could have pulled this off with such honesty and grace.

The Slow Wonder, AC Newman
Carl Newman is best known for his work with fellow Canadians the New Pornographers, who have released two albums of breathless power-pop that goes down like a slab of rock candy: polyphonic choruses, triple-tracked guitars, enough massive hooks for six songs melted down into one. His first solo effort, The Slow Wonder, is a little more restrained, though it doesn't sacrifice the old sugar rush - see "On The Table," with its pretty background piano bits, crunching guitars, and massed backup vocalists, or the scraping cello hook that anchors "Town Halo." For that matter, just try not shouting along to the multitracked cry of "Game on!" that punctuates "35 In the Shade." Even more noteworthy, however, might be the slower moments. The stately, booming "Cloud Prayer" is pitch-perfect soundtrack to a thunderstorm. The awkwardly titled "Drink To Me Babe, Then" is a melencholy ballad, with some spacey whistling and a big guitar in for the bridge. The album is brief but its effects are lasting. There is no fat here, and quite a bit to wonder at.

Books

Tales of Protection, by Erik Fosnes Hansen
Norwegian author Erik Fosnes Hansen unites four separate stories -about a dying industrialist in contemporary Norway, a 19th century Baltic lighthouse keeper, miraculous paintings in Renaissance Italy, and a mining engineer posted to Ceylon in the 1937 - in a sweeping new novel (recently translated into English by Nadia Christensen) that only builds in power as it progresses. Underneath it all lies what he calls early on "the music behind the music," the force of coincidence, of luck, of sudden change. The separate sections lean up against each other in surprising ways, gently revealing common themes - illness, aging, song, and the power of small transformation - without forcing them into ruin. They are punctuated by moments of giddy strangeness that verge on revelatory - a treatise on bees by a blind scientist, an medieval encounter with the Devil, a midair interview with two swifts, the ruminations of a dead man lying in his coffin. Inventively narrated, stunningly executed, entertaining and intellectual, it is a read to savor.

More Reviews

A Beggar's History

2005-07-10T22:04:00.000-04:00

The True birth myth of the New York Minute

We none of us are as we seem. History, personal or national, is a story we tell ourself. Sometimes these stories are outrageous falsehoods. Sometimes we tell pretty girls at parties that we are surgeons, or hang-gliding instructors, or currently publishing critically acclaimed novels. We tell people that we are twenty-two and working in Boston as a screenwriter. We say that we're originally from Delaware, like it says on the license. We say how about another martini.

And the New York Minute? Slang for a gang of Dublin street urchins in the 30s. They were thin and ragged street thieves. They stole pocket change and copies of Ulysses. They stole umbrellas in the sunshine and parasols when it rained. They lived in damp fog and cold old stones, alleys that smelled sticky of drying whiskey. They turned corners and wore caps and covered their faces with coal. They collected American vinyls and hid tubercular coughs. When they dreamed it was of steaming broth and warm weather and soft cloth. When they talked it was of gold covered streets and emerald baths, whole roasted pork, English servants, motorcars. They were as quick as New York and wanted the boats and the fast streets. Some of them sailed. A few of them made it. And one of them started stealing words instead of wallets. He horded them. He lived old. He had sons. His sons had sons. And when the old man died - and he died in an Irish way, upright and drinking in an Boston pub, singing one of the old songs on New Year's - when he died, he passed his ragged collection of stolen words on to one child. A boy.

Now, the boy never amounted to much. His good fortune made him indolent. He hadn't cupped small white hands over a guttering candle on an uncharitable Christmas morning. He hadn't needed his fingers to be warm enough to steal with. Desperation had never been his game. And so he let the name fade. He lost track of it. He was careless with the words.

And when they slipped, I stole them. All writers are street urchins at heart.

Other birth myths.

Mint Green Analogies II

2005-07-09T12:43:00.000-04:00

For The Benefit of Emily Platt

So if life is like a very long row of toothpaste tubes, should we be flossing? Dentists recommend it. It heads off gum disease. It is a simple precaution. But like most simple precautions - looking before we cross the street, walking with the kitchen knife pointed down, turning the television off during thunderstorms - it's inconvenient, and easy to ignore. And maybe obsessing about dental health is a little egotistical, if life is like a row of toothpaste tubes. Do you really want to be the asshole shooting for perfection?

Slapstick Living

2005-07-07T16:43:00.000-04:00

The last week has been a minor triumph of good housekeeping. Three days ago, I forgot to turn the fan over the stove on while frying bacon. The fire detector went off. I did not know where the fire detector was. I left the bacon draining on newspaper and ran out, waving my arms. It rained outside. I opened windows. The rain came inside. I closed windows. The fire detector shrieked. I opened the windows. The rain came in.

I set up a broken fan. The fire detector shrieked. I stood on a chair that was not quite tall enough to reach the fire detector. It shrieked. I stood on tip-toes and tried to find a button. There was a switch. I turned it. The fire detector got louder. I heard sounds from the kitchen. The fire detector shrieked. I fell off the chair.

The fire detector stopped. Merciful silence. I ran to the kitchen. A tortilla was burning on the stove. I tried to get it off. It came out in pieces, smoldering. The fire detector came back on. I took the pan off the heat. Bacon grease slopped onto the floor. The fire detector shrieked. I looked around for paper towels. I was out of paper towels. I tried to mop the bacon grease up with a sponge. I stood up to rinse it out. I slipped on the bacon grease. The fire detector, finally, stopped. I stood gingerly in grease and tried to fry eggs. The yolks broke. I scrambled them in the pan and scraped them over burned tortilla pieces and bacon bits. I looked at the pile thoughtfully and added some good strong salsa.

Outside, the rain sluiced out vengeful. Water ran down Cortes, carrying sodden trash with it. Rats fled. My kitchen smoked. When I got to work, there were three inches of water in the breakroom. A live mouse stuck to a glue trap floated past. The city drains in the alley behind Banana had backed up. Five and a half feet of water filled it up, like an aquarium. It leaked through our back door. A mop lay useless and drowned. Pieces of boxes were soaking. Wet messes of tissue tried to contain the pools.

Just two days before, I’d lost my phone. I didn’t quite remember losing it, on account of a bottle of tannic red wine, some cheap tequila, and a couple Coronas, but sure enough when I’d woken up it wasn’t in my jeans. I had a job interview the morning after and they said they’d call me. I hoped I’d found a phone before then.

The next day, feeling unaccountably sick, I made a careless gesture and swept a kitchen knife off the counter. It fell onto my foot. I looked around for something to stop the bleeding. I was out of paper towels. The toe swelled up purple.

I learned that day what baking soda does. This is an important life lesson. I was making homemade pancake batter, and having to make some substitutions, seeing as I don’t have a fully stocked kitchen – olive oil for canola oil, that sort of thing. I had flour and vanilla, thankfully. But no baking powder or soda (I wasn’t sure of the difference). I shrugged. They were white powder. I pinched in some more flour.

It turns out baking soda makes pancakes fluffy. Without baking soda, pancakes are flat, soggy, and chewy. The taste goes away. They taste like warmed-over batter. I frowned, refrigerated the batter, bought some baking soda, came back. Stirred it in to confirm my hypothesis.

Hypothesis: confirmed. Pancakes came out delicious. I chalked up one success.

On Thursday, my friend sent me a breathless message. She’d gotten a call from a friend of mine in Maine, who – it turned out – was the last person I’d talked to on the phone, though that had been the night I’d lost it, and neither of us quite remembered the conversation, though if I concentrated I thought I could see in my mind’s eye his name come up on the call screen.

Well, my friend in Maine had gotten a call from a stranger who sounded exactly like me. This stranger had found my phone in a gutter in a part of Boston I hadn’t, to my knowledge, even been in that week. The stranger wanted to get it back to me, though he has yet to do so. It gurgles on the line when we call. I have not yet determined whether my prospective employer has followed up on the interview, but I imagine I had better find that out soon.

My toe is still purple and swollen. I do not own bandages. I have not done the dishes, because standing is a little unpleasant. I still need to remember to buy paper towels.

Review Desk

2005-07-05T14:11:00.000-04:00

The sheer volume of new music and writing being pumped en masse into the world is almost frightening. It's difficult to even get around to the critical cream of the crop, much less to root around among less recognizable fare, and with that in mind I'm cracking a metaphorical champagne bottle over this new occasional piece, whose aim isn't so much critical as it is an attempt to spotlight good albums and novels published within the last several months.

Music

Picaresque, The Decemberists
The Decemberists - named after a gang of Russian army officers turned failed revolutionaries at the turn of yesterday's century - are as charmingly anachronistic as their name suggests. It's the kind of band that claims in their biography to travel exclusively via dirigible balloon. Their third album, and their most fully realized, Picaresque still finds band leader Colin Meloy crafting writerly narratives about Andalucian princesses, barrow boys and revenge-obsessed mariners that he makes both strange and hauntingly familiar, lit from behind with heartbreak and mortality. Check album standout "16 Military Wives," which brings in brass horns, organs, and a bouncy piano line to fill out an infectiously hummable melody. It may be the catchiest anti-war song ever.

Separation Sunday, The Hold Steady
Craig Finn, ex-Lifter Puller and now lead singer of The Hold Steady, is not, in fact, a singer. He screams his seedy stories of love, drugs, and dirty bars in an utterly unique, strained, smoker's yell. It's a trick that rides solely on the lyrics, and Finn provides on that count. "I have to try so hard not to fall in love / I have to concentrate when we kiss" he sings on the first track. It's a concept album of sorts, full of recurring characters and the born again. It's acted out over the theatrics of a crackerjack backing band, who pinch classic rock epics and transform Finn's lyrics into something incendiary. Weepy Hammonds swell before choruses, guitars crash, pianos strings snap. They sound like the best bar band in the history of bar bands. On "Charlamagne in Sweatpants," Finn gives us the album in a single bridge. Shouts, "Do you want me to tell it like boy meets girl and the rest is history? / Or do you want it like a murder mystery? / I'm gonna tell it like a comeback story. / 'Cause when we left we were defeated and depressed. / And when we arrived we were ripping high. / We had a gun in the glovebox. / We had some sweet stuff tucked into our socks. / We had Jesus Christ in all his glory." The album's a wicked Sunday morning hangover. This is a good thing.

The End of Love, Clem Snide
Erstwhile punk rockers Clem Snide have been doing shambling, shaggy, funny-sad alt-country for five albums now. They haven't changed too much on The End of Love; musically, the works shuffle along as always, borrowing liberally from cha-cha, folk, corn-pone country and its alt wing. The instrumentation is laid on a little thicker, and the guitar lines have a new meaty twang. Lyrically, Eef Barzelay puts in a well-turned performance, with jokey songs that cradle real feeling. See "Jews For Jesus Blues," in which he sings "Now that I'm found / I miss being lost." His nasal whine turns alternately mournful and sarcastic, sounding like Buddy Holly as sung by...well, by somebody named Eef. Album standout is "Made For TV Movie," which - like all great Clem Snide tracks - starts with a gimmick, in this case a Lucille Ball biopic. But it mines it for real feeling, concluding "they would never make a movie / If everything was great / Because happiness is boring / It's always black and white / And the good times never last / And the chocolates move to fast / For us all."

Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs, Andrew Bird
Violinist prodigy and professional whistler Andrew Bird has slowly assembled a sound out of shards of music from the last century that is both unique and wholly contemporary. The arrangements are intimate and organic, featuring fuzzy guitars, pizzicato strings, clicking percussion, and, of course, whistling. The lyrics are reserved and often funny, and twist unexpectedly into subdued melodies that slowly reveal layers of emotion. Among standouts like the awkwardly titled yet infectious "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left" and "MX Missiles" (which contains an oblique and threatening reference to a parade of "legionnares with two-by-fours marching off to war"), the record peaks on the second-to-last track with the drop dead gorgeous "Tables and Chairs." Beginning reserved and acoustic, it swells to a driving, post-apocalyptic climax where there "are no more countries / no currencies at all" and the survivors "throw away survival packs." The way Andrew Bird puts it, it sounds damn near joyous.

Books

The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break, by Steven Sherill
In Steven Sherill's accomplished debut novel, he takes an idea that sounds like a snotty postmodern art-school premise - the Minotaur as a roadhouse chef living in a trailer park in the American South - and invests it with a remarkable restraint and humanity. The Minotaur has been dimished by his thousands of years of existance, blunted and reduced by age. The bloodlust has been dimmed. He has difficulty speaking, because of the construction of his mouth. His observations of human nature are far more eloquent than his actions. Sherill is a good enough writer not to get swept away by the cleverness of his conceit, and to spend time fleshing out small details and moments - the alterations M has to tailor into his shirts, the dusty confines of trailer life, the quirks and foibles of the humans he interacts with. In the process, he creates a work both quietly moving and strangely hopeful.

Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Letham
Jonathan Letham's work has always revolved around collisions of pop culture and, increasingly, a powerful evocation of place. A greater emphasis on depth of character and his roots in the city that began with Motherless Brooklyn continues to great effect on the large, semi-autobiographical Fortress of Solitude, as he revisits his childhood. The book vividly evokes the Brooklyn coming-of-age of Dylan, the subject of the first half and the narrator of the second. It revolves around some of Letham's very personal interests - music, comic books, race, gentrification - as refracted through Dylan's childhood friendship with Mingus, a black kid who lives on the same block, and through the adult circumstances that end dividing them.

A Star Called Henry, by Roddy Doyle
The first in a planned trilogy narrated by the prodigious, brilliant, egotistical, precocious Henry Smart - Dublin orphan, Irish revolutionary, hitman and fugitive before he hits his mid-twenties - A Star Called Henry is giddy with language, with dramatic events, with hyperbole. Dialogue is rat-a-tat and breathless. Violence and wrenching poverty are everywhere. Henry often carries himself away with the story, vividly painting up events until they loom larger than larger than life. It's a marvelously entertaining birth of the Irish nation, and Doyle is clever enough to subvert all of this overstatement by puncturing it at the end in an abrupt reversal that leaves a good deal of Henry's tale of the war under queasy suspicion. The second novel, already out, may have gone awry - it will be hard to tell until Doyle wraps up the trilogy - but the first stands on its own feet.

Being Dead, by Jim Crace
Jim Crace is a kind of working genius of the English writing world, tackling strange and utterly different subjects with each novel and folding them gently into a kind of universal resonance. He has invented an entire Third World continent (the appropriately title Continent), written about stone-age flint workers (The Gift of Stones), produced a book composed entirely of 60-something short pieces revolving around food (The Devil's Larder), and put out a novel about Jesus' forty days in the desrt (Quarantine) in which Jesus is not even the main character. In Being Dead, the first thing that happens to his married Australian biologists is exactly that. They are murdered on the beach where they originally met. From there it goes both backwards and forwards, tracing their relationship from the beginning even as their bodies disintegrate. Crace paints the biology of natural decomposition in lovingly rendered, deliberately unsentimental prose. The result is elegaic and - like the rest of his work - unreservedly brilliant.

A Birthday Party For America

2005-07-04T22:40:00.001-04:00

Red-Eyed and Blue

America's civic culture hit a minor but telling low this afternoon in the form of a 4th of July announcer who forgot the words to the Declaration of Independence in front of 100,000 people. It was over a loudspeaker overlooking the esplanade and at least half of the city of Boston, who, up until that point, had been listening peaceably to Ray Charles instead. "Hit The Road Jack" shorted out. There was a pause. A woman came onto the loudspeaker and began to inform us of the program. In forty-five minutes, we'd be treated to a pre-show. We were encouraged to say hello to the people next to us so that we could remember why we were the greatest nation on Earth. Today, she reminded us, was the Fourth of July, America's birthday. Today - her announcer voice getting a little cracked - it would do us good to remember what got us here. She mentioned freedom briefly. Then she cited the Declaration of Independence, "the document that began all of this. We should remember what our Founders wrote, so many years ago: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal." There was a pause. She clearly had forgotten how the rest went. "...And other words that are also in the Declaration," she concluded. She wrapped up. Pause. She came back on. Static crackled. "Oh, and sponsored by Liberty Mutual. Thank you, Liberty Mutual, for helping this event to take place."

Speaking of which, did you know that at the website of The National Archives you can click a link to 'join the signers of the Declaration of Independence'? Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, your signature can be digitally placed onto a full-size Declaration, which you can then print out and hang, the better to impress houseguests. You get the choice of three signature fonts - Colonist, American, and Patriot. Naturally, I chose Patriot. Fuck Colonists. They're practically immigrants. Now I've got my name where it always belonged. I'm a father of the country. The National Archives say so. Hell, George Washington is a piker compared to me. I've still got my real teeth.

Anyway, things are exploding over the skyline and it looks like a really pretty warzone. Have a good Fourth, everyone. Pound beers. Get shitfaced. It's what Thomas Jefferson would have wanted.

Mint Green Analogies

2005-07-02T20:05:00.000-04:00

Life is like...

Life is like a very long row of toothpaste tubes. You know how, when you start a new tube of toothpaste, you vow you're going to start squeezing from the bottom? This time, you say, you'll finally have a clean slate. This time, you will have learned from your past mistakes - from all the toothpaste you wasted unused, from the mess and the fuss of taking the thoughtless way out. From the gobs of bright blue that grow encrusted over the tip when you lose the top. From the last bit you can never get out. This time you're experienced. You'll start squeezing this tube from the bottom, keep the tube rolled, follow it carefully up its length as the days tick by. Leave it spent and glowing like an orange rind.

Somehow, though, even if you manage to remember for the first couple of days, for the first week, something goes awry. You forget. You're in a hurry. You wake up hungover and bleary and hardly trust yourself to find any solid object, much less the end. You have houseguests and somebody disregards your carefully laid plans. Scatters them like paperwork in a rainstorm.

By the end, the tube's a crinkled, misused mess. You're disgusted with it. You just want to be over and done with it so you can get on to a new one, so that you can try again to have a shot at a perfect tube of toothpaste. And eventually, even though it is a very long row of toothpaste, you reach a point where suddenly there doesn't seem to be many tubes left at all. Until suddenly, without realizing it, you're brushing your teeth for the last time.

Like as not, you never quite got your toothpaste right. It wasn't the right flavor. It didn't whiten like it said it would. You got cavities anyway. You didn't get it all out. You threw it away and bought a new one just so that you could have a shot at a new beginning. You left it behind, half-used, after the breakup.

Now, of course, it's too late. You remember a thousand tiny regrets. You say at least you've still got your teeth, and after all, isn't that something to be proud of?

Sometimes you wish you'd never brushed your teeth at all, that you were a Neolithic man free of modern notions of dental hygiene. Sometimes the thought of all that toothpaste seems like a horrible and tragic waste. Sometimes you wish you could live it all again, get it right - maybe not perfect, but better. You vow that knowing what you know now, you would have been more careful, or more reckless. You would have tried that new flavor. You would have taken the free sample.

Sometimes you feel youthful and invincible. You say: So we only get so much toothpaste in a life. Well, fine. Fuck it. Squeeze it for all it's worth. Crumple it like tissue. Pound it six ways 'til Sunday. Shoot it for the flavor. Fill your mouth with it to rinse out the sex-and-vodka smell from the night before. Brush until your gums bleed. That time you spend worrying over how to roll it? Throw it out and buy a new one. Run outside and roll in the grass. This is it. You get a certain amount of toothpaste in life. You'll only have teeth for so long. Don't let them fall out all on their own.

Sometimes you think that this would be imprudent. Sometimes you think that you have nothing to lose except your life, and shouldn't you make sure it's a life worth living?

None of this changes the fact that life is a row of toohpaste tubes. You know that in a world of uncertainty and equivocation that this, at least, is true always.

Germ Warfare

2005-07-01T13:07:00.002-04:00

Fever Dreams

I am sick. A viral infection, maybe a meek version of influenza. Hundreds of thousands of inert little flecks of protein are exploding heedlessly out of my cells, leaving them ruptured and deflated like balloons. I snuffle. I cough up unmentionable things. My skin feels thin and easily bruised. My sinuses are swollen and stuffed. My internal thermometer is broken; it is the middle of a muggy summer and I am alternately covered in blankets and sweating. I have a headache that feels exactly as if a warm vice was being tightened against the veins on either side of my head. I am feverish, I'm sure - the parts of me I have no control over trying to burn out the contagion. My eyes hurt when I focus them. I guzzle orange juice and hope for the best.

Red Red Fire Trucks

2005-06-29T19:09:00.000-04:00

And Other Perils of Retail

There are advantages and disadvantages to working retail at Newbury Street's five story marble-floored Banana Republic. Certainly it changes a person. Now when I shop I find myself resizing racks when I put clothes back. If I allow my mind to wander I may finger-space unconsciously. If, God forbid, I even so much as hear one bar from a song on the Banana Summer 05 Corporate Soundtrack - Track 11 in particular - I literally have post-traumatic flashbacks. The corners of my mouth turn up in a rictus grin. "Hi, how are you doing today?" I say to thin air. "Can we help you find anything, or are you just browsing?"

That isn't to say that the job doesn't have its occasional moments of excitement, like when five boxes of ice cream turned up in the freezer, or when the air conditioner broke down again and temperatures in the store soared to 95 degrees, or when The Incredibles was playing in the break room for three days straight. But none of that beats yesterday, when our elevator broke down with a hapless sales associate trapped inside (somewhere between the mezzanine - women's shoes & accessories - and the third floor, or Ladies' 1) and three red firetrucks had to come screaming to a halt in front of the store and disgorge a battalion of firefighters armed with poles and hooks and axes to break her out, which they did. I would give more detail, but I didn't get a very good look at the action, mainly because a woman whose heavy mascara was running in the store heat wanted to know if men's shorts came in waist sizes above 38.

I was working stock at the time, so I was feeling more badass than usual. Stock has its own laws apart from the sales floor. Stock people are virtually autonomous, answering to no one but the stock supervisor. They aren't required to wear headsets with their walkies for practical reasons. They have the run of the store, from top to bottom - where sales has to stay on one floor for an entire shift, stock gets to travel, busy with arcane tasks, taking inventory, auditing, restocking. Stock is not questioned by management. If inclined, stock could spend a good portion of the day knocking back Coronas down in women's sale, in the nook next to the boot cut jeans, playing poker and listening to the radio. Stock has clipboards. Stock has laser guns. Stock can spend thirty minutes on Ladies' 2 under the pretext of helping with go-backs. Stock is not required to open up Banana Republic Cards or listen to customers. Stock lives outside the rules. Stock are the Rebels Without A Cause of the garment industry. Stock is James Dean with a little cart and a pencil behind his ear. The stock room is a country unto itself. Stock has diplomatic immunity.

Even though I was working stock, though, I was trained as a sales associate, and I still have the reflexes. So I told the woman that we only carried up to 38 in the store, but that online we carried Big & Tall sizes. I told her that our linen drawstring pants were cut more generously, and that her husband would probably fit into a 38 in those. She expressed her doubts about wrinkling. I assured her that they were actually a linen-cotton blend, 55/45%, and a little more durable than pure linen in that respect. I added that I owned a pair and enjoyed them very much.

Inside, a stock person was screaming YOU AND YOUR HUSBAND ARE SERIOUSLY OBESE. YOU ARE WHY ENGLISH TOURISTS ARE SURPRISED WHEN MEDIUMS ARE TOO BIG FOR THEM. YOU ARE WHAT MAKE AMERICAN WATER PARKS HELL ON EARTH FOR ANYBODY WHO DOESN'T SHAKE THE GROUND WHEN THEY WALK. THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD ISSUE YOU MUMUS AND BAN YOU FROM RETAIL CLOTHING STORES FOREVER.

She said she'd have to think about it. I smiled and told her to have a nice day.

The Sun's Not Yellow - It's Chicken

2005-06-28T20:12:00.000-04:00

Heat And Work Ethic

So I'm sitting here at a little iron table looking onto the courtyard at the center of the Boston Public Library, the one that looks kind of like a miniature Italy, complete with marble walkways, columns, a fountain featuring dancing bronze, and what appears suspiciously to be a papal balcony. I'm sitting here, listening to John Darnielle, and pretending to write as I people-watch. This consists mainly of grimacing solemnly.

As an artist, you too can muster the courage to lie to strangers and close friends.

This comes out of nowhere, and is the only thing I have written yet today. I find it inspiring. I am about to follow it up - perhaps with, (Cheating and stealing are also permissable)? - when a Nigerian man in uniform informs me that the library is closing, and I need to leave the colonnade, though not in so many words.

Meanwhile, the heat is biblical. The sidewalk peels. The flowers in the oil paintings down the hallway are wilting. In a wet heat like this, plaster swells tumescent and cracks, couples scream at each other in airless rooms, cars leave their tire melted on the street. The underage sleep fitfully, bathed in sweat, dreaming of mojitos and the iced teas in Long Island. Mold and insects encroach. Carpenter ants breed in dressers. Moths seek out seven hundred fifty thousand softly glowing lights. Rats the size of shoeboxes grow fat on garbage and insulation and loll around in apartment living rooms half-crazed from fever. The heat smells like rotting fruit, oily suncreen, the backwash frm air conditioners, burning meat, car exhaust.

My mother calls me and tells me last week she rescued a baby bluejay that the barn cat had in its mouth. Today she saved a baby morning dove being attacked by bluejays. When headlines shout that giant morning doves have crushed Tokyo, I will know the reason why.

Heat does strange things to a man. It ages me, for instance. I complain of creaking joints. My speech slows. I savor cold beverages. I refer to all of my drinks as being 'on the rocks.' I acquire a Southern plantation-owner accent that first reared its head one July in Virginia. It's the kind of talk that comes when every syllable has the same drawn-out consistancy as simple syrup. I rock non-rocking chairs. I want to smoke or chaw something and I don't know why. Eventually, I fall asleep, grumbling about the War of Northern Aggression.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

2005-06-24T16:35:00.000-04:00

Fruits of Higher Education

2005-06-21T18:21:00.000-04:00

Collegiate lessons borne from a year of intensive study.

College and its ruinous cost have taught all of us a good many things, even if at Emerson collegiate academics are a well-organized fakery designed to let us film at will. After a year, and with a little reflection, you can stop and be shocked by the change. Benchmark it. We're gone, and irrevocably.

Exhibit: High school seniors touring the works come spring. Note how comparatively clean-cut they look. Even the dyed and pierced have an antiseptic kind of innocence. They're holding on to long-distance romances that have yet to crumble under the weight of actual distance. Wide-eyed, naive. Underexposed. Juiced up on anticipated hedonism we've already sampled.

They're a reminder. Education has done a number on us.

Lessons have been learned: how long it takes to do laundry in an upright washer (24 minutes), what Coetzee's allegory was in Foe (South Africa), and when NYP makes their best pizza (1:30 am). The streets intersecting Newbury are in alphabetical order (Arlington-Gloucester). There is a good Malaysian place around the corner. 15 stops on the B line get you 44 Linden and five kegs.

We have perfected our vices. We know the right angle to tilt our plastic cup for beer (45 degrees) and how Jagermeister is best served (ice luge). Without formal training, we can mix what bartenders call Cuba Libres. We usually do without the lime.

Exhibit: A dear friend of mine at Columbia who in a year has captured herself in a snapshot. Fedora tilted, scarf swung, lollipop lolling out of a mouth corner, liquor bottle in hand, eyes shadowed on a New York subway. A year ago she was white-dressed at Commencement.

And while we're on the subject, a White Russian with vodka is called a Screaming Orgasm. A T pass gets one other person in free on Sundays. Most cabbies will turn the meter off and take you back for a ten-spot if you ask. Wednesday the dining hall serves breakfast-for-dinner or pulled pork sandwiches. McCormick's has a two-dollar burger after 11. Thursday Lowes puts on midnight movies; print out enough Student Advantage coupons and you'll get in for $5.

The price of a cab from Brookline. Friday markets at Fanuiel Hall. Cheap Indian food. The numbers and menus for three different Chinese take-out. Cafes where they know us. Oyster bar Wednesdays. Pregaming.

We are hardened. We forsake sleep strategically. We run for blocks after the last T of the night and walk home if we miss it. We buy some music and steal the rest, shower three times a week, eat breakfast at our morning lecture. We stamp out papers in an afternoon. We suck down tomato juice and thick bread in the morning for hangovers. We dumpster dive in Back Bay for Upper Crust after close. We smoke pot on the docks. We don't go to bed before two on Saturdays; the car horns keep us up. We take pictures for the nights we won't remember.

It's no secret that the life's dirty and mean. Sheltered too, in a strange sort of way. It's not the real world, not yet. But then none of us are ready for that anyways. For the time being, we're here instead, learning an important life lesson:

3:43 am. Running home. A subway sign under our jacket.

Lesson - Never pay for posters when you can steal signs instead.

Lesson - Joyce's modernist pastiche employs multiple voices towards the end articulated by Stephen Daedalus in Portrait of an Artist: to sit as the artist, "within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, pairing his fingernails, like the God of his Creation" (Joyce 215).

Lesson - An Irish car bomb is not just an act of terrorism.

An Old Proud History

2005-06-20T17:11:00.000-04:00