To Report an Emergency

Doubling Down

2010-06-08T15:36:00.005-04:00

What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

“What the hell is it?” said Jimmy

“Those are chickens,” said Crake. “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.”

“But there aren’t any heads,” said Jimmy. He grasped the concept—he’d grow up with sus multiorganifer, after all—but this thing was going too far. At least the pigeons of his childhood hadn’t lacked heads.

“That’s the head in the middle,” said the woman. “There’s a mouth opening at the top, they dump the nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don’t need those.”

“This is horrible,” said Jimmy. The thing was a nightmare. It was like an animal-protein tuber.

“Picture the sea-anemone body plan,” said Crake. “That helps.”

“But what’s it thinking?” said Jimmy.

—Margaret Atwood, Oryx & Crake

A few months back, KFC (neé Kentucky Fried Chicken) rolled out its Double Down "sandwich" nationally. In case you've somehow missed it, which seems unlikely given the shitstorm of coverage this release engendered, the Double Down consists of two slices of bacon, two slices of cheese, and some kind of mayo-like sauce, all sandwiched between two chicken breasts, either fried or grilled, in lieu of bread. There's something wrong about it: when KFC was test marketing the Double Down last year, the commercial they ran found its way online, and many people -- myself included -- believed it was a fake. But, even in my incredulity upon learning that it actually existed, my concern that its existence testified to some terrible cynicism, I couldn't help but wonder: Could it actually be good? I might have sworn off chain fast food years ago, but the sheer wrongness of this beckoned, a bit.

Mark Morefored, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, sounded one of the more indignant alarms:

You got your chicken-like creature, your pig-like creature, your dairy cow-like creature, all wrapped in a $5 fistful of nausea, ready to strangle your heart and benumb your brain. God knows what's in the "special sauce." Maybe some sort of fish byproduct, just to round it all out. It's like a wild kingdom in your mouth! It's like a toxic zoo in your colon! It's like a suicide note from what's left of your brain! "If you eat this, you are a complete and total idiot, and we're through. Signed, You."

[...]

You [fast food executives] convince the less educated and the gullible that they are wrong, that this crap is actually a good value for your family, nutritious and safe to feed to children, even as you manufacture all the flavors, smells and meat-like textures in a giant lab and sell truckloads of the crap to the poorer classes, until they get fat and sick and die. Meanwhile, you employ cute cartoon characters and bright, funny mascots to lure in the next generation, to keep the cycle going.

Moreford's column, even as it attempts a structural critique (albeit one reliant on notional fast food magnates), expresses a clear sense of contempt for the people who would buy the Double Down. They're stupid, they're fat, they don't know the joy of eating like Alice Waters has taught. In many ways, it's the same critique Jamie Oliver is levelling in his new show. It's quite easy for those of us who know better to sit back and laugh at the great unwashed and their stupidity.

Which reaction, you may note, mirrors the progressive response to the Tea Party movement, and, in both instances, bespeaks a major problem with the progressive response. That is, there's a reason people are drawn to the Double Down, just as there are reasons people are drawn to the Tea Party movement. Those who are offended by these things best try to understand those reasons, lest they only strengthen them though their condescension.

***

A few more words about Oliver's Food Revolution. Now that the six episode miniseries has run its course, anyone who watched all the episodes won't be too surprised at the outcome.

Further, the charge that Oliver levies against the whole of Huntington (and, by extension, America) is essentially one of laziness and ignorance: a modicum of personal responsibility and self-education about food could change the world. There's something to this, putting aside for the moment how such prescriptions ignore any structural or systemic critiques in favor of placing the onus on individuals. What troubles, though, about this one, is that Oliver's own ignorance about the systemic issues is used as a dramatic and rhetorical device: he doesn't know about the USDA guidelines that school lunch programs must adhere to, he knows only that these guidelines seem to stand in the way of his improving the food.

By valorizing his own ignorance, Oliver makes it much harder to criticize the ignorance of others as a moral failing.

One of the show's most telling moments comes in the second episode when Oliver performs "an experiment" that he has, he explains, performed several times before in England, an experiment that "never fails." (If the outcome is forgone, it is a demonstration, one wants to tell him, but "an experiment" it is.) In front of a group of children, Oliver butchers a chicken, removing the breasts, thighs, legs, and wings from the carcass. (No offal is discussed; certainly he isn't about to even bring up notions of chicken liver.) The children agree with Oliver that the parts removed from the carcass are the "good parts," he then proceeds to grind the carcass and the meat remaining on it -- bones, connective tissue and all -- in a food processor, and adds stabilizer and preservatives. He breads the paste, and fries it: he's demonstrated how a chicken nugget is made. And, contrary to his past experience with this experiment that never fails, the children all want to eat the chicken nugget he's just made in front of him. Is it manipulative? Of course it is, but it gets to a fundamental truth about the American consumer: origins don't matter.

I used to work in a restaurant that specialized in sausage. We prided ourselves on making it all in-house, grinding pork butt and mixing it by hand with spices before stuffing it into casings. Contrary to popular belief, it's not a gross process as long as one is comfortable with touching raw meat (which, if you're not, you perhaps should reconsider eating cooked meat, too). Still, customers would invariably assume that because of vaguely repeated (and largely accurate) tales of industrial sausage production, left over bits comprised the bulk of our sausage. More than once I heard customers suggest that they were probably eating pig anus, but at least it tasted good. Out of sight, out of mind then: even knowing that something's origin is probably stomach churning isn't enough to make the finished product unappetizing. At least, it's that way for a while. We have to be conditioned to reach that point of disinterest where a McDonald's burger can sound appetizing, even if we know what's probably in it, and the American food industry works hard to perpetuate such conditioning. Only after one undertakes a concerted effort to change does the burger start to sound less good. And, speaking from experience here, even then the thought of a Big Mac, in all its standardized, synthetic umami, can be pretty tempting. And I swore off chain fast food years ago, a promise I've kept, with I believe two exceptions, for at least five years. That smell, so tempting in my youth, still beckons, even if every rational chord tells me to resist.

Unintentionally, Oliver, by performing his failed "experiment," demonstrates one of the most troubling yet pervasive characteristics of the American mind: its irrationality. Knowing that something's bad or wrong isn't enough. Not when it tastes okay, at least.

***

On October 20 [1963], UN Day (which the far right answered by declaring "U.S. Day"), Adlai Stevenson, leaving Memorial Auditoriam after giving a speech, had been clomped on the head by a yelping picket wielding a sign reading "DOWN WITH THE UN." Stevenson insisted on confronting the woman before policemen whisked her away. "What is wrong?" he asked. "What do you want?" Mrs. Cora Frederickson, forty-seven, her face contorted, responded with gnomic fury: "Why are you like you are? Why don't you understand? If you don't know what's wrong, I don't know why. Everybody else does."

—Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm, 239.

The week following the passage of Health Care Reform rattled me, as it rattled many Americans. The vigilantism, the racism, the homophobic slurs, the bricks through windows—surely this is not my America, I thought. I was, of course, in denial. This is my America. My America is where Sara Palin's book is a best seller and she implores followers to reload, where Michael Steele's RNC website pictures Nancy Pelosi in front of a flaming background like some kind of she-demon, where Glen Beck can, with a straight face, explain to his audience that when detractors compare him to Father Coughlin, they couldn't be further offbase because Coughlin preached "social justice." This is my America.

Frank Rich, responding to the ugliness, penned a worthwhile column that suggested the rage of the Tea Party faction echoed the rage of some factions in the early 1960s, and represented a recognition that America was changing:

If Obama's first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House -- topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman -- would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It's not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver -- none of them major Democratic players in the health care push -- received a major share of last weekend's abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan ''Take our country back!,'' these are the people they want to take the country back from.

Rich's suggestion that the Tea Partiers represents not substantive objection to Democratic policies should be obvious, but the language with which he expresses it is worth noting: the Tea Partiers (and their fellow travelers) are not a movement which need be reckoned with, they are "a dwindling and threatened minority." Forget for a minute that racism and sexism and homophobia still exist—it's hard, I know -- and recognize what Rich here is suggesting: the gains made by marginalized groups in the past decades threatens those who perceive those gains as threatening their own privileged position. The Tea Partiers' rage is about a world in which merely being a white American who represents certain values will no longer be a source of privilege: they are watching their power dissolve as we move towards a more pluralist society.

There are a number of problems with this argument, not the least of which is how, by historicizing civil rights struggles, it suggests that America has achieved racial, gender and sexual-preference-based equality. The biggest problem is that, by so historicizing the struggles, it suggests the battles are over, and the vocal opponents of these groups will inevitably fade. In this, it is Rich who evokes the 1960s, and not his subject: his words echo those of the liberal intelligentsia who did not foresee that period's radical right reshaping American politics.

In The Radical Right, a 1962 essay collection he edited, Daniel Bell published an essay titled "The Dispossessed." By 1962, the John Birch Society had burst into the public consciousness, and Barry Goldwater had become, in some circles, a folk hero. What is most striking, to a modern reader of Bell's essay, is how familiar they immediately sound: if one didn't know they were in reference to the early 1960s, one might easily mistake them for a line from a recent column about the Tea Party movement.

I believe that the radical right is only a small minority, but it gains force from the confusion within the world of conservatism regarding the changing character of American life. What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world—now overwhelmingly technical and complex—that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.

The right, thus, fights a rear-guard action. But its very anxieties illustrate the deep fissures that have opened in American society as a whole, as a result of the complex structural changes that have been taking place in the past thirty years or so. And more, they show that the historic American response to social crisis, the characteristic American style, is no longer adequate to the tasks.

Just as Rich would decades hence suggest Tea Party rage proceeded from the social changes anticipated by 1960s legislation and the civil rights movement, Bell argues that the rage of the 1960s radical right stemmed from rise of a new generation whose sensibilities were shaped by the New Deal.

While the Roosevelt administration created a host of new regulatory agencies, the judiciary, in its values and social outlook, largely reflected the ancien régime, and even though there was no entrenched bureaucracy [...] that would impede or distort these reforms, the lack of a broad intelligentsia made it difficult to staff the regulatory agencies without drawing in the business community, the trade associations , and the like. Thus, while the enactments of the Roosevelt administration seemed to many conservatives to be startlingly revolutionary, the business community—the main group whose power was abated—could, through the courts, Congress, and often the administrative agencies, modify substantially the restrictions of the regulations.

The paradoxical fact is that while the New Deal has lost much of its meaning on the ideological or rhetorical level, the fabric of the government, particularly the judiciary, has been rewoven with liberal thread so that on many significant issues—civil rights, minority-group protection, the extension of social welfare—the courts have been more liberal than the administrations. Only Congress, reflecting the disproportionate power of the rural areas and the established seniority system, has remained predominantly under conservative control.

Reading Bell nearly fifty years later, we see what he did not. The radical right would shape the political agenda in the ensuing decades. That a supposedly liberal President in the 1990s would finally undo the New Deal would seem a culmination of this agenda, were it not for the President who followed him in the Aughts. Indeed, the radical right of the 1960s, even if it never elected Goldwater, sewed the seeds of of the movement that would elect Ronald Reagan and, later, George W. Bush, precisely because of these politicians' rhetorical appeals to Americanism. This shouldn't have been so hard to see.

But the American left, in the early 1960s, was not quite ready to look ahead in such ways. In 1949, Lionel Trilling, in a colossal misstatement, suggested that "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation." Of course, five years before Trilling wrote this, Hayek published The Road to Serfdom; half a decade after Trilling's proclamation, William F. Buckley would found National Review. What Trilling meant, of course, is that it was the plain fact in 1949 that nobody Trilling and his circle took seriously conservative ideas. While the radical right that would manifest itself a decade later might very well have been the result of what Trilling did allow for, the conservative and reactionary "impulses [that] are strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know," the intellectuals who wrote the right of as mere "impulses" didn't recognize that, through that impulse, a distinct intellectual tradition would be embedded in the American consciousness. Even if a John Birch Society member believed in the paranoid conspiratorial tales the organization's founder Robert Welch disseminated, and even if those tales were, to any onlooker, obviously only shared by a lunatic fringe, this fringe's support of other politicians would help to calcify American conservatism. By writing this fringe off as evidence only of an impulse, the American left set themselves up to lose ground they have yet to regain.

***

Let's look a little bit at that impulse. Let's pretend for a second that, even if we find ourselves put off by it, it maybe makes sense. Let's try to empathize, rather than merely pointing fingers.

By way of example, I offer the following story.

I support gun control laws—not a radical position, I know. I also, until 2002, had never fired a gun. That was the summer when my neighbor Matt, an affable drunken twentysomething, asked me if I wanted to go shooting with him and some friends, a group of Irish girls all living next door to us for the summer. "We can't do this in Ireland," one of the girls explained, "so it's on our list. And it's Ladies Night! We get free gun rentals!" Looking at my Irish neighbors, I decided I couldn't say no.

We got to the range safely—I mention this only because the likelihood that Matt, our driver, was intoxicated seems, in my memory, quite high—and procured our firearms and several boxes of ammunition. "Have any of you here got experience with firearms?" one of the range attendants asked, and my neighbor, the drunken one, volunteered that he did. "I grew up in Georgia," he offered. The attendant was satisfied: "You'll all be listening to him then." So it was my neighbor, the one who I had to physically restrain from fighting with a bouncer after he got thrown out of a club, the one who didn't remember it the next day, but thanked me because his girlfriend told him to—he was the one who taught me how to fire a gun.

The experience of firing a gun didn't shake my faith in gun control laws. What it did change, however, was my conception of those who shot guns, and of what they saw in it. Because, holding that Glock? Squeezing the trigger? I felt a sense of power, of control unlike quite anything else I had ever experienced. (The .22, the first gave such a little pop; it wasn't until I moved up to the larger caliber that the charge came.) It wasn't exactly sexual, but I believe that, as passé as it might be to invoke Freud in explanation of such experience, it might also be accurate. Beyond that charge, I felt powerful. Nobody would challenge the man holding a loaded weapon in his hands, not when the holes on the paper target testified to his capability. An hour before, I'd been a lefty slacker; now, I was a marksman.

As we piled back into Matt's car, I realized what people meant when they talked about prying their guns from their cold dead hands. Obviously I couldn't quite fathom what it would like for guns to be my way of life, but for a second, I think, I glimpsed part of why they attracted people, and what peopled feared loosing because of gun control. While those who supported gun control talked about statistics, about violence, those who opposed it talked about values, about tradition. And neither side could hear the other, because neither side was actually speaking to the other's concern.

***

I recently moved to Flatbush, Brooklyn. A few blocks southwest from my apartment lies Ditmas Park, "up and coming," in real estate parlance. (The Observer says it's the lesbians who are the indicators of ascension, though I'm inclined to believe it's more accurately The National.) Where I'm at, though, is a little different. West Indian restaurants line Church Avenue, and distinctive Caribbean patois and creoles echo through the streets. When I tried to subscribe to the New York Times, I discovered I'd need to give the carrier a key to the lobby—I'd be the only one in my 40-odd unit building who subscribes.

There were other signs that I was a new element in the neighborhood. At Stop & Shop, the nearest full-service supermarket, the shallots I bought were rotten, as was much other produce. (I learned quickly to buy my produce at the vegetable stands on Church Avenue, at least until my CSA's season starts.) Still, I find myself at Stop & Shop at least once a week, usually to buy pantry staples or beer, and I, of course, look into the carts and baskets of those around me.

Many of those carts contain giant packages of toilet paper and paper towels, and I get the sense that there must be good prices on same, for on some days it has seemed every other customer had them. (For my part, I live alone, so I have no need for a 48 roll package of toilet paper; where would I even store it in my apartment?) As to foodstuffs, a relatively high percentage of customers pay using food stamps (or, I suppose, the electronic benefit cards that replaced the stamps).

And there was that night, I cannot forget, when the obese woman in front of me purchased over $60 worth of soda, each variety of which contained HFCS, and paid with her benefit card. And I felt myself starting to feel contemptuous, to feel indignant that, indeed, state benefits can be used to purchase products that, far from sustaining one, actually increase one's health problems. (I was not so angry over the story a few weeks ago about hipsters on food stamps, though I gather I was one of the only one. But, really, if you can use your food stamps to buy rabbit meat and tarragon, why not?)

The thing that the $60 of corn syrup-rich soda drove home to me was my own ambivalence about personal responsibility, because, for all the comfortable left's talk, in its discussions of the food supply and public health about how obesity is a class issue, it is hard to look at someone in a different class than yourself and feel empathy when they choose to do something that you, in your own cultural position, would consider, for lack of a better term, wrong. That test of cultural relativism is always harder than it should be, and this is what gives me pause: the sense of superiority that I couldn't escape feeling at that moment, even as I knew that I only arrived at that sense through the luck of being born into the class I was, and exercising the social mobility that accompanied being this class.

In a series of commercials funded by the Corn Refiners Association, the message that HFCS was no less healthy than sugar, and in the most troubling of these, the message is put in explicitly racial terms. The white woman who would tell the black woman the stuff she's feeding her kids is bad for her? She's the dumb one in the ad.

Some years back, a PBS documentary, People Like Us: Social Class in America featured a scene at a food bank, where one of the workers explained that, while the bank received donations of whole grain bread from a local bakery, it was the white, Wonder-like bread that was always the first to go. Sure, the donated whole grain bread would sell for several times the cost of the white bread, but those patronizing the food bank actually preferred the white bread.¹ The lower classes have been culturally conditioned to prefer the food that was bad for them. And, now stories about how high-fat foods actually alter neurochemistry have begun to gain traction, and even those who can't be bothered to read Michael Pollan can get the thumnail sketch after watching Food, Inc., perhaps the tide is changing.

I suppose I represent one of those insufferable types who conflates healthfulness and political good in the food he eats.

And, if healthfulness becomes some kind of moral virtue (as, I'm afraid, it unconsciously does), then what of my exercising, my running, my cycling?

And it isn't, I might add, that I never ate fast food or led a sedentary life. Growing up, my father worked several jobs with odd hours—community college football coach, prep sports stringer—that kept him out of the house in the evenings. (During the day, he taught high school.) After my brother and I got off school, my father would pile us in the car and take us to practice for the evening, or to the game he had to cover for the newspaper, and we'd almost invariably eat something from a fast food drivethrough. As a teenager, I continued to eat this way, spending innumerable weekend evenings in a car parked in some half-empty parking lot, a bag from a drive through on the floor, arguing away the night with friends. I weighed about 230 pounds when I graduated from high school.

In six months I spent away at college, I lost about 50 pounds. I ate less there, and of what I ate, far, far less was fast food. Of course, I also started smoking cigarettes in earnest then, a practice I'd continue for the better part of the next decade. I mention this only to say, who am I to to judge how someone else lives their life? I'll be the first to get in line to call out the open secret of racially motivated menthol cigarette marketing, but that guy buying a loosie for a few coins in the bodega? While I might find myself physically repelled by the smoke—few things are more sanctimonious than an ex-smoker—I have a hard time looking down at the man buying the smoke.

***

The Tea Partiers have no clear analogue in what I've thus far discussed. Indeed, the largely nonwhite urban poor I notice in my neighborhood have little in common with the largely exurban and suburban Tea Party contingent. However, while the people in my neighborhood may be at a disproportionate risk of obesity and obesity-related diseases, those in my neighborhood are hardly the only ones. For if the progressive view maintains that obesity is a class issue, this view lacks a proper apparatus to explain those for whom class cannot explain their obesity.

These are the people who, effectively, chose poor health. I recognize this is not, in many circles, a popular statement. I know some would hear it, and would likely condemn me for my fat phobia. (Others, like Michael Ruhlmann, might applaud it.) But there comes a point when we have to say enough. Yes, the American food system is unhealthy. Yes, it's easier to eat fast food. But if you have the means to know better, and the means to eat better, will I feel the same sympathies if you develop Type 2 diabetes as if, for class reasons, you remained ignorant of these things?

For all the data served up in the much discussed New York Time/CBS News poll of Tea Party supporters, perhaps most revealing would have been what the poll didn't include: geographic data. The numbers tell a story of the Tea Partiers as cloistered amongst themselves: when 82% of them said the Tea Party movement represents the views of most Americans, it is clear that they do not know much about "most Americans," preferring instead to assume those they are surrounded by to represent "most Americans." And, of course, the data about who Tea Partiers most trust on the subject of the Tea Party bears this out, too: 45% most trusted other Tea Party members, to 37% who most trusted TV or Newspapers, though Nate Silver helpfully parsed the data to reveal quantitative evidence of Glenn Beck's influence.

I mean, it's not like eating bad food is limited to the willfully ignorant. Hell, N+1 loves the Schnitzel & Things truck, and these are the people who offer not only a deep fried "schnitzel burger" but, prompted by all the talk around the Double Down, offered their own "Schnitzel Down." Thought to compare the handmade food of Schnitzel & Things to the industrial product that KFC sells may chafe, I would wager that the Schnitzel Down clocks in at a minimum of several hundred more calories than KFC's juggernaut. Is it only okay to gorge yourself it you do it knowingly? And how is that different that KFC in the first place?

Because the thing about the Double Down that its critics seemed, foolishly, to miss was that it was about being wrong. The sandwich wouldn't exist if it didn't seem somehow obscene. For many Americans, including, at times, a lot of foodie-types, that kind of excess may be justification for itself. You can't counter a desire to engage in unhealthy behavior by merely pointing out that the behavior is unhealthy, not when someone's aware of that desire. The unhealthiness is built in: take it away and you lose the desire, too.

***

It's not like I've got a solution to this. The data that revealed that, surprise, a plurality of Tea Partiers have actually more education than the average non-Tea Partier challenged notions that they're all just ignorant (though, I'll say for my part, I'm weary of education attained as a metric for intelligence or engagement or all that, even if there are correlations). Really, it's that they're actively wrong: they've been taught, whether by school or society or each other the world view they hold. That this world view is actually proud of its rejection of voices that might be able to offer compelling reasons it may not be right is, indeed, one of its characteristics.

This is a world view that assents to Sarah Palin's claims that it was environmentalists who led to the Gulf Coast spill. This is a world view that calls for less government while simultaneously looking to crack down on immigration. It's all rife with contradictions, but it's the very contradictions that provided the identity.

Perhaps it's all started to wane, anyway. It wouldn't surprise me. While the Glenn Becks and Sara Palins may have stoked the Tea Party fires, the lack of a proper leader basically ensured that unfocused rage couldn't last forever. Even historically, populist movements never lasted too long, be they led by William Jennings Bryant or Father Coughlin or Ross Perot. Always the pendulum swings back. Self correcting, and all that.

But even after the return of normalcy, the re-attainment of equilibrium, something ugly is left behind. The Tea Partiers, whether or not they're attending rallies, will have revealed something about themselves, and about America. They can learn and move on, but their hate will remain a scar.

There's something about ignoring reason that seems to mark Americans. It could have been one of the Four Freedoms—Freedom from Truth, or at least Freedom from Evidence. For we have all been told enough times that we are individuals and free and smart enough to know better.

----

¹That poor, nonwhite people may prefer unhealthy foods may, in fact, be a trope of discussions about class and health. In the Times' 2005 series about class in America, in one story following three heart attack victims of various classes and ethnicities, fiancée of the middle class African American man, a man whose affinity for fried foods the authors suggest is cultural, says of whole grains, "That we've got to work on...Well, we recently bought a bag of grain or something. I'm not used to that. We try to put it on the cereal. It'O.K."

All Put Together with Alligator Leather: Remembering a Mustang Family

2010-03-29T15:07:00.006-04:00

The first car I ever drove was a '66 Mustang. Cherry red with a black hardtop, it had belonged to Nana, my mother's mother. Nana, my mother told me, passed on the car on her death bed. "Take it," she told my mother, "I want the boys to be able to drive it." I had already heard that story countless times before that day when my mother handed me the keys and asked if I wanted to take a drive.

We still lived Greenbrae, California then, near the cul-de-sac of a dead end street high in the hills. The hill itself was steep -- at age 15 or 16, I clocked myself pushing 50 miles an hour screaming down its main artery on my mountain bike -- but our lane rose and fell more slowly. Still, the roads in those hills meandered, hugging the hillside around blind turns and through stretches too narrow to let a car pass without someone pulling over. Usually when someone learns to drive, I've gathered, their parent hands the keys over in a parking lot with little traffic, not on some road that, even relatively free of traffic, still provided a bit of a challenge. My brother was in the car when my mom handed me the keys. I didn't know whether I could say no, so I didn't. I didn't have my learner's permit yet, but I was going to drive. When I decided to turn around, the nuances of the three-point turn eluded me, and I found myself stuck between the hillside and a wall. My mother had to get out and extricate the car. That was the last time I drove for a while.

Maybe the first drive is always shot through with such anxiety, but this one, I knew even then, had that other meaning. I was driving the Mustang, Nana's car, carrying on the legacy. When Nana had been alive, someone had stolen the Mustang. Nana filed a police report, of course, like you do when a car is stolen, but received little help from the SFPD. Instead, a few weeks later, she saw the car in the street in another neighborhood. She had the keys in her purse, so she opened the door and started the engine: she called the police later to tell them that she'd gotten her car back, and not to arrest her if they found her in it.

The red Mustang wasn't Nana's first. I remember a white one before that (which must have been pretty early, because Nana died when I was eight or so) and I have reason to believe that the white one wasn't the first, either. Her affinity for Mustangs was just another aspect of the woman, like her Francophile affectations, or her belief in instilling manners in her grandchildren -- they all seemed of a piece, and it wasn't until a good deal later that I started to realize that, while the Mustang was a cool car, it was hardly obscure. It was, indeed, a touchstone of postwar American auto making, as this Times piece on its recently deceased creator, Donald Frey, makes clear.

I'd thought the Mustang was a sports car, growing up, but I suppose that wasn't an accurate description. Sure, there was V-6 under the hood of that '66, but I think the real sports cars by then had eight cylinders, and when you opened the hood, you'd see just how much empty space was in there. The Mustang was a triumph of marketing and, yes, design, because it was, I'll grant, a beautiful body, even if the chassis was less thoroughbred than burro. It all looked great, of course, but it didn't exactly haul, even when you wanted it to. But, I gather, it still drove right into the American mind. There was that episode of The Wonder Years when, for a brief moment, it looks like the family is going to buy a Mustang and Handel's Messiah, I think, plays, and while, of course, the Wonder Years was a retrospective view of an era, it told me as much as I needed to know as a kid in the late 80s: we remembered the Mustang as a cool car. And it was.

Even before I drove the Mustang, when it was still my mother's car, I knew it was cool. There was that night when my mother took me to dinner at that restaurant in some San Francisco Victorian with chamber musicians on one level. I couldn't drive yet, but when we pulled up in front, I got out and, as if rehearsed, walked around the car and opened the door for my mother, before handing it off to the valet. What was I, 12 years old? I wore a suit, probably purchased at Young Man's Fancy, my mother looking it over, her mother's memory hanging over both of us. Everyone at the restaurant that night seemed quite impressed with my behavior. There was a prix fixe menu, and I recall eating smoked salmon and escargot, and, following the bread course, the waiter efficiently produced a crumb scraper to clear the linen's surface. On the way out, I may even have placed my jacket over my mother's shoulders. She was trying to teach me something that night, as Nana had tried at our fancy lunches, but I'm not sure whether I ever figured out exactly what it was.

Eventually, I did get that license, and, somehow, for a while, the Mustang was mine. It probably wasn't the best car for a 16 year old to drive, a 16 year old who, like all the others, had poor impulse control and a propensity for risk taking, but I drove it all the same. The windows were slow to defrost, especially when multiple teenagers were talking and yelling inside, and there were real mechanical problems, too, problems mechanics could never quite diagnose. It constantly drained transmission fluid, but as the level got lower, the power steering would begin to give out, sometimes mid-turn, causing me to place both hands on the wheel, tugging it, hoping to make the car track the line around the curve, until I could pull it over and refill it. Years later, I asked a mechanic and Mustang hobbyist about that problem, but he told me there was absolutely no reason that the transmission fluid should have affected the steering. "It's likely," he speculated, "that somebody along the line fucked up and patched one line into the other or something, and that's why nobody can figure it out." Perhaps he was right. That made as much sense as anything else. By then, though, I didn't have the car anymore.

The women who loved my mother bought Mustangs, too. They all worshiped her -- she was always the center, the most important one -- and I figure the cars were a way of deferring to her taste. One purchased a '67 mustang, in an aquamarine hue. That one was a convertible. Even though I liked riding in that one with the top down, it just wasn't as sexy as the '66 with the hardtop. Mustangs are supposed to be red; they are for me, at least, since the first one I truly came to know was red. (The one in Bullitt wasn't red. I know. Still, you'll never convince me they're not supposed to be red. Like Corvettes. Or Ferraris.) Or there was that one another partner got, the V-8 1994 model, with a five speed manual transmission. '94 was the first year Ford revamped the Mustang after those boxy 80s models, adding curves and removing nearly all of the corners. It was a fun car, not the least for what was under the hood, but it wasn't driving a classic, not by a long shot. But it was red, the same red as the '66, so that was something.

But it was still that first Mustang, the red '66 hardtop that will forever remain, for me, the real Mustang, both in my family and the larger world. Nana had passed it on to my mother, and I always thought that it was in that driver's seat that my mother most felt herself growing into her own mother. They both had terribly bony hands, Nana and my mother, skin just barely stretched around their frame, and my mother later told somebody else, when she seemed to have forgotten that I was with her, that, driving down Lincoln Boulevard from the Golden Gate Bridge, Baker Beach and the Pacific Ocean shimmering to our right, she glanced at her hands on the steering wheel and, for a moment, thought she saw her mother's hands. After hearing that, I paid more attention to my mother's hands, especially when they rested on the steering wheel's black leatherette. They did look like Nana's, or at least they became what I remembered Nana's hands looking like.

Though I did get to drive the Mustang, my brother did not. He was in the car with me, I think, when, in the rain, turning off of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, the car fishtailed. For all I can remember, perhaps it was one of those times when the steering began to give out, too, though, more likely, it was just my inability to handle the car in that kind of condition, a mixture of gravel and water and youth that conspired to wrench control of the car from me. I turned the wheel one way and then another, and the car continued to slide. It came to a rest when the left front made contact with a Jersey barrier, and the nose crumpled in on itself. I was lucky. I wasn't hurt, and the car still drove -- all that empty space under the hood meant that no vital components were damaged. Only the looks were compromised. But in the case of a Mustang, perhaps the looks are the worst things to lose.

A few months later, Mom sold the car. She took out a classified ad and a hobbyist and his son came to take a look at it. They'd restore it, he told my mother, they'd get it looking good again. That assurance and $500 was all she needed. They drove it away that afternoon, down the winding road that I'd first driven on. In a few months, Mom bought a deep green 1970s BMW 2002, a great little car that, to its credit, always looked like it belonged in Europe and not the US. I liked that car too. But it would never live in my dreams quite like that red one. Before that crash, I'd dreamed that, one day, my child would drive it, that I'd tell him or her about Nana -- my mother, in those dreams, would of course still be alive, and, in deference to her family traditions, would be Nana to my child -- and how the car would live in our family, and how he or she should feel lucky to know that Nana would have been so, so proud of them, if only she could see them.

Psst.

2009-12-28T16:35:00.002-05:00

I'm over here these days. So sue me for jumping platforms.

Spotted in front of the Met

2009-05-26T12:46:00.006-04:00

"And when the revolution comes, we'll storm their busses and give our own tours—for the people!"

Hot Cocks

2009-05-22T11:19:00.003-04:00

If you need proof positive of the Grey Lady's blinders to anything outside of the City, look no further than the recent story about Huy Fong's sriracha. Just because New Yorkers are finally catching on to the joys of banh mi and pho (though, sadly, at the inflated NYC prices one comes to expect and not the depression prices I experienced out west) doesn't mean that the rest of the world doesn't know about them. As a newspaper that's trying to be a national presence, this seems a big oversight.

Here's one for the Times: Did you know that, in California, they have good Mexican food? Look into that.

"this creature scare out the shit of me:)"

2009-05-18T20:40:00.003-04:00

Via.

Two Brands Enter, One Brand Leaves

2009-05-18T17:55:00.004-04:00

On the endcap of the Fairway aisles back by the freezer cases, it was Operation that first caught my eye. Operation, by Kellog's. Operation, by Milton Bradley, by Kellog's. A game about a sick person, turned into a cereal. Wait, what?

Looking further, I noticed other companies involved in this cobranding clusterfuck: Mattel, Disney, Viacom (and those are just the brands that jump out at me). Again, I asked myself: breakfast cereal? Well, actually, no. Apparently these are fruit snacks: the Kellog brand extends beyond breakfast. Which, considering how strong the consumer association of Kellog with breakfast is, seems a particularlly odd decision.

In notionally related news, there's going to be a big-screen adaptation of Battleship, the game. Make of that what you will.

The Disease of (Burger) Kings

2009-05-18T09:53:00.003-04:00

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Weiner may have had other health problems that contributed to his death.

"This person may have had other health problems earlier. We're trying to identify that," Bloomberg said.

But the wife of the city's first swine flu death disagreed. Bonnie Weiner said her husband did not have a preexisting condition that would make him more susceptible to the H1N1 virus.

"Gout would not affect severity of swine flu," she said.

I think the above illustrates nearly everything that's wrong about how Americans think about health. "Gout would not affect the severity of swine flu?" Maybe not. But the presence of an illness caused by dietary decisions don't bode well for someone's health, whether that illnesses directly affects one's susceptibility to a virus or not.

Solutions

2009-04-23T09:28:00.001-04:00

Holy Crap!

2009-04-07T19:08:00.002-04:00

Spike Jonze has another new movie coming out!

[And while I probably shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, I will say that the producers of this really missed some easy shots at Dave Eggers and Karen O. Just sayin'.]

Will this be ready in time for the Arrested Development movie?

2009-04-07T11:50:00.005-04:00

Good move, guys. We can't design a car people want; maybe we can design a scooter they want!

[WSJ: "GM, Segway to Make Vehicle"]

Clearly, they live in bizzaro world, where the Segway really did reshape cities, and the Onion is a real news source.

*Edit: At least some people are smart enough to point out that it wouldn't be street legal or bike path viable. Wasn't this obvious to the Journal?

Gizmo v. Governor

2009-04-07T11:40:00.005-04:00

[New York Post]

Kudos to Animal NY for noting that the picture in the Post is, in fact, a mogwai, and not a gremlin.

Dinah Blow Your Horn

2009-03-30T20:17:00.004-04:00

So I'm totally in favor of guys growing up and acting their age. That said, I am also totally in favor of this:

You might say that £8M is an absurdly large amount to spend on a model train set. And you'd be right.

But you still wouldn't have that awesome train set to play with yourself.

My admiration for this set now replaces my fond memories of the Japan pavilion at Expo 86, the centerpiece of which was a giant train set. (Also, instead of having actual Japanese getting their hands dirty stamping Gaijin Expo 86 passports, there was a self-service robot. A robot! That stamped your passport when you pushed a button!)

Link: Daily Mail

Eefin' Crazy

2009-03-25T09:53:00.003-04:00

[Via WFMU, where there's lots more where that came from.]

I think it's safe to say that Lux Interior was a fan of this.

Now More Than Ever

2009-03-25T09:02:00.002-04:00

The Final Call

Is this the end of the world?
No, just the end
of the language that describes it.

So the end happens
But no one says anything.
It's a downturn, not a collapse,

an economist explains.
The pair of polite apostles ringing
my doorbell are in no rush to die.

In the literature of the last days
there are many typos.
Dead, dread, bread, take your pick.

Whoever is saying it's over
refuses to specify demands,
makes no ultimatums, it's just over.

What kind of language is that?
Analysts are antic with interpretation,
think tanks are flooding with thoughts.

The global information network
backs up the data, streams them up
to one of Jupiter's moons.

The ram's horn heralds
our coming from the hills.
We're enslaved by that sound.

We're called to parasail
from hilltops into the open air
where we verify and counterpunch.

Ah, another soft landing.
Though this time a rather large sheet of sky
tangles and trails down after us.

--Ron Slate
(From the collection The Incentive of the Maggot)

Also: From the notes at the back of the volume, Slate notes that, in another poem, he adapts these words of Robert Frost: "Something in me refuses to take the risk—angrily refuses to take the risk—of seeming to use grief for literary purposes."

Discuss.

It's Funny Because It Was True

2009-01-29T00:05:00.002-05:00

Ha! San Franscisco's two daily papers! That's rich! [via.]

Department of Factchecking

2009-01-26T16:31:00.003-05:00

Okay everyone, yes, they're going to make a 3D porn flick. Fine. But 31 years ago, a little picture called The Disco Dolls in Hot Skin already accomplished the same feat.

Seriously. 3D porn? Not news, guys.

And I Think to Myself...

2009-01-05T18:42:00.003-05:00

Wow. And I thought I had trouble reading American Humor on the subway.

[Via.]

One More

2008-12-27T10:19:00.003-05:00

The masters of property, on the other hand, arrive at their immutable decisions on the basis of economic necessity. They know that the "intellectual" of the family has no talent for practical affairs. He is outraged because the firm no longer treats its employees with the decency and kindliness that prevailed when business was flourishing. He has failed to understand that in order to avoid bankruptcy serious measures must be taken. But they are quite sure that in the end he will "come around," accept a minor post and occupy himself with keeping the firm's book in order.

—Philip Rahv, "Trials of the Mind" (1938)

Oh, snap.

A Moment of Silence

2008-12-18T22:35:00.003-05:00

Sparks is dead, yall.

And while I've never really liked Sparks—it was kind of sick, no?—this makes me feel a little sad.

With that in mind, I recommend observing a moment of silence, and then watching this classic video for Sparks' "My Mustache."

There, that's better.

Protect Library Books from Students: Exhibit 2

2008-12-17T13:38:00.002-05:00

Why is there what appears to be an iron cross drawn in the back of the 1938 volume of Partisan Review?

(Other than that, the marginalia and other markup for the volumes from 1937 through 1941 has been minimal and, at times, even insightful. How odd.)

"I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the gods have been against me."

2008-12-09T00:38:00.003-05:00

That E.M. Cioran could have had a Twitter!

Westside + Eastside

2008-12-06T14:34:00.005-05:00

Spotted on West 53rd, in front of MoMA: an awesome Metrocard scraper bike. If that were mine, I'd ghostride it everywhere.

(Can you see I'm excited to learn that I can use Bluetooth to get the pics off my crappy phone? Now I too can document life in a series of blurry, low-res images.)

City Sickness

2008-12-04T22:02:00.002-05:00

The Old Verities

2008-11-26T12:39:00.003-05:00

Boys Caught Snickering at Bathroom Graffiti
BAKER -- Several students were questioned after Baker School officials discovered pictures of breasts and a penis on the wall of the 5th grade bathroom, according to an Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office incident report.

One boy told the principal that several students were in the bathroom laughing at a drawing on the wall. One of the boys gave him a marker and he drew a picture of a woman's breasts. He said he went back into the bathroom the next day and drew another picture of breasts, according to the report.
Someone had also drawn a picture of a penis on the wall, which caused students to laugh, the report said.

[Via.]

Protect Library Books from Students: Exhibit 1

2008-11-25T18:47:00.006-05:00

[It should go without saying that the information contained in the highlighted passages is too general to help anybody at all experienced with the subject at hand. Once the book gets into specifics, the markings all but stop.]

Best Correction Ever

2008-11-24T00:14:00.003-05:00

Published: December 25, 2000, The New York Times:

Because of an editing error, a review of Darren Aronofsky's film ''Requiem for a Dream'' in Weekend on Oct. 6 misidentified a singer in referring to a doo-wop lyric. A letter received last week points out that the singer was Dion, not Celine Dion.

The New York Intellectuals: Was There Anything They Wouldn't Pronounce On?

2008-11-23T22:11:00.004-05:00

I've been immersing myself in the milieu of the New York Intellectuals over the past few weeks. What follow are some choice quotations. I reproduce them here mostly for my own benefit.

In which Alfred Kazin reflects on campus organizers:

I knew all about professional youth leaders; the city college saw many of them, four and five years after graduation, still holding forth at street corners just outside the college walls. Youth leaders never seemed to graduate out of the class of youth. There was one of them, expelled from college because he had led a physical attack on Italian students, supposedly all Fascists, touring American colleges, whom one could see any day of the week, either at City College or Columbia—he was literally a professional agitator—working on a circle of students with a look of detached and professional hauteur. His personal arrogance had always infurated me; he was always on pdoiums, street corner platforms, in front of the statue of Alma Mater at Columbia, looking down.

—Starting Out in the Thirties (1962)

In which Clement Greenberg first comments in print about his future meal ticket:

There are both surprise and fulfillment in Jackson Pollack's not so abstract abstractions. He is the first painter I know of to have got something positive from the muddiness of color that so profoundly characterizes a great deal of American painting. It is the equivalent, even if in a negative, helpless way, of that American chiaroscuro which dominated Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and has been best translated into painting by Blakelock and Ryder. The mud abounds in Pollock's larger works, and these, though the least consummated, are his most original and ambitious. Being young and full of energy, he takes orders he can't fill. In the large, audacious Guardians of the Secret he struggles between two slabs of inscribed mud (Pollock almost always inscribes his purer colors); and space tautens but does not burst into a pictures; nor is the mud quite transmuted. Both this paiting and Male and Female (Pollock's titles are pretentious) zigzags between the intensity of the easel picture and the blandness of the mural. The smaller works are much more conclusive: the smallest one of all, Conflict, and Wounded Animal, with its chalky incrustation, are among the strongest abstract paintings I have yet seen by an American. Here Pollock's force has just the right amout of space to expand in; whereas in larger format he spends himself in too many directions at once. Pollock has gone through the influences of Miró, Picasso, Mexican paintings, and what not, and he has come out on the other side at the age of thirty-one, painting mostly with his own brush. In his search for style he is liable to relapse into an influence, but if the times are propitious, it won't be for long.

—Review of Exhibitions of Marc Chagall, Lyonel Feinger, and Jackson Pollock (1943)

In which Dwight Macdonald, he of the gentile background and radical affect, pronounces on Pound and the Bollingen Prize for The Pisian Cantos:

The wave of the future is rolling in the other direction, as the warmaking centralized State becomes more powerful. It is ironical that it is precisely those who are misnamed "liberals" and even "socialists" who seem to be least enthusiastic about the Pound award. What bothers them is the very thing that is healthiest, politically, about it: the fact that Pound's treason and fascism were not taken into account in honoring him as a poet.

—"Homage to Twelve Judges" (1949)

In which Lionel Trilling prepares to attack V.L. Parrington and his then-ubiquitous Main Currents in American Thought:

His errors are the errors of understanding which arise from his assumptions about the nature of reality.

—"Reality in America" (1950)

In which Irving Kristol, the original neocon, rather than telling the kids to get off his lawn, speculates on why they're there in the first place:

The radicalism of the 30's was decidedly an adult movement, in which young people were permitted to partake. We young Trotskyists were as numerous as the adult party, but we unquestioningly accepted the authority of the latter. In contrast, the radicalism of the 60's was a generational movement, bereft of adult models and adult guidance. It is not easy to understand just how this came about, but one thing is certain: The radicals of the 60's were what the were because American society and American culture—which means we, the adults—permitted them (sometimes encouraged them) to grow up to be what they were. It is not, as some think, that we failed to impose our adult beliefs upon our children. That would be an absurd enterprise. What we failed to do is to transmit adult values to them—values affecting the way one holds beliefs which would have encouraged them to take their own and others' beliefs seriously, and to think coherently about them. And precisely because we adults encouraged our 20-year-old children to be "kids," their rebellion so often resembled a bewildering and self-destructive tantrum.

—Memoirs of a Trotskyist (1977)

In which Trilling surveys the intellectual landscape of 1950, and doesn't see William F. Buckley:

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical expressions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

—Preface to The Liberal Imagination (1950)

In which Trilling gets right to the heart of the matter about teaching literature:

Nowadays we who deal with books in universities live in fear that the World, which we imagine to be a vital, palpitating, passionate, realty-loving World, will think of us as old, respectable, and bald, and we see to it that in our dealings with Yeats (to take him as the example) his wild cry of rage and sexuality is heard by our students as quite thoroughly understood by them as—what is it that we eventually call it?—a significant expression of our culture. The exasperation of Lawrence and the subversiveness of Gide, by the time we have dealt with them boldly and straightforwardly, are notable instances of the alienation of modern man as exemplified by the artist. "Compare Yeats, Gide, Lawrence, and Eliot in the use which they make of the theme of sexuality to criticize the deficiencies of modern culture. Support your statement by specific references to the work of each author. [Time: one hour.]" And the distressing thing about our examination questions is that they are not ridiculous, they make perfectly good sense—such good sense that the young person who answers them can never again know the force and terror of what has been communicated to him by the works he is being examined on.

—"On the Teaching of Modern Literature" (1961)

Sad News

2008-11-19T12:09:00.003-05:00

Odetta is in the hospital.

It's enough to make me tear up at the library.

S.F.W./SFW

2008-11-18T00:09:00.004-05:00

So I watched that Diesel SFW XXX video a little earlier. I think I saw it a few months back, but my déjà vu can be so convincing, that I'm never sure about things like this. And you know what? *Yawn.* It's too dull even to embed here. Painting over '70s porn movies was more fun when it was a comment on representation and identity.

But! The title SFW XXX spun me off, and set me to thinking about a little picture from 1994 called S.F.W. It hasn't aged well.

According to Stephen Dorff's Wikipedia entry, the S.F.W. star is " best known for portraying Stuart Sutcliffe in Backbeat and for his roles in Blade and Cecil B. DeMented." Maybe that's true. I however, would assert that S.F.W. was Dorff's zenith: it was the right movie for the time, and at that time, Dorff was the right star for it.

I haven't really done any research on this: I haven't even read further than that line in the Wikipedia entry that I quote above (though because it doesn't cite any sources, I'm kind of tempted to flag the article). No, I'm just sort of feeling this one out. And 1994, Stephen Dorff, and S.F.W. just sort of go together in my mind.

Here: Dig this clip where, as YouTube poster rickforesight explains, "Spab explains his philosophy."

(You may, upon hitting play, notice that the audio and video seem to be out of synch. You may further notice that this looks not like a DVD rip but a video made by filming a TV on which S.F.W. plays. At first, I was annoyed by these "defects," but I came to think that maybe I wasn't putting myself in the proper 1994 mindset. There was no YouTube in 1994! And, okay, even if there were, would people have been complaining about the quality of the clip because the uploader probably lacked the proper hardware to rip the video? Hell no! We'd have been kicking back, hoisting the bong, and saying so fucking what right along with Spab. So, really, I've gotta hand it to YouTube user rickforesight: that's some serious meta-commetary.)

The plot, if memory serves, had something to do with a hostage crisis and TV cameras and the nature of celebrity and the sense that life is kind of pointless. The title, of course, standing for So Fucking What, announced itself with that great paradox of apathetic rebellion, the conspicuous insistence on not caring. The whole thing seemed created by committee to represent the desires of the alternative nation. It was a bad movie. And at its heart, Stephen Dorff.

Stephen Dorff! 1994! The name, too, or maybe the name above all else: Dorff. Lose one 'f,' and you've got Dorf (of Dorf on Golf, the kind of cultural production that Gen-X distance made it okay to like, around 1994). Staring out to us, he says, "So fucking what."

So fucking what, indeed. 14 years later, "SFW" is everywhere. But S.F.W., alas, is not. Check out my Google results:

S.F.W. (excluding "Stephen Dorff"): 1,990,000 results
S.F.W. (with "Stephen Dorff"): 8,640 results

A mere decade and a half later, "safe for work" has nearly supplanted "so fucking what."

It seems apt, no?

Where I Was From: An Example

2008-11-16T20:11:00.003-05:00

Every once in a while, sleepy little Marin County pops up in the news. Usually it's when some celebrity dies, or some happily new age type decides that if everybody would just get off at the same time, we could end war.

But! The story I came across the other day actually moved me: the nation's ugliest dog just died. The Marin angle to the story is that it was at the Sonoma-Marin Fair that the dog won its title.

And try as I might, I just couldn't find a snarky way to approach this. I mean, an ugly, cancer-ridden dog? You'd have to be truly heartless not to be moved by that.

The Relief of Misundertanding

2008-11-12T19:57:00.003-05:00

So Mitch Mitchell died. That's sad.

But it wasn't Mitch Mitchell from Guided by Voices, as I'd initially thought when I saw the post (and, judging by the location, it wouldn't have been the worst guess).

That is all.

Regarding the economy: my bad!

2008-10-23T15:11:00.006-04:00

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

-New York Times, "Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulations" (10/23/2008)

Seriously?

That Time and Place

2008-10-21T12:44:00.005-04:00

I remember very well the impression I had of Hemingway that first afternoon. He was an extraordinarily good-looking young man, twenty-three years old. It was not long after that that everybody was twenty-six. It became the period of being twenty-six. During the next two or three years all the young men were twenty-six years old. It was the right age apparently for that time and place.

Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Dolemite Is Dead

2008-10-20T22:33:00.004-04:00

Rudy Ray Moore, the king of the Adults Only XXX Party Record, is dead at 81.

(The movie advertised is rated R; the trailer probably would be too, if you're worried about that sort of thing.)

I don't have much more than that to say than that, but I do hope that as the obits pour in, the excellent early R&B sides he recorded (many of which appear on the stellar Norton comp Hully Gully Fever) aren't completely ignored in favor of his more flamboyant later persona.

[Via WFMU, where there are plenty of links to the infamous party records.]

Annals of Advertising: Reebok Gets Political?

2008-10-20T12:24:00.009-04:00

Now this is funny:

Thing is, I'm not sure what's going on. Oh, sure, that's the point of viral marketing. But I'm not sure that this connects.

For those who, like me, don't watch football, Terry Tate is associated with Reebok. Which, of course, you can't tell from this ad. Apparently, too, that was a problem with his other ads: it wasn't always clear that they were Reebok advertising.

Assuming, then, that over the years the association between Terry Tate and Reebok has been created, then this ad would have to be taken as Reebok attacking Sarah Palin. Though I support the sentiment, I'd think that having a major corporation commissioning ads that depict, literally, a sitting Governor and Vice Presidential candidate being physically tackled could actually have some blowback for Reebok. Or possibly not. But does this mean that Reebok is officially annoucing itself as anti-Palin? As anti-Republican? Or just pro-voting?

Or is Terry Tate now a free agent? The Reebok logo that was on Tate's jersey in the originals isn't visible on this one:

Can a fictional character created for advertisments transcend that frame? And what does it mean to the old ads if that character's new frame is explicitly political?

Update:
I see that this was posted on Funny or Die, the Will Ferrel-backed venture for creating viral videos with lots of money and big stars and all that (i.e. viral videos sans whatever murky sense of origin make videos on the internet fun in the first place). Fair enough, but part of the Funny or Die strategy, I think, is controlling where the videos are hosted, and thus driving traffic back to the Funny or Die site. (Part of the strategy also revolves around a boatload of money for supplying content to HBO, but that may be beside the point here.) These, by appearing in YouTube, in high quality, with no Funny or Die watermark, appear to have been put directly onto YouTube by their creator. It seems a long trail from embedded YouTube video to the Funny or Die voter ad unless, like me, you're so confused by the the YouTube one that you stop what you're doing to try to figure out what it all means. Besides, even knowing that Funny or Die has a hand in this doesn't answer any questions about who owns the rights to "Terry Tate" and what that means for his previous corporate gig.

"Somebody Is Watching"

2008-10-19T22:17:00.005-04:00

The above image adorns some photocopied pages hanging in Butler Library. The pages, at the top, read "Somebody Is Watching." Below the image, there's an explanation about how you shouldn't leave your laptop and valuables lying around in the library because, duh, they're worth a lot of money and they might get stolen. Fair enough: People do leave thousands of dollars worth of stuff lying around all the time. I'm sure that some of it gets stolen, even with the security and the electronic ID scans on the way in.

I'm mentioning the image, though, because yesterday, I noticed two unattended laptops on which someone had placed the pages with the "Somebody Is Watching" and the bugler pic. Perhaps some kind soul had walked through the library and dropped them on all the unattended computers as some kind of a reminder, but I don't think that was what was going on. I actually think that the owners of the unattended laptops were trying to use the fliers as messages to potential thieves: Look out! You're being watched! Perhaps by somebody in this room! Perhaps the laptop owners should leave copies of Discipline and Punish atop their machines to really drive home their point.

Being Chose to Recognize Your Heirs

2008-10-19T21:56:00.001-04:00

Things looked pretty different back in early 1997. We'd just reelected Clinton, I was a freshman in college, and the new Pavement record, Brighten the Corners, was anxiously awaited, even by MTV. It's hard to view the subsequent 11 years as anything but a bit of a letdown.

I bought the record the day it came out. I had to go to the record store, Green Noise, twice. It was the only store in Eugene that would be stocking it on vinyl—the only store that I knew of, at least—but they didn't get their vinyl shipment until UPS came sometime after noon. "Do you have the new Pavement record?" I asked the owner that Tuesday morning. He seemed bemused at the question. A sticker on the LP of Slanted and Enchanted sitting in his racks said something like "Pavement's first and best album"—why would a kid be so eager for a new LP in 1997? Didn't I know they were already over?

Oh, Mr. Record-Store Owner, don't you know that I'm trying here to build a new self?

Building a new self was tricky, though. Depending on whose definition you looked to, my birth date marked me as a member of Generation X. Putting aside the general stupidity of that appellation, nobody seemed to be debating the range of birth dates of that generation's members: whether or not you called it Generation X, there was a generation, and I was born at its end.

The pop culture narrative bore this out. Gina Arnold's line about how Nirvana's success meant "we won" was repeated everywhere, so obviously the whole of the generation had been cool, right? Clearly, everyone had actually been a freak all along, just waiting for their moment to fly the flag of flannel.

Us kids in the tail end of the generation, we came of age after the great alternative fizzle, and we knew that the whole loser-ascension narrative was bankrupt: even winning didn't mean winning. By decade's end, the same radio stations that had heralded the Alternative Nation looped rap-metal over their airwaves. I think everyone was a bit relieved that the jocks didn't have to pretend to be sensitive anymore. Not that this happened overnight, though.

Which brings me back to 1997. In one of the on-campus eateries that accepted the student meal plan, I overheard a shaved head say something about how the food there sucked, but at least you got to listen to Candlebox. In a pizza place with my roommate, I commented at "How Soon Is Now?" on the radio. My roommate had never heard of The Smiths. In short, the market had begn to change. Alternative wasn't going to be the flavor of the day. And Pavement was trying to make a go of it.

People said a lot of things about Brighten the Corners. They said it was an attempt at a commercial breakthrough. They said it was "honest," as opposed to Wowee Zowee, which was too suffused with irony to approach greatness. (Never understood that criticism.) They said Mitch Easter's production would make the band palatable for new audiences. They said Matador's new distro-deal with EMI would put the record in stores that wouldn't have ordered it otherwise. Pavement were going to be huge! Again!

Malkmus never seemed so sure. In a cover story in Magnet, when asked about the new album's chances for success, he recognized that the pop landscape was different than it had been, and the indie landscape, if it was in fact disticnt, was different too. He talked about how maybe Pavement's moment to break through had passed. "Everybody's talking about Tortoise now," he said. (That's how I remember it at least—Magnet doesn't have their archives online, and the homespun fansites where meticulously-transcribed articles were hosted have long since disappeared. ) Looking back, it seems funny that anybody looked at the release of noodly instrumental records as the next big thing.

A few weeks before Brighten the Corners' release, I'd risen early and walked to the bus station, a bottle of everclear in tow, and bought a ticket to Seattle. On the ride up, I choked down a few swigs of the grain alcohol mixed with Sunny Delight from the school's cafeteria. About that, I can offer only that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

When the bus pulled into Seattle, turning onto Denny, we passed the RKCNDY -- I could recognize it from the mural on its wall, the bubbly graffiti letters. Somehow, those letters made me sad: no club a grown-up would go to would have letters like that on its wall.

It wasn't exactly the letters, though. My friend in Seattle had explained to me the archaic laws about all-ages music in that town, how in the '80s a sort of dance club manager and cult leader ignited a moral panic that culminated in some kids being taken advantage of and a citywide moral panic. The legacy of it all was the Teen Dance Ordinance, a law that limited minors from attending any show with alcohol being served, which, given the economics of live music, effectively limited minors from attending any show with worthwhile bands playing. So of course the RKCNDY, with its missing vowels and graf-lettering, would look like some kind of youth center. Of course we'd have liked to see the other Pavement show, the one at Moe on Capital Hill. But when you're 18, you take what you can get.

So what is there to say about the show? That it was good? That the set only featured a few of the new songs, and leaned heavily on Crooked Rain and Wowee Zowee? That I snatched a setlest after the show, scrawled on the back of a Dirty Three flyer? That it seemed a worthwhile reason to take a long weekend and miss class? That I wondered whether the whole EMI-Matador alliance really would break the band bigger than Cut Your Hair? That everclear is never, ever a good idea? Whatever. The set was great, and every mistake I made that weekend was the right one.

So the reissue comes out this year. It's finally got that non-canon version of The Hexx (or, if you prefer, And Then). I've preordered it, so I'll be getting the bonus live LP that was supposed to be released back in the '90s. I recall stories about losing the master tapes, but my memory isn't all that it used to be. And nobody ever really believed Pavement stories, at least not after the Luke Perry one. I guess all I want to say is this: This is the second time I've bought Brighten the Corners on (or before, I guess) street date.

Farmer in the City

2008-10-09T16:36:00.006-04:00

Inspired by these, and the suggestion of another.

2008-10-09T14:45:00.008-04:00

Um, is it just me, or does Axl Rose really look like Simon Pegg these days? Weird.

Also, I sure hope you like Dr. Pepper: Get yr Chinese Democracy in time for Xmas, exclusively at Best Buy.

Something the Debate Didn't Answer

2008-10-03T10:30:00.004-04:00

Is this what Sarah Palin meant about joining "a team of mavericks"?

Or was it this?

And why didn't Biden ask for clairification?

Annals of Advertising: Direct Email Edition

2008-09-30T19:39:00.003-04:00

Barnes & Noble got me all excited for a moment with an email ad that promised a wicked offer.

Actually, that's not right. The subject line promised a Wicked offer which, obviously, is completely different.

I'm going to go out a limb here and say that those excited by the prospect of the latter would likely be less than excited at the reality of the former.

Way Beyond Falling

2008-09-27T11:23:00.004-04:00

We expect lives to have arcs, to follow long parabolas, to climb and just for a second hang, before beginning to fall. But when these arcs are interrupted, we don't know how to react. It offends the order of things we think, even if publicly (and even privately) we may couch our reactions in terms of tragedy, sadness and justice. We know that to say something is wrong because it is a tragedy says nothing about the nature of that something: its wrongness we take for granted.

David Foster Wallace's suicide a few weeks back bothered me a good deal, though I couldn't say just why. Somehow, simple sadness seemed insufficient to explain what I felt; I looked for answers about other deaths, as if answers were all I, or anyone, needed. I should say here that I stand by my earlier promise to leave the elegies to others: this is not an elegy, nor a remembrance. Moreover, it is not an attempt to somehow make someone else's pain my own. I'd let it all pass without comment, but as my mind returned to this, I started to realize that this event had, for me, meaning, quite beyond what it could possibly mean to the subject's friends, family, and self.

In 1994, I stood in San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza with some friends. A reporter from KGO radio approached us: What did we think about Kurt Cobain's death? We were big Nirvana fans -- it was hard not to be, back then -- but none of us had yet heard. We laughed nervously, cracked jokes. I felt a little guilty about our flippancy. When the story aired, I took solace in throwing the reporter off the scent: Based only on our interview, he'd decided that the kids didn't care. (Oops!)

Not that Wallace was a rock star in the Kurt Cobain sense, but he surely bore a bit of that generational voice yoke. But one of the big differences to me, aside from my being almost twice the age I was in 1994, is that Wallace's eventual life path, exemplary though it may have been, still seems not so very far from my own goals. I just hadn't expected the path to stop so abruptly.

Searching my bookshelves for answers, I came to William Gass' 1972 "The Doomed in their Sinking," an essay I've read as many times as any other I can think of, and read it again. Though I feel like I can recite the whole things from memory—in truth I can only recte the first few sentences—the piece read anew to me. Strange, that, because I could always have told you what it was about. He writes:

Yet my mother wasn't what we call a suicide, even though she died as though she'd cut her throat when the vessels burst there finally, and my father, who clenched his teeth till neither knees nor elbows would unfist, dying of his own murderous wishes like the scorpion who's supposed to sting itself to death—no—he wasn't one either: both had a terribly tenacious grip on life…so that some suicides will survive anything, and many who court death have no desire to wed her…it mixes us up….

Should suicide be regarded as the last stage of a series of small acts against the self, since the murderer who arsenics his wife little by little is still a murderer though she takes a decade dying; or does this confuse kinds of hostility in a serious way, because harsh words aren't the same as blows or their bruises, desire isn't adultery whatever Jesus preached, not even a degree of it? Cigarettes shorten our life, but the alcoholic's fuddle mimics death (departure) in a way the smoker's never does. What can we make of that? We shall manage something.

I reread the above-quoted essay often, but I think that only just then did I finally understand wat Gass was getting at, i.e., the odd equivalency of the universally acknowledged suicide and the obscured yet equally serious "chronic habitual suicide." Chronic habitual suicde, though, never achieved the same valence as suicide in society's eyes even as we see it everywhere we look. Wallace, in his recently much-read Kenyon University commencement speech, addressed the outcome if not the instrument of such chronic habitual suicides, when he observed "that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."

In these last few weeks, as it has been copied and pasted into thousands of blogs, that line has echoed.

• • •

After the Kenyon University speech found new publicity, there were more outpourings. The McSweeney's website became as close to a spontaneous roadside memorial as a website could. A blogger posted the syllabus from one of the classes Wallace taught. Everybody talked about rereading something he'd written. If anyone was actually looking for answers, none of this was going to help. This isn't to say that none of this contained clues. No: all of this contained clues. The answer, though, is so simple as to be unsatisfying. And this simplicity crystalized for me all those years ago when I first read this passage in Infinite Jest:

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out out of quote 'hopelessness' or any other abstract conviction that life's assets and debts do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

So the answer to quesions of why becomes, to those asking, simultaneously obvious and incomprehensible. Gass was right: it mixes us up.

Only a few weeks on, and the the interruption of the life's parabola we once saw has faded. Instead, the parabola itself has reformed, shorter this time. The terminus is still the same as before, laterally at least, but this new shape reveals the downward slope that our initial shock denied.

We can only hope that next time we can see the slope for itself, and that our cries of 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!' should not seem so ineffectual. We can only hope that those we love remain within our reach.

All Hands on Deck

2008-09-26T14:17:00.004-04:00

John McCain is right: In trying economic times like this, the nation really does need all hands on deck.

For this reason, I'm doing my part to help keep Washington Mutual solvent: I'm depositing my paycheck there. Yes sir, I'm reporting for duty!

UPDATE: They were playing "Wonderwall" when I went in. I almost got a little choked up when someone walked in and asked a WaMu banker how he was holding up.

DFW: RIP

2008-09-14T13:02:00.003-04:00

It struck me as kind of perfect, when I stopped to think about it this morning, that I learned of David Foster Wallace's death via a text message.

I have nothing else to add, other than that hearing of this really saddened me. I'll leave it to others to elegize.

I Dreamed I Dreamed

2008-09-10T00:24:00.002-04:00

I never really dreamed of being a rock star, but there was a time when I wanted to make a lost classic record. The lost part here is integral to the dream: it had to be something that influenced the right people, even while remaining obscure to all others. This dream came to me in the late nineties, around the time that I was starting to dig into the catalogs of labels like Sundazed and Norton. And while these labels started to offer some sort of alternate canon -- in the span of a year, a, say, Skip Spence went from "Huh?" to "influential," even though Oar had been in print prior to its much lauded reissue -- their titles most satisfied when they sated a preexisting desire: it was more fun to find a reissue when you'd been looking for it for years after hearing it spoken of in hushed tones.

The hushed tones were really what the dream was about. It went something like this: I'd somehow learn how to play music, or maybe assemble a crack team of people who could, and make a record. We'd have it pressed on vinyl, and we'd go through the trouble of finding a pressing plant that could supply us with those old heavy cardstock covers that held up so much better than the sleeves used by the nineties. And after roughing them up -- maybe we'd have a party where we pulled a Christian Marclay and left the records all over the floor for people to walk on -- we'd go on road trips and seed the nation's used record stores with pre-destroyed copies of this lost classic. And then, some friends in bands (or bands we interviewed) would start dropping the name of our lost classic. And then, eventually, a much heralded reissue of the album that never came out would find its way, legitimately, into record stores, and rock critics would fall all over themselves rewriting their genealogies of pop music. It would be perfect.

Writing that out now, I realize how silly it sounds. I think I knew it then, too. But for a time I persisted, thinking that maybe a short story could do the idea justice. I kept turning it all over in my head, worrying myself with little details, like whether the records we'd drop into the bins would look old enough. It never seemed that far out of reach. (I never forgave John Lurie for actually doing it, though, to be fair, he skipped a few steps and went straight to the reissue part. On the other hand, I doubt I could have gotten Iggy Pop and Beck to play along with it.)

I remembered all of this when I read this morning that the fake American Apparel ads that had been springing up in SoHo had not, actually, been springing up. Now: I'd already gathered that they were a viral marketing (?) stunt for Stereo Hell, but the revelation that they actually were just photoshopped kind of has my head spinning. I'd half-expect to encounter one each time I found myself in the neighborhood of their alleged placement. Maybe I just wanted to believe.

Now, it's not that there weren't doubters from the start, but as the pictures kept springing up on the internet, the talking points weren't whether they were real in the sense of whether they existed, but whether they were real in the sense of what connection did they have to the AA mothership. Given the porny ads and culture at AA, it seemed, initially, that they probably were some sort of of attempt to recapture a lost AA mystique (i.e., evoke the underdog sense it's hard to evoke when your shockingly bright stores are in every neighborhood). But then the whole art criticism thing started, and I had to admit that, even if they were ads, I was amused. Whatever overlap there is between "art school" and "hipster," this all seemed a little too out there to be real. But what do I know? AA did run that Woody Allen billboard, apparently believing the inevitable legal fees worth the exposure. More recently, Dov Charney replaced some LA AA billboards with what had to have been record breakingly large lost dog flyers. Eventually, I accepted that the campaign, whatever it was for, interested me, and that I was, as a result, invested in its outcome.

I can say now, after the fact, how foolish I was to have cared. But it seems more interesting to me to note that yes, it was a hoax, and yes, it actually changed the way I encountered the city. It actually made me look a bit closer at wheatpasted posters; when I didn't see the fake AA ads, I noticed their absence and wondered when they were removed. I walked through SoHo, and I saw the absence of something that was never there.

(It's almost like that thing that Gertrude Stein said about there being no there there, right?)

Something to Keep in Mind

2008-09-09T13:17:00.003-04:00

"It is the fashion among dilettantes and fops (perhaps I am not myself guiltless,) to decry the whole formulation of the active politics of America, as beyond redemption, and to be carefully kept away from."

Walt Whitman, "Democratic Vistas"

Personality Crisis

2008-09-08T23:52:00.005-04:00

I love "studies." Really, I do. I'm not joking. Especially the ones that seem tailored to end up in Reuters' Oddly Enough, or fill a few column inches in the back of some newspaper section. They don't, you know, actually illuminate anything, but they bring with them the virtue of statistics to either flatter the reader, or confound the reader's expectations.

The study I'm particularly enamored of at the moment is this one about personality and music preference by some guy in Scotland at some school I've never heard of. But never mind the provenance of the study, let's get down to finding ourselves!

Bam! There I am, a fan of "Indie." My traits are "Low self-esteem, creative, not hard working, not gentle."

The problems with just that one tidbit are so many (and obvious!) that it's probably not even worth parsing the study's (unstated) definition of "indie." But, whatever. The reductive personality type offered as the indie fan probably would have suited me well-enough when I was at the height of my musicophilia (i.e., ages eighteen through twenty-three, give or take a few years). And as stupid as it is, how much sillier is this than say, the Myers-Briggs test and the occupational suggestions that surround it? There's something comforting (if entirely insidious) about destiny. And who else but an expert could command the authority to pronounce on destiny these days?

Happy Labor Day

2008-09-01T22:27:00.002-04:00

Classic Water

I remember Kitty saying we shared a deep longing for
the consolation prize, laughing as we rinsed the stagecoach.

I remember the night we camped out
and I heard her whisper
"think of me as a place" from her sleeping bag
with the centaur print.

I remember being in her father's basement workshop
when we picked up an unknown man sobbing
over the shortwave radio

and the night we got so high we convinced ourselves
that the road was a hologram projected by the headlight beams.

I remember how she would always get everyone to vote
on what we should do next and the time she said
"all water is classic water" and shyly turned her face away.

At volleyball games her parents sat in the bleachers
like ambassadors from Indiana in all their midwestern schmaltz.

She was destroyed when they were busted for operating
a private judicial system within U.S. borders.

Sometimes I'm awakened in the middle of the night
by the clatter of a room service cart and I think back on Kitty.

Those summer evenings by the government lake,
talking about the paradox of multiple Santas
or how it felt to have your heart broken.

I still get a hollow feeling on Labor Day when the summer ends

and I remember how I would always refer to her boyfriends
as what's-his-face, which was wrong of me and I'd like
to apologize to those guys right now, wherever they are:

No one deserves to be called what's-his-face.

--David Berman

I sometimes wonder what happened to my copy of Actual Air. I suppose I should buy a new one. It's one of those works that I encountered at the right time, so it'll stay imprinted on my consciousness, even as everything and everybody else moves on. Bingham is dead. Berman is clean. But damned if that one doesn't get me every time.

One Week Later

2008-08-30T20:09:00.005-04:00

Sometimes, it's like I'm asking for it. To a friend who'd broken his collarbone after a bike accident, I said earlier this year "I've never had a really serious bike accident," to which he replied, "You will. Just wait." I named this blog To Report an Emergency. I had two beers at lunch (though, to be fair, they were Mexican beers accompanying a burrito large enough to inhibit whatever effects of alcohol they might provide). Hell, I even wore a helmet: why would I do that if I didn't, on some level, know I was going to crash?

But seven days after the fact, I feel much better, thank you very much. The separated shoulder hurt plenty, but the pain has subsided a bit each day. At this point, I can nearly sit up without discomfort. So, with the worst behind me, I'd like to present some things I learned:

*Just because the warnings on painkillers are a little more cautious than they need to be (and even the pharmacist said the warnings will make you paranoid), it probably isn't a good idea to ignore them altogether. (Or, to put it another way, there's a reason that the warning "Never mix prescription painkillers with alcohol, unless you like to party really, really hard was published by The Onion, and not the manufacturer of your painkillers. What happens when you forget this will be more embarrassing than your crash.

*Stupid or not, I'm pretty proud that I rode the two or three miles to the ER by myself. I was also a little proud that, though I hit the back of that van pretty hard, I didn't actually fall off the bike. I think I just sort of smashed into it - BAM! - and then put my feet down. I didn't realize this until I was at the ER and they asked how I fell.

*Doctors (and other medical professionals) know that people want painkillers. "How about we get you some Percoset," the nurse attending to me said with a tone that recalled a mother offering her child ice cream. This is probably a good thing.

*Orthopedist is a hard word to remember. I keep wanting to say "orthopediatrican" or "orthopodiatrist." At one point, I actually wrote in an email of my need to see an orthopedic specialist because I couldn't remember it. Why this should be so hard, I don't know.

*It's nice to have insurance. Let's hear it for private schools!

*I really miss running and biking.

*My belief that the street is faster than the bike path is only true if I don't get into an accident on the street. If that happens, I never reach my destination.

Hardly Anyone Remembers Rock and Roll Radio

2008-08-20T22:01:00.004-04:00

"Is 'Guitar Hero' saving rock 'n' roll?" asks CNN. I read the story, and I'll save you a minute: they don't answer the question.

I kind of love the "what will save rock" trope. It plays off the notion of "classic rock," i.e., that rock is an important tradition worth preserving, as well as the notion that somewhere along the way said tradition became in need of such preservation. These twin notions validate the feelings of anybody who was there, man, but wonders why the kids just don't seem to get it anymore: the problem isn't that you're too old, it's that they're too thick. (To this last bit, I'm tempted to add "with their hipping and their hopping," but I think the outlines of the "it all stopped mattering when I stopped caring" argument are pretty clear to all).

But these notions are wrong. Or, maybe more accurately, they are not entirely right. But that rock 'n roll, as a genre, a style with a specific set of characteristics, a shorthand for a way of being, might have fallen out of favor -- this much is right. Rock 'n roll is a dead metaphor, and it has been for some time.

In an entertaining post last year at the A.V. Club, Steve Hyden set out some criteria for determining the "most rocking song of all time." I mention these now because they're fresh enough in my mind, but plenty of others have engaged in similar exercises. These exercises often engage precisely because of their familiarity: they confirm the reader's prejudices.) He posited that such song could only have been recorded between 1955 and 1980, the early limit because rock didn't yet exist (duh) and the later one because punk rendered unselfconscious rock impossible, and thus anything after it a kind of revival act. (It may be worth remembering that the Nuggets LP was a huge hit with the first wave of NYC punk musicians, and thus they, even in the late 1970s, had a packaged bit of rock as a passed moment.) His conclusion about the question he asks aside, I pretty much agree with this assertion: unselfconscious rock died not long after I was born.

The death of rock created a new kind of listener, too. This listener couldn't listen to rock without being self conscious that what he or she heard coming out of the speakers was rock, and rock was something that was associated with an earlier era. It was unavoidable: to listen to rock was to look back. Looking back is fine. But believing that because the past is passed it's somehow meaningful is something else altogether.

I thought about this while watching this short movie. Go ahead, watch it. It's worth your eight minutes, even if I think it's, in most of its assumptions, wrong.

The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

If you click through to view the movie on Vimeo, you'll see that most of the comments talk about what a great little film it is, and how practically unjust is is that the guy can't find a buyer for the collection. And even a sourpuss like me has to admit a pleasant, elegiac vibe suffuses the whole thing. But, as much as it pains me to say it, the collection in the movie isn't priceless. Anybody who's ever been a record collector knows this. They've been in basements and backrooms filled with records, they've been watched by the strange men (always men) who own the collections, they've flipped through thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of shit records from all those decades. I've talked to strange men in subterranean shops who insist that The Byrds LP I want is worth $30 because "book value is $25, and this one's in mono," or even worked, sort of, for another strange man who let me smoke behind the counter that held a crate with "rare" items including a nearly destroyed copy of Parable of Arable Lands, the first Red Crayola (still with the C on that one) album with an asking price of $75. (That was the store where he had so many copies of the "rare" original cover art version of Tad's 8-Way Santa that one day he ran a "Get a free 8-Way Santa with any purchase" promotion.) Collectors are a strange breed, and every last one of them thinks their collection is special. But just because it exists doesn't make it worthwhile. And what hardly anybody has the heart to say about this guy's collection is that it isn't all that impressive. If the Stones LP he holds up is the most valuable thing in it, well, that's a whole lot of shit records.

It's funny that the filmmaker didn't seem to understand this, but I suspect that's because he isn't a record collector. I say this not just because of his uncritical presentation of Paul's story, but because of a little detail at the end of the movie that bothers me: the dubbed in sound of a lock-groove at the end of a record. That the documentary was almost certainly shot on a digital camera, only to have the sound of a lock-groove dubbed in suggests a fetish for the vinyl medium that overlooks the content contained the medium. It's nostalgia, but for all the wrong reasons.

Digital, too, had the unexpected effect of bringing to the surface heretofore hidden cream. Who knew about the wonders of Ethiopian jazz music? Of the thousands of 1960s garage bands? Of the odd orchestrations of bands remembered only as bubblegum? The CD and later MP3, sterile aesthetics aside, actually allowed forgotten music to be rediscovered. And since rock has now been dead for the better part of the last three decades, hearing some of that old rock music evokes much the same feeling in the listener as hearing those old Carter Family sides (also available on CD). One is struck by the moment from which the sounds sprung, and how distant it seems.

All this brings me back to the Guitar Hero story. Has Guitar Hero led to increased catalog sales for some of the artists featured in it? I'm sure it had, and I'd be sure even if the story didn't quote an editor from Billboard. Will it save rock? Of course not. I imagine here -- with no good reason, mind you -- the young player of Guitar Hero who discovers "rock" via the game as thinking of the music much like one who says "I like 80s music" probably means they like the music that soundtracked The Breakfast Club, and not, say, Black Flag. Which may be okay. Perhaps rebuilding the walls that bounded rock music isn't such a bad thing, if it means that "rock" will cease being used to refer to guitar-based pop music.

(As a side note, one of my favorite bits in the CNN story is the line from the Billboard editor that "If you've ever played air guitar, more than likely, you weren't doing it to a Michael Jackson song. You were doing it to an Aerosmith song," a statement that conveniently overlooks that Eddie Van Halen famously laid down the guitar tracks on Beat It, a song apparently included on a forthcoming version of Guitar Hero. So, you know, it's not as if Billboard editors have to have any recall of genre-busting chart-toppers, or anything. On the other hand, based on the rest of the story, he's probably quoted out of context, so maybe it's a CNN fail.)

FYI:

2008-08-18T15:14:00.000-04:00

Now you know.

There Is No Editor There

2008-08-18T13:30:00.000-04:00

"So we were totally confused as to why he was involved with this," Mr. Rosenfield said. "Isn't there a quote by Gertrude Stein, 'The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn't any there there'?"

New York Times, August 16, 2008

Actually, no, there isn't a "quote" from Gertrude Stein that Mr. Rosenfield remembers correctly (and I'm not merely bristling at the usage panel's concerns over using quote synonymously with quotation). The quotation does not contain a contraction of "is not," and the lack of "there" is not a problem with Oakland, as such, so much as a problem with trying to find a location when it exists only in memory:

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

That the "there there" quotation should be invoked to mean something other than its author's intention is not terribly newsworthy, but the way the Times lets the quotation slide here is what I am interested in. It is a relatively minor point, this (mis)quoting Stein out of context, in a story of interest only to a few. But what of when demonstrably incorrect statements are presented between quotation marks in other Times stories? When the Times lets bullshit like this slide in stories that don't matter, it undercuts its credibility for those that do matter.

Or maybe I'm just tired as hell of hearing Oakland badmouthed with that line. Can we call a moratorium on invoking quotations one has only heard secondhand to make a point?

Annals of Education

2008-08-15T16:41:00.000-04:00

When I heard that Texas will allow teachers to carry concealed weapons, my mind drifted to a different kind of educational philosophy and, of course, to the Belush:

Truth and Soul

2008-08-14T14:28:00.000-04:00

What with Tropic Thunder opening tomorrow, and the unavoidable discussion over Robert Downey Jr's hi-effing-larious looking blackface turn, it may be worth remembering that Downey has a pedigree for this sort of thing. After all, his father conceived and directed Putney Swope, a satire of advertising and the black power movement, all the way back in '69. To this day, the mere existence of Putney Swope blows my mind.

On a personal note, I had a sound clip from Putney Swope on my answering machine in high school. The clip, a petulant boy declaring "Fuck you! And fuck the establishment! And fuck you people who are trying to make me part of the unestablished establishment!" was lifted from a mediocre Bay Area pop punk band's CD. When I saw the flick, it all finally made sense.

Goodnite to the Rock and Roll Era

2008-08-11T13:23:00.000-04:00

Though today marks my thirtieth year to heaven, the weather turned around well before I could get out of the house to marvel my birthday away, so I decided to clean out my closet. I finally found the wherewithal to toss my Stereolab and Pavement shirts, both too-tattered for some years now to wear.

A Song to Welcome the Onset of Maturity

2008-08-05T14:55:00.001-04:00

For the record: This is how I plan to celebrate my thirtieth birthday, and by "this," I mean vaporizing my foes, dancing around, singing torch songs, and kicking the dirt-like remains left after said vaporization.

Annals of Gender Reporting

2008-07-31T10:47:00.000-04:00

In an effort to try to keep the peace, Genesis P-Orridge, the frontman/woman of industrial rock pioneers Throbbing Gristle, took the stage to quiet things down. But he/she was also escorted off the stage by security.

Billboard, "Altercation Marrs Butthole Surfers NYC Show"

Lunch Options

2008-07-29T15:10:00.001-04:00

I am voting yes on Papa Perrone's grandma slices and artichoke pie.

Different Class

2008-07-28T17:40:00.001-04:00

If ever I seem to complain too much about some of the more sheltered specimens to attend school with me, please remember this probably not-fake add for a nanny for one 19-year-old Columbia student [Via Gawker.]

Suffice it to say, I've already applied.

A Copy of a Copy

2008-07-28T17:34:00.000-04:00

For the record, I'm totally tempted to buy one of these Warhol Pete Rose prints. And, no, I'm not really sure why.

Sound and Sense

2008-07-24T13:08:00.000-04:00

And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

Now this letter to the editor (about the editor) by Giles Coren is fucking brilliant. (Via MetaFilter, yo.) I'm reminded of the the line from the abstract in A Frolic of One's Own in which the judge considers the firefighters, though good at fighting fires, to have little understanding of sculpture,

much in then manner of that obituary upon our finest poet of the century wherein one of his purest lines was reconstituted as 'I do not think they will sing to me' by a journalist trained to eliminate on sight the superfluous 'that.'

Because, really, sometimes meter matters.

Democracy in Action

2008-07-23T17:04:00.001-04:00

It's reassuring to hear, after calling a Senate subcommittee to ask for an email address to which correspondance to the committee should be addressed, that, honestly, the email isn't checked all that often.

From the Wires

2008-07-23T11:46:00.000-04:00

Years ago in Seattle, the small magazine I worked for held periodic planning meetings. Since nobody got paid much -- each quarterly issue might yield an editor enough to cover one good night of drinking -- the editor in chief tried to make the meetings fun. We'd all sit around his dining room table, expanded for the occasion with a leaf of plywood and covered with a worn tablecloth, and take turns arguing about our pitches. Usually, I would end up drunk enough at the end of the night that I would regret something I said or did. And then we'd proceed with putting together the issue, having gained nothing from the meeting that was, for once, supposed to get us all on the same page.

This isn't to say there weren't bright spots. One summer, we had an intern on his summer break from Yale. Why he was working for us, I'll never really understand, because the kid was pretty sharp. He wrote well, he thought well, he had pretty good taste, and that kind of entitled Ivy attitude that actually helps if you're trying to work in media. He also had self discipline (or, perhaps, enough free time to make it seem that way), evidenced by his exhaustive pitches. I think my favorite pitch of his, though, was less than exhaustive. (I should also here note that I shot down the notion of actually covering it from the start.) The pitch read in full, if I remember correctly:

Utilikilts: They fascinate me.

Now: I didn't want to actually cover the story because I didn't think a story about the Utilikilts would be right for whatever our target demo was supposed to be. But I understood where the intern was coming from as far as his fascination with Utilikilts. One doesn't really see those back East, but in Seattle, their birthplace, they did obtain a kind of ubiquity. I imagine coming to Seattle for the first time after this ubiquity had been obtained, one might think Utilikilts even odder than those of us who watched them go from something sold at the Freemont Fair to something of a (much-mocked) local institution.

I was reminded of all this by a recent story in the Boston Globe: Apparently, a Lacey, Washington mailman is lobbying the National Association of Letter Carriers to adopt a resolution allowing mail carriers to work in kilts. (The photo accompanying the story depicts a mock uniform, and the kilt in question sure looks like a Utilikilt.)

Because of all the aforementioned Utilikiltery in Seattle, I guess I'm not all that surprised to read this: the mailman in question is, after all, from Washington. That doesn't mean I understand it.

Growing into a Tautology

2008-07-22T11:49:00.001-04:00

"Well, her, she's got to be in her thirties by now, mid-thirties. I think at first she was some kind of performance-artist-slash-barmaid. Now she's just a barmaid. It's like..." Eric cut himself off again.

"Like..."

"I don't know, people say they're one thing or another? Then at some point, they just are what they are."

I Am a Scientist, I Seek to Understand Me:

2008-07-16T18:51:00.001-04:00

I am continuing the research of a Yale scientist on whether or not it is possible to get "drunk" on beer. [Minneapolis Star-Tribune, via Gawker]

2008-07-08T18:01:00.000-04:00

My Favorite Mongoloid

2008-07-08T16:47:00.002-04:00

Way back in the 1990s -- January 1997, to be precise -- I enrolled in a film history survey at the University of Oregon. I liked the class pretty well, and I think I most appreciated the opportunity to see classic films projected as films: with the exception of Terminator 2, a concession to the week on "The Blockbuster" that we viewed on laserdisc, and Sadie Benning's The Wrong Girl, a film originally made on the FisherPrice PixelVision camera, the professor only showed films for which she had access to actual prints. That's how we watched Persona and La Strada and even Raising Arizona. The film, though, that most fascinated me was Bruce Conner's A Movie.

Something is lost in the transition from film to Flash, but the outlines are still there, of course. The day after the professor screened that, she showed this, which also blew my mind:

For what it's worth, I even remember that one being shown on film, too.

I didn't really do too much more research on Conner over the years, and I guess I shouldn't pretend here that I did. Still, it's with a small degree of regret that I note Conner's death yesterday. It's not as if I'd continued to research him or to study his work. But, still, I remember the first time I saw those films, and saw for the first time new possibilities in that medium. It was a perfectly typical 'college' experience, one of those moments in which the student is not merely told of something heretofore hidden, but initiated into a discourse that began long before those tentative steps onto the campus, or, gasp, into the larger world of art -- I get that. But recognizing how typical that moment is can't erase how big it felt then, and the chills I still get today watching A Movie when the title card dwells on the director's name for far longer than it should.

Somehow, the true innovators never seem dated.

Space to Respond

2008-07-08T16:13:00.000-04:00

Correction: July 6, 2008

An article today in Sunday Business about missed opportunities to reduce America’s dependence on imported oil refers to a 1990 effort by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, to block higher mileage requirements for vehicles and notes that Mr. Helms did not return calls seeking comment. The section went to press on Thursday, before Mr. Helms’s death Friday morning.

Though, to be fair, he really hadn't return their calls.

Assisting the Authorities

2008-07-03T12:21:00.000-04:00