fighting fire with unlit matches

The Stupidest Thing I've Ever Heard

2010-08-28T19:18:00.005-04:00

What follows is a quote from a New York Times story about today's utterly surreal and, in my opinion, near-blasphemous Glenn Beck rally on the National Mall, on the 47th anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. I don't think I could come up with a more off-base interpretation of what Jesus stood for if I tried:

Becky Benson, 56, traveled from Orlando, Fla., because, she said, “we believe in Jesus Christ, and he is our savior.” Jesus, she said, would not have agreed with what she called the redistribution of wealth in the form of the economic stimulus package, bank bailouts and welfare. “You cannot sit and expect someone to hand out to you,” she said.

Oh really? How's about this, from 1 John 3:17–18:

If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

Or any of these Bible verses concerning how one should treat the needy.

These people are seriously out of whack.

Goodbye to All That (Blogger)

2009-08-07T18:14:00.004-04:00

I'm going to be using a new blog service from here on out, so change your bookmarks (if you have me bookmarked) to either hunterslaton.com or hunterslaton.wordpress.com. Both will go there.

I hope you like the new site, Dear Reader. I have a new post up about the High Line and various light!

Tell Amazon What's What

2009-07-21T09:03:00.007-04:00

Recently, Amazon deleted some George Orwell books from users' Kindles. The reason the company did this was because the books "had been mistakenly published." I saw this in the news, and didn't think much of it until I read this piece by Farhad Manjoo, published today on Slate.com.

Manjoo writes:

The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have. Here's one way around this: Don't buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, with his company's Kindle e-reader.

If this book-deletion episode bothers you, do this: Write Amazon a quick email, demanding what Manjoo recommends. Here is the link to write Amazon a note. (If you don't have an Amazon account, just click the "Skip sign in" button at the bottom of the form.)

And here is a basic draft of what you should send (feel free to use this verbatim):

To Whom It May Concern:

I was disturbed to hear about Amazon's recent remote deletion of George Orwell books from users' Kindle devices. I understand the reasons why you did so, but I do not believe that any company should have the power to remotely delete books from a computer or other similar devices.

As per Farhad Manjoo's article on Slate.com, I am writing today to request that you update your terms of service to prohibit remote deletions or, better yet, remove the capability to do so. I will not purchase a Kindle until this is done, and I will encourage my friends and family to do the same.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

YOUR NAME

Power to the people right now.

We Thought You'd Left Us

2009-07-16T10:06:00.004-04:00

It's been far too long since I've blogged.

This, too, will not be a full-meal blog, a gallon of water after days in the desert. No, rather it'll just be a quick collection of what's been occupying my headspace of late.

One, I have a new web address, hunterslaton.com. It currently points to this blog, so it's not much of a change, but it's nice to have the domain name.

Two, after being inspired by my brother, I'm currently working on transitioning this blog to WordPress. It's still in progress, so it's yet rough, but go take a look and let me know what you think. It's a little buggy, and when I imported my old posts from this blog, many came through duplicated one, two, or even three times. Anyone else have that problem and know how to fix it?

Third, I made a hot summer jamz 2009 "mixed CD." The reason I call it a mixed CD is because once, an old girlfriend of my brother's gave him a mix CD and called it, on the disc, a "mixed CD"—I guess that was what she thought it was called, and it always cracked us up: a mixed CD. It's all mixed-up.

Anyway, if anybody out there in TV Land who reads this blog wants one (and hasn't already claimed one via Facebook or Twitter), hit me up in the comments (or via email) with your mailing address, and I'd be happy to send one out, in plenty of time for summer listening.

It is highly recommended for cookouts.

Here is the tracklist:

And finally, I got a bike. Haven't owned one for ten years, since Oxford. I bought it used, from B's Bikes on Driggs in Greenpoint. $250, and I talked them into throwing in a bike lock and helmet ($70 value) for $50. I'm loving it. Each of the past four weekends I've ridden down, for various reasons, to Prospect Park and, wow—It really just changes the way in which you interact with the city, expands your radius. And riding up Kent Avenue on a breezy schoolnight, with the Manhattan skyline bright off across the East River, and the wind whipping around you, is a glorious thing.

Here is my bike:

I love it. But now I want one built by these guys.

Response

2009-06-29T09:17:00.003-04:00

The end of the weekend ended
as most of my recent weekends
have been ending—with a sense
there was something I’d forgotten
or someone to see about something.

But after reading Sam’s poems,
which are similar to but better
than poems I’d formerly written,
the feeling went via confirmation
of the identical feeling in another:

That last winter was the best winter,
parties at an old house far superior
to the parties currently being thrown,
missing a girl on a goddamned mountain,
and all of one’s best friends leaving.

To which I say: All of one’s best friends
are always leaving, a sense of falling
suspended in mid-air, or the bottom
always dropping to pace the falling.
same as the way that I was feeling

at the wedding the day before:
I was arriving and had arrived,
dancing and having had danced,
the people across the wide lawn
receding as I paced toward them.

Liberty & Fountain

2009-06-19T10:59:00.004-04:00

In honor of Summer Fridays (the first of which I might take today, if I can get my work done), here's a poem I wrote a few years back and which I've always been kind of proud of. Dig it. (And forgive the small type; I had to shrink the font size to make the line breaks appear correctly.)

Liberty & Fountain

Yes, we sat and stood at the curb and corner of
Liberty & Fountain, where we’d walked to and ridden buses to
from first Jamaica and earlier Astoria and before Roosevelt Island
It’s Dutch. It’s gotta be Dutch. Roosevelt / Gansevoort
Over the Queensboro Bridge from the city, whose definition grew bigger
as we moved to and from different boroughs.

Yeah, we’re at the corner of Fountain & Liberty we kept saying,
pleased with ourselves for having seen so much unseen
by our fellow hipsters, tourists all, I disdained them.
You were more forgiving.

From the sculpture park where we’d seen art and children saw toys
I studied the cartoon deer lawn statue and we discussed what
the pedestals meant, the junk embedded, the geologic strata –
then the Filipino girl ran up and climbed up and she
rode that cartoon deer with as much if not more intent
than what we’d just brought to bear on What does this piece mean?

I straightened up and thought, well
Of course that’s what it means. Deer are for riding,
silly.

So we took the Q something bus on out to where the 7 rushed and rucked
overhead, to where we stood under overpass and
stood forever waiting for the Q60. White faces dropped off
one-by-one
and the bus filled and we felt self-conscious
I don’t know why. I don’t know why that should be so.
But it was so even though I wished it wasn’t. Wish it weren’t.
A cop car slides suspiciously up: Y’all need to get outta here
in a gravel-rough granite-deep voice, or at least that’s how I kept saying it
to lighten the mood.

You and I both laughed but what is laughing but
making loud noises to scare off whatever’s bad out there.
The corner of Fountain & Liberty. Liberty between Fountain & Logan, really.
We kept on saying that. You kept on
laughing and I kept on making you laugh. I was trying.

I was trying to know who Rufus King was,
who had the house that was the reason for the park
where the wedding photos were being taken in Jamaica,
but I didn’t have that information in my mind. Of the information I did have
there was one item which told me I liked parks like Rufus King’s
whoever he was
parks with trees with big tall trunks and lots of rich green leaves
and benches like would not look out-of-place in Savannah.
Broad green lawns and black babies, barbecue
and a sort of blent mist, gauzy, that hung among the upper branches
and seemed a sort of benediction.

We couldn’t stay long, though. We had a plane to catch.
We had a train to catch. We caught the Q8 instead,

and headed back west toward Brooklyn, following our progress
on a bus that filled with only black faces on an MTA map
that didn’t much correlate to reality, but worked alright enough.
Growing up, the idea grows that not much correlates. Nothing’s to scale.

You said you missed John as it was getting late
at the corner of Liberty & Fountain, or more really
Liberty between Fountain & Logan. You laughed
and missed John. Or more really you missed John in between laughing.
Or you laughed in between missing John. Which is the way
I’m beginning to believe life & living just are.

When the Q12 did finally come you were cold, and you cursed air-conditioning.
I agreed. The bus filled up with black faces and you were cold
and hungry. I pressed up against you and once sat forward
You pulled me back and said stay there.
I stayed there.

That bus ride was by far the longest, and when we made Prospect Park
it was as if we’d been in the hinterlands, East New York &
Woodside & Ozone Park, Tibet to Kathmandu, &
that girl you worked with you told me about with the tattoo of an ampersand.

The park opened up like the mouth of a whale made of forest.
We passed its cold marble teeth gleaming dully in the half-moon
The moon in the arms of the sun
and were inside this gigantic green thing, breathing.
You and I were breathing and so was the park and
so was the lake with the lights that brought to my mind
Lake Hamilton in Arkansas, and college nights spent in the dark
on the lake with boats moored and cold beer,
the boats tied together and the lights across the lake
with the engines off and the sound of water, some slipping naked into the dark water,
and so was the bullfrog that was in the lake,
he was breathing too.

We walked along the paths of the park, lit by lovely lamplight
and talked and I told you to breathe in the riot of greenery.
You did so and I did so, us both breathing like a couple
of bullfrogs, struck stupid by art.
The rushes in the lake were six feet high if they were an inch.
And nothing got us.

When we left the park, the townhouses were lit by lamplight or candlelight.
Let’s say the latter.
They were three or four stories tall and for all
I knew this was Paris. Some magic come down from
the heavens to live on Earth. The air perfumed, permeated
with June, finally, in this year of too-long winter
and overmuch rain. But overmuch rain makes the greenery grow
thick & pungent, and that is heavy worth it.
The breathing-in bears out that this is heavy worth it,
regardless of the misting-up and the missing.

For there’s the laughing at Liberty & Fountain, near Logan,
and all of the cupcakes and all of the barbecue and the beer,
all of it, tired legs in the morning and maybe missing, too,
but deep sweet sleep before and summer hours again next Friday.

Rain, Rain, Get Lost

2009-06-18T12:53:00.004-04:00

Lately, it seems that just about everyone in New York City—myself included—has been complaining about the never-ending rainfall we’ve been having. But how bad is it, really? I decided to do some digging and find out. The following data comes from the National Weather Service Forecast Office, and covers from 1869 to present, with measurements taken in Central Park*. Here are the soggy facts:

The city has had 5.32 inches of rain thus far this month (we had 5.17 inches in all of May). Average June precipitation is 3.84 inches—so, with 12 more days to go this month, I’d say we’re going to beat that by a mile. (Average May precipitation is 4.69 inches, so we topped that, too.)

Q. What was the wettest May ever?
A. In 1989, 10.24 inches fell on the city during the month of May.

Q. What about the wettest June?
A. Our wettest June ever was actually quite recent, in 2003, when we received 10.27 inches. That was the wettest June in 100 years, in fact, since 1903.

Q. How about the wettest 24 hours ever in the city?
A. That would be over October 8 and 9 in, again, a well-soaked year—1903. A staggering 11.17 inches fell from the skies in that 24-hour period … that’s double what we’ve had throughout the past 17 days of June!

Q. So which way is this trending? Is the city getting wetter or drier?
A. Wetter, or at least it seems to be. Three of the top ten wettest years on record in New York City were in the last decade. Even more impressive, eight of the top ten wettest years were in the past four decades. (All ten have happened since 1903.) The most recent wettest year on record was 2007, at No. 4 on the list. That year the city got 61.70 inches of precipitation.

Q. Are we on track to beat 2007?
A. Not likely. By the end of May in 2007, we’d seen 25.91 inches of precipitation, including an epic 13.05-inch April (remember that storm?). By the end of May this year, the city had only received 15.52 inches of rain—respectable, and worth complaining about, but not looking like a record-breaker.

So that’s the verdict: Contrary to what you might believe, the rain has been much worse, and as recently as 2007. And yet....

(In the middle of writing this, I saw that the Times beat me to it. Oh well.)

* Final fun fact: From December 1868 to December 31, 1919, weather measurement for the city was conducted in Central Park, at the Arsenal Building on 5th Ave between 63rd and 64th streets. But on January 1, 1920, measurement moved to the Belvedere Castle Transverse Road, near 79th and 81st streets, where it remains today.

Ulysses

2009-06-17T08:27:00.002-04:00

This gorgeous, knockout excerpt from the last chapter (the Molly Bloom chapter) of Ulysses, by James Joyce, showed up in my co-worker's inbox yesterday, in the daily Writer's Almanac email. Get a little sensuousness up in you, how 'bout:

"O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Mr. Obama Goes to Cairo

2009-06-04T13:13:00.005-04:00

This morning I woke to the calm, measured tones of President Obama giving a speech addressed to “the Muslim world” at Cairo University in Egypt. It was a good way to wake up. I wasn’t able to listen to the whole speech this morning, as I had to get ready to go to work. But I just now, at lunch, read the entire speech, which can be found here; I highly recommend that everyone give it a look.

The speech is pure genius. Its purpose was, as the president said, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition.”

If the previous administration’s mission statement was, “You are either with us or against us,” here the president was laying out a new mission statement for the U.S. and the Muslim world, one that Obama has been preaching for many years now: We are all in this together. In his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama—then a state senator from Illinois, and a candidate for the U.S. Senate—eloquently expressed this view as it related to Americans. He said:

“The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?”

What Obama was advocating today at Cairo University was a politics of hope for the entire world; what Bush and his administration advocated for the past eight years, and what former Vice-President Cheney, along with other outspoken Republicans, continue to advocate today is a politics of fear and cynicism.

The president made his case in part by using a very powerful rhetorical tool when communicating with people of faith: by deploying key passages from that group's chosen holy book—in this case, the Koran. For example, in one part of the speech that dealt with terrorism, Obama noted that, “The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.”

This rhetorical trick didn’t seem cynical because Obama, of course, has personal experience with Islam. As he said in today’s speech, “Part of this conviction [‘that the interests we share as human beings are more powerful than the forces that drive us apart’] is rooted in my own experience. I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith.”

But the finest deployment of scripture came at the end, when Obama quoted from the holy books of all three Abrahamic faiths. He said:

“We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning, keeping in mind what has been written. The Holy Koran tells us, ‘O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.’ The Talmud tells us: ‘The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.’ The Holy Bible tells us, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.’ The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God's vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth. Thank you. And may God's peace be upon you."

I agree wholeheartedly. God’s vision is for all people to live together in peace; not for all people to be Christians; not for all nations to be democracies; not for one nation to dominate any other. I think that all men and women of faith—whether Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, or any other—should be able to get behind that sentiment. Provided, that is, that they truly follow and believe in the teachings they claim to.

Facebook and Twitter Are Eating the World; also, Lewis & Clarke

2009-06-03T22:45:00.007-04:00

Lately I've noticed something: I'm posting way less to this blog, yet I'm posting way more to Facebook and Twitter (notice the new Twitter feed just to the right of this post; also, you can find me on Twitter here). Which is fine, I suppose, though I get the feeling—at least with Facebook—like I'm working on Maggie's farm, providing Facebook with free content for its advertisers to sell against. Has anyone else out there in TV Land been getting this feeling?

The problem is this: It's so easy to post content to Facebook. On practically every web page one might come across these late days, "Share" is an option (right alongside "Print," "Email this Story," and the like). You click the Share button and a selection of sites on which to share the story pops up; Facebook is always on there, and Blogger never is. So you click the Facebook button and then you're inside Facebook, which provides a few lines of the story, a headline, and even a photo tied to the story in question. Modern science! But it makes me neglect this blog and then, when I return, post self-indulgent junk about how, lord have mercy, I find myself posting on some sites more than others.

Sounds like I'm in need of retooling.

At any rate: In the meantime, here's a link to the links I've been posting on Facebook lately, many of which have some nice discussion from friends of mine under them. A sad substitute, but it will have to do until I figure out some way to quit feeding the Facebook machine. Anyone out there know a blog site that more easily allows you to share or post stories from other sites?

Before I go, though, one quick recommendation from Yr. Faithful Correspondent:

The other night, as I often do before bed, I was listening on my radio to NPR's New Sounds show, which is all over the place in terms of content, but is consistently good and affecting and beautiful. But so the theme for this particular night's broadcast was "new folk," and in the show I heard an amazing, delicate song that bloomed midway out into cacophony before falling back to earth and subsiding. After, I waited to hear who it was, and I'll be damned if it wasn't the band Lewis & Clarke, with whom my good friend Karen has been playing cello as of late. The song is called "Comfort Inn," and it's off Lewis & Clarke's latest album, Blasts of Holy Birth (it came out in 2007, and the gently psychedelic album cover can be seen above). Lewis & Clarke's Myspace page does not have the song, but I found it here on Last.fm. You should absolutely give it a listen, preferably late-ish at night and when you're in a contemplative mood. It's very worth it.

That's all for now, but coming soon to fighting fire with unlit matches (or, hell, maybe Facebook): A discussion of President Obama's stunning, insightful biography Dreams from My Father, which I will shortly be finishing.

Turning onto Rodney

2009-05-22T01:39:00.002-04:00

Rodney Street looks brightly lurid
as I turn north onto it from Broadway
at 1am. Not that Broadway,
which I was on earlier, slowing through
the crush of crowds after seeing Waiting
for Godot, the Shrek crowds, Times
Square tourists; but rather the busted Broadway
under the JMZ trains, screeching overhead.
Trash flattened, pancaked into pavement,
an overgrown lot above the B.Q.E.,
which, passing, I thought I could set up a tent in.
The traffic lights staggered down Rodney
bathe the asphalt in reds and greens,
the streetlights' sodium-lamp yellow
and all of the things I will never do.

Weekend Roundup

2009-05-18T08:36:00.005-04:00

Let's kick off this week with this amazing picture, to which I was alerted by my friend Katie:

The kid wanted to see if his own haircut felt like the president's haircut. (For more great daily pictures of Obama and others in the White House, see the Official White House Photostream, which currently features a picture of the president talking to a pirate.)

At any rate, this picture of the kid resonated with me all the more because right now I'm reading Dreams from My Father, Obama's first book.

Here's a favorite passage of mine from the book, which I highly recommend:

For the rest of the day and into the next, I thought about Ruby’s eyes. [Obama had noticed that Ruby, a black woman, was wearing colored blue contacts, and he kind of called her out on it.] I had handled the moment badly, I told myself, made her feel ashamed for a small vanity in a life that could afford few vanities. I realized that a part of me expected her and the other leaders to possess some sort of immunity from the onslaught of images that feed every American’s insecurities-the slender models in the fashion magazines, the square-jawed men in fast cars-images to which I myself was vulnerable and from which I had sought protection.

I love that Obama gets it about "the onslaught of images." That's why I want to start a band called The True Iconoclasts. Smash images. It's like Sex and the City and Friends, like magazines and movie stars; even though you know that the images are glossed and styled and Not Real, they provide a nonstop background noise against which, reflexively, you measure your own life and look and, of course, find them lacking.

Then there are these lines, from a story in this Sunday's Times about good deals for first-time renters now being more available than before in the city:

Maggie Hawryluk, a freelance publicist, graduated from Hofstra University last year. She decided to look in Astoria because she knew some Hofstra alumni who had settled there. She shares a $1,600 two-bedroom with another Hofstra graduate, a dancer who works as a waitress when she’s not auditioning.

“I guess it’s the same idea as immigrants — they find ways to stay near one another,” Ms. Hawryluk said. “When I’m out on the weekends, I’m constantly running into people that I know from college, and it’s nice to see a familiar face.”

I like that take on things. It's much more forgiving and clear-eyed than most of the vitriol that gets spouted and hand-wringing that gets done over gentrification. People want to live near others who are like them, simple as that—Trinidadians with Trinidadians, Russians with Russians, liberal arts school graduates with liberal arts school graduates.* No one ever complains about the former two groups clumping together, so why the latter?

Also RE: gentrification—I'm pretty much 100 percent over feeling at all bad about it, because A) That's the way the market works and B) What's the alternative? That no one should ever be allowed to relocate from the town in which they were born? Or, if you are a college graduate and you do move to New York City, that you should be required by law to live in the West or East Villages and disallowed elsewhere?

It's just not workable. People have to be able to move wherever they feel like. That's kind of an essential American value, I think. Now, of course, the government does have a role in preventing or mitigating some of the inherent predations of the market, in real estate and in all other areas. But swinging the pendulum too far in the direction of regulation is a bad idea.

Finally, I'm now on Twitter. If you want to follow me, my name is hrslaton. Here's a link to my page.

* Whether or not this—people desiring to clump together with others like them—is a good or bad thing is another story entirely; but I do think it's a very human thing. And arguing against human nature is a losing battle.

Robots Are Disappointing Me

2009-05-08T14:17:00.002-04:00

Last night, in a fit of misguided hope, I OnDemanded the movie Transformers for an hour or so before bed. I'd never seen it before. What I saw of it, though, was hilarious. Literally within the first 30 seconds Michael Bay deploys no fewer than six cliches about American military men: There's one guy who speaks Spanish (everyone reprimands him, "English!") and talks fondly about his mother's cooking; another who says all he wants to do "is hold my baby girl for the first time"; and another who waxes rhapsodic, in a you've-gotta-be-kidding-me Boston accent, about a ballgame at Fenway, "a cold hot dog and a flat beer." At any rate, it's kind of hilarious how rapidly the movie hurls its stereotypes and cliches; it's like a kid gorging on candy because he's afraid some adult is seconds away from taking it from him. So I turned it off and went to bed.

This summer, like every summer, is a big one for big, dumb movies. Some are dumb and fun, but most are dumb and insulting, and make you feel sad and disappointed for even hoping against hope that maybe a summer movie could live up to its firecracker hype, maybe make you feel how seeing Independence Day at the dome theater that one summer in Little Rock made you feel: frisson, sexy, excited; cordite on the air, rolled-down windows, wind whipping, girls.

Mostly they are not like that. There are reasons why. Guess who knows them: David Foster Wallace (I know, I know). Here's the first two paragraphs from his excellent dissection of James Cameron's T2, which is apropos given the imminent arrival of the fourth Terminator movie:

1990s moviegoers who have sat clutching their heads in both awe and disappointment at movies like "Twister" and "Volcano" and "The Lost World" can thank James Cameron's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" for inaugurating what's become this decade's special new genre of big-budget film: Special Effects Porn. "Porn" because, if you substitute F/X for intercourse, the parallels between the two genres become so obvious they're eerie. Just like hard-core cheapies, movies like "Terminator 2" and "Jurassic Park" aren't really "movies" in the standard sense at all. What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes -- scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff -- strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.

"T2," one of the highest-grossing movies in history, opened six years ago. Think of the scenes we all still remember. That incredible chase and explosion in the L.A. sluiceway and then the liquid metal T-1000 Terminator walking out of the explosion's flames and morphing seamlessly into his Martin-Milner-as-Possessed-by-Hannibal-Lecter corporeal form. The T-1000 rising hideously up out of that checkerboard floor, the T-1000 melting headfirst through the windshield of that helicopter, the T-1000 freezing in liquid nitrogen and then collapsing fractally apart. These were truly spectacular images, and they represented exponential advances in digital F/X technology. But there were at most maybe eight of these incredible sequences, and they were the movie's heart and point; the rest of "T2" is empty and derivative, pure mimetic polycelluloid.

Here's the link to the full thing. You'll need to be prepared if you plan to plunk down $12 (that's New York City prices) to see the new Transformers or Terminator FXtravaganzas this summer.

On the Poles

2009-05-06T08:53:00.002-04:00

When people learn that I worked on Antarctica for a while, the first thing they usually ask, with a hint of incredulity, is "Why?" I usually tell them that I've always been obsessed with the place, and that it's probably the closest thing to being on another planet I'll ever get to experience ... but beyond that I don't really get into the metaphysics of Antarctica, and its psychic pull on me.

But Tim Wu, in a great piece published today on Slate, does. Here's a couple of key (and beautiful) paragraphs that come after he compares the North and South Poles to Eden:

The signs of Eden are everywhere in Antarctica. The penguins and seals don't seem to have learned, as most animals have, that humans are fallen creatures, best avoided. In the far south, the penguins spring out of the sea and waddle over to meet you, acting more like kindergarten children than wild birds. You feel you're at a reunion with lost friends and wonder why we have such bad relations with most animals.

That's very true. The penguins will just walk right up to you, and the skua birds (scavengers) are totally fearless ... they will divebomb you if you are carrying a blue tray from the galley, which they have learned means food.

Every so often, an iceberg floats by that is grander and more beautiful than any cathedral, though it lacks any history or even a name. What's almost as shocking as its appearance is its anonymity: beauty untainted by fame. Most of these perfect objects will never be seen by human eyes. They float around and slowly melt by themselves, unappreciated and utterly indifferent to that fact.

Again, very true, though I didn't see any icebergs (I was on land). But I did sit atop Observation Hill in the lee of a rock and look out onto the frozen sea with the sun hanging in a sentient, old way over it; and the quiet of the sea ice and the quiet of the mountains, the boundless white, hypnotized me.

Kitchen Conspirators

2009-05-03T15:19:00.005-04:00

Back last September, my friend Michael Cirino, along with a newer friend, Danielle Florio, and two of her "co-conspirators" (keep reading) hosted a Panamanian-themed dinner at their loft apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The dinner was filmed for a new Food Network show called Kitchen Conspirators (in which Danielle and her two co-chefs star; Michael, who some of you may know from the pig roasts I've talked about on this blog, was the guest chef for the evening). Below is the dinner portion of the episode, in which I and my friend Jessica Wurst, who I brought with me, can be seen several times. Check it out—It's a great video, and was a lovely dinner: peach gazpacho, shrimp and risotto served in half a coconut, and for dessert, iced coffee served with tobacco-infused whipped cream. Here's the home page for the Kitchen Conspirators series, where you can find the recipes for these dishes, and here's a link to a video of the dinner (I had to take down the embedded video I had up earlier because it was automatically playing whenever you loaded this page).

Boise

2009-04-29T22:14:00.006-04:00

The way you pronounced your home town—
boy see—still sticks with me
half a decade later
when my boss stops by my cubicle
to suggest a city—boy zee—for my story.

I don’t correct her; rather
I allow myself a brief reverie
of saying goodbye on the ice runway
on a sun-wracked January Monday,
when someone took a picture of us
"because we looked so sad."

All of the Beer and All of the Cupcakes

2009-04-27T23:09:00.005-04:00

Last Friday was my niece Emma’s first birthday. I spent a good portion of it doing one of the favorite Little Rock activities: running errands. But after the party, which was at the park across the street from my parents’ house, where I lived throughout high school, I went to see my friend John Beachboard at his restaurant, Zaza, a salad and wood-oven pizza joint in the Heights, Little Rock’s progressive and old-money enclave.

I first met John at Dunbar Junior High, where we both went but didn’t run in the same crowds. I vaguely knew of him since then, but didn’t hang out with him until college, when I met him again through my best friend and roommate Joe, with whom John’d been in a band in high school. John was overweight then, and his party trick was to flex his glutes and let people to touch his bottom, which, as a result of carrying around his bulk, would be hard as wood when flexed. John could drink copious amounts of beer, and was mostly a gentle giant, but when messed with could fight like grizzly bear.

But it wasn’t until after college, after Fayetteville and Oxford, that I really got to know John, in New York. He and his longtime friend and bandmate David Slade came up to New York around when I did, right after we all graduated from school. I lived in the East Village my first year in the city, and John and David and another guy lived on the northwestern edge of SoHo. Right after they got the apartment, which was a beauty (though small), I was over at their house and we were up on their roof, and John was marveling to me about where he lived.

“All my life I’ve heard about SoHo,” John said, “and now I fucking live here.”

I knew how he felt. Though I hadn’t lusted after New York for much of my life at all—I hadn’t even really thought about it much until my senior year of college, when I was trying to figure out what to do—when I got there I got swept up quick in the romance of it all, a humming city that lived out on the street.

We spent a lot of nights on John’s roof. I came to think of it as John’s roof more than John’s and David’s, since John and I hung out much more. We’d sit out in chairs on the roof and drink beer and smoke cigarettes and look at the Empire State Building, which dominated the northern view. Sometimes we would cook up on the roof, on a little grill John had, and would sit on a piece of cardboard and eat barbecued chicken and get real messy and roll around drunk.

That was a good time. I was working a couple blocks away on Hudson Street and oftentimes I’d come right over after work, in that first late summer, and sit up on the roof with John. After a few beers I’d walk home to the East Village.

Then September 11th happened. While the planes were hitting the Twin Towers, I was in the shower. I walked out onto East 7th Street and turned west, to walk to Hudson Street, when I saw a fleet of emergency vehicles, fire engines, and cop cars scream down First Avenue. I turned south onto First and saw, way down south, smoke way up high. The Towers themselves were obscured by other buildings, but I knew that nothing downtown was that high up, and that it must be the Trade Center. When I got to where I could see the Towers themselves, I saw massive burning holes in both buildings.

I kept walking to work because I didn’t really know what else to do, and my cell phone wouldn’t work, so I wanted to be able to use the landlines at my office, which I figured would be better. So I made my way over southwest, toward SoHo. Near NYU I passed the upper deck running track, which is in full view of the towers, and was shocked to see someone working out, running around the track as if it were just another blue fall Tuesday. I stood at the corner of Thompson and LaGuardia Place and watched as the first tower fell. Everyone in the street was crying, myself included, and some were screaming. Everywhere cars were opened to the street with their radios on, with groups of people gathered around, listening.

After the first tower fell I went on in to work, to see about my co-workers and to use the phones. A few people were there, including my British boss, Martin Dunford, who looked gray-greenish and like he was about to be sick. Martin told us to go home.

So of course I went over to John’s. I didn’t know what else to do, couldn’t imagine being alone at that time, and didn’t know how to get in touch with anyone else. I buzzed the buzzer and John came down, and we went up onto the roof, to see what we could see. While I was in my office, the second tower had fallen, and the southerly view from John’s roof was blocked by other buildings, so there wasn’t much to do but speculate on what had happened and look at the dark plume of smoke that towered toward Brooklyn. We hung out on the roof for a while in the bright sunshine, looking down over the edge of the building onto the street below, when an eighteen-wheeler, like a sparrow blown off course in a tornado, appeared below us, on Charlton Street.

The truck seemed to be stuck, and this caused the nearby cops to freak out and order the driver from the cab at gunpoint, fearing the out-of-place truck to be part of a second wave of attacks, via truck bomb. The driver laid facedown on the pavement and cops swarmed John’s building, guns drawn, telling everyone to get out, which we did, hustling down the stairs and across the street with everyone else, fearful ourselves of a bomb—it seemed like anything could happen that day, as I suppose it did.

We decided we would go over to my apartment in the East Village, because I had a TV where we could see what was happening. We walked over there and got 40-oz. beers along the way. I needed a drink. When we got to my apartment we went inside the cave of a studio room, which I shared with a friend of mine, and turned on the TV. I only had a few channels, on account of no cable service, but we saw that all of the non-news channels had suspended their programming. I remember the Food Network being just being a static screen announcing that programming had been suspended. We clicked to the New York 1 news channel and cracked the beers. But after the first few sips of beer, which normally I never turned down, it began to feel wrong to be drinking, and John agreed. So we decided to leave and go up to Beth Israel to give blood.

But this isn’t about September 11th. It’s more about John, and his leaving New York for Arkansas, and his success now, and my missing him and those days.

More TK (that means "To Be Continued")

The Fight Over Aggregation, and TimesDigest

2009-04-16T10:30:00.004-04:00

Today on Slate, Jack Shafer has an interesting story about the online “newspaper” The Huffington Post, and how “the media giants have put the Web's journalistic ‘parasites’—blogs, aggregators, Google—on notice that they will no longer allow them to pinch their copy without reimbursement.” Check out HuffPo here.

What Shafer is talking about is the practice of excerpting news stories and other content, with attribution and a link to the full story. Oftentimes, though—at least in the way The Huffington Post practices it—the excerpted stories can appear, to the untrained eye, like original content. And some are up in arms about this.

Shafer goes on to outline the long and colorful American tradition of stealing stories and rewriting them (I am aware of the irony in what I am doing right now), citing the turn-of-the-century newspaper wars between the New York Journal (led by William Randolph Hearst) and the New York World (ditto Joseph Pulitzer).

Shafer then discusses how print media titans like The New York Times could learn a thing or two from The Huffington Post, and even points to an example in which The New York Times already has an in-house answer for this: the TimesDigest.

Unfamiliar with what the TimesDigest is? Well, I was, too, until I went down to Antarctica for six months to work as a dining attendant (read as: dishwasher) at McMurdo Station. Every day in the galley (dining hall) at McMurdo, there would be copies of the TimesDigest, an eight- or nine-page digest of the top stories, opinion pieces, and more (including the crossword!) from that day’s New York Times. We all read it, and failed, as the week progressed, at doing the crossword.

It was a lovely connection, while marooned down on the Ice, to the outside world and the U.S. It contains the same stories as in The New York Times, just slashed and cut down. For Jack Shafer’s review of the TimesDigest, see here on Slate. Apparently the TimesDigest is mostly distributed to cruise ships, hotels, military bases, and the like, but you can download a sample copy of today’s issue (in PDF format) here.

I have been thinking about interiority

2009-04-11T14:14:00.006-04:00

This all arose or re-arose, bubbled back up, on the C train the other day, when, pulling out from the station, we passed the platform entrance and the station agent booth, which was strung on the inside of the glass with a strand of multicolored Christmas lights. The colors looked supersaturated, like old big good glass-bulb lights, and the interior of the booth looked warm and bright—at least it did as I glimpsed it through the windows.

How lovely to be sitting on a high, cushioned chair in that warm booth, with all the workers streaming past in their rain-flecked black, and to be nodding off, chin on chest and hands folded across stomach. A radio on, a stillness—But a peopled, a warm stillness, a cozy outpost in the middle of the chilly, wet city; Not like the stillness at home, home sick from work, when the daytime TV is bad and sad and it feels like everyone has left. Nor tapping a knife on one’s wrist, Law & Order a sick muddle. The couch.

But this dream of interiority began longer ago. The first time I remember was when in junior high I would ride with my dad in his red Mazda hatchback to school. We took the back way out of the neighborhood—which was a little rough around the edges and from which, within a couple of years, we moved—past the brick square that used to seem so high and that we used to climb on and which, from a valve on its front, sometimes gushed water; past the road that ran down to the low-rent pool and the poisoned pond beyond; then up the hill and a right down the hill, past the Easter Seals on the right.

The way I remember it, it was always cold. The car was small, its metal thin, the seats vinyl, and by that early point in the weekdaily trip the heat hadn’t yet kicked in.

From my place in the passenger seat, I could see across the Easter Seals parking lot and into the building through a portrait window. The room had overstuffed armchairs and sofas, and a TV. It looked very bright and warm, a little tableau vivant. I do not remember ever seeing people inside. (If I had, it might have depressed me, as Easter Seals was an organization that worked with the physically and mentally handicapped.) Before it was an Easter Seals, it was a roller-skating rink, called, I believe, 8 Wheels. But that was when I was way younger. I don’t remember skating at 8 Wheels.

So we would drive on, past Easter Seals and onto Cantrell and then I-430, which connected to I-630 which connected to downtown where my dad worked and I went to school. I imagine rainslick streets, a mist of gray rain, not a thunderstorm because a thunderstorm has its own excitement, when an electrical excitement is small and giddy in the middle of your chest, thrilled, like the leaping electricity at the center of one of those globes on which you put your fingers and the lightning leaps to your fingers.

No: This was a different rain I remember, and the junior high was a sad place on days like that, a damp, brown, hard place of marble, brick, and stone, and the hallways and classrooms felt like the end of something.

All I wanted was to be in that room at Easter Seals, or in my dad's Mazda after the heat'd kicked in, the oldies station on the radio, the smell of my dad's aftershave and the leather or vinyl of the car's seats. Inside, contained within, warm.

Another time I had a dream of interiority. Freshman year of college, and I'd driven in my 1974 sky-blue Volkswagen Bug up to Columbia, Missouri, to visit my girlfriend, who was going to school at Mizzou. It was a long drive up, in the fall I think, through the severe ridges and pines of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, highways slashed across the land and feeling very on my own, in a thrilled way.

I visited my girlfriend and did not behave as I would have liked. I was jealous and said dumb things about the length of a bathrobe. I met her roommate and friends and was very judgmental and self-righteous.

But pulling into town was something else, on my own, one of the first few times I'd ever done such a thing, and it felt like arriving, coming over the bluff and seeing the city and feeling very separate from everything, seeing a place I'd never seen before on my own.

On the way home it was raining, hard. The highway in a VW Bug in a hard rain is not a place to be. The eighteen-wheelers scream by and buffet the car, and you have to keep a steady grip on the wheel, ready to correct, so you don't get blown off the road.

After a while my car started to stop working. I misremember what exactly happened, but I made it to a auto repair shop on the side of the highway, up on a hill (which seemed like a counterintuitive altitude at which to erect an auto shop). Raining hard and the auto shop was dark inside, though open. It was cold. They could fix my car but it would be a few hours.

I went into the waiting room of the shop, which was dark and empty, save for a few chairs and a TV. It was drowsy warm in the room, and there were no people. I turned on the TV and Mission Impossible, with Tom Cruise, was on. I watched it and I was maybe as happy—"not hating anything, not wanting anything"—as I have ever been, quiet, warm, and safe inside during a rainstorm in a waiting room in an auto shop on the highway home to Arkansas.

On Coffee

2009-04-10T10:37:00.001-04:00

All across the city, everybody is making coffee.
In the shops, the bodegas, McDonald’s, diners,
apartment kitchens, depreciated condominiums:
Turning on kitchen lights with a clack or click
and reaching down the filters or French press,
then grinding the beans or uncapping canister,
slinging grounds, swishing sound, into the filter.

Then a scent which is like a presence or person
appears as everyone stands, sleeping, eyes shut
waiting for the coffee to perc. Going back into
half of a dream, dream epilogue, denouement,
the flutish sound of the Vltava River receding
in Smetana’s “Moldau,” night visions receding.
Wrapping things up and the day getting going.

So a person comes into the room, as in winter
when home for Christmas, coming downstairs,
the coffee’s already on and your house is full
and alive. Living alone, one can set the maker
the night before, but the effect is hollowed out.
Still it is some sort of sacrament, the moment
coffee is tasted: One rare undegraded example.

An Oldie But an Oldie

2009-04-01T22:24:00.001-04:00

Austin Poem

And what it all came down to was
faces sheened with sweat and beer cans,
cigarrettes held dangling and hesitant,
eardrums pulsing and heads throbbing
while the waves washed over and into
and through bodies in tight jeans worn
with years and snuff cans, wallets
and token key trinkets given by girlfriends
long gone and friends miles away,
for remembering.

The way light reflected from shoulderblades
and shadows marked cheekbones with hollows
and high points that could be read like Tarot,
the shape of hips and tanning, sandals,
and uncertainty – where go? what do?
Listen: it will explain itself, in time,
if only you shun earplugs and sunglasses,
if you let yourself believe you can be witness
to something big, that something big, even if it’s small,
is still possible, like the fixin’ to die rag,
or a gong and different camera angles:
don’t watch the TV, on the screen up there,
because it’s not real, even if it looks close:
your angle is the best, much better than all the rest,
don’t you know that? And how many times
have I told you I love you? And how many times
won’t you believe me? How many times
will you shake off and turn left, 90 degrees from me,
and fold arms, slipping them, one, after, the other,
under and above each other, until they come to rest,
like a sigh, like a dream, layered and comforting
each other, when I’m left here holding a tired joint
and glasses whose frames you used to like,
flicking a lighter, on, off, flame, no-flame,
with a snick each time, our relationship’s metronome.

Here are sideburns frayed like newsprint,
red hair close-cropped and boyish, but in the style,
flower prints on summer dresses and old shirts
with patterns and holes and bits of paint and white-out,
and eyes drifting like smoke, like empty river rafts,
hunting a place to put in for the night,
find some saltback and a biscuit,
a campfire and a scarred guitar, and later on,
embers and the smell of trees, the haunt of crickets
and nightbirds, coming from everywhere, surrounding
from all points and permeating until the tingle comes
and the first rays of the rising sun break.

Streetlight humming and heightening,
light from the Tower spilling down and shaking,
still nervous after these several decades,
but also, still there.
Talk and blonde hair and eyes furtively met,
the glint of green or hazel and thinking of cats
creeping at night through dark alleyways full
of stumbling and linked arms and silly songs
sung by friends, off-key and maybe not remembered
in the morning – let’s not consider years from now,

No, let’s be now.
Skipping and lions and tigers and oh my
when he kisses you for the first time, unexpectedly,
against redbrick and white cement crumbling,
but wanted oh so badly for so long,
for all your life it seems, ever since you were in the womb,
longing for a twin, doesn’t even have to be identical,
fraternal even, just somebody to be there and hold
your hair back when you’re drunk in the street
and steadying a concrete curb with a shaking wrist,
or when your dad dies and your mom drinks whiskey,
bottles of it, in his honor, as a tribute, she says,
with mascara running and hair graying and you
pulling away, twisting in your head side to side
with arms out, flailing, looking for a doorjamb
to steady yourself under and hide from the falling plaster
and asbestos: your fault’s quite overdue.

And for you, somebody to be there so you can feel,
and not be afraid, somebody to touch your hand
in that way and have it speak encyclopedias and dictionaries,
when two decades of preachers haven’t filled you
with anything but nervousness
and a contingency plan.

Breeze through bushes and light off freshly-washed cars,
seeing the moon big in the sky, like in a movie
set in the Pacific, starring a volcano and sex.
Bicycles and cardboard, skateboards,
held hands and married couples far too young
to be anything but clutching.
Smells of beer, cops, pizza, Chinese food,
take-out in those boxes that you’ve always wanted
to have in a fridge to share with that girl
who’s never yet appeared, but the poster that flutters
across the pavement and smacks flat across the street,
on a telephone pole, just so you can read it,
makes you hope that maybe, maybe.

Neon and argon and pitchers of beer collecting drops
while lungs collect tar and nicotine ebbs and flows,
stilling the seas of turbulent growing up
and giving the flotsam and jetsam a time
to be what they are, and be good for that.
Pool cues and blue chalk and the echoing crack
of the break and the thunk-thunk of a lucky shot,
two stripes solid in the hole, quarters stacked,
chinking, chinking, plans made, broken, made again,
feeling good about having a friend who drives a stick
and drives your car okay, so you don’t have to worry.

Will to Blog Apparently Rising

2009-03-26T13:48:00.003-04:00

One:

All this brief bus ride I have been writing
two poems in my head: One a screed against
our fame-drunk nation—I feel sorry
that Natasha died, but she is no more
than anyone; she is not some blonde god—
and the other a thing addressed to You,
and the semi-sexual sound you make—
mmff—when I put my hands on your hips
and you sling your slim arms around my neck,
clinging like a baby animal to its mother.

Two:

This morning I was whistling in the mirror and noticed
how, though the sound changed dramatically—slid up and down, filliped
over the notes—my lips, poised in an "O," did not move one bit.
I thought of how much my tongue was flipping and flicking inside
the dark, small cavern of my mouth while I whistled,
how it's like the unseen flopping of thoughts behind placid faces
waiting on the early-morning subway. And on the subway, the read-out
that shows the next stop and the current time was scrambled, a chaos
of red, green, and yellow LED lights as we crossed over the bridge.

And then at work I found out that a man
I emailed with and interviewed two weeks ago
had been killed in a car crash, at 57. He was nice to speak to,
had a good email manner, and seemed like a friendly sort.
If I emailed him again
there would no longer be anyone at the other end.

The Obamas + Where the Wild Things Are

2009-03-26T08:38:00.003-04:00

This is a great story in the Times about the Obamas getting out in Washington, going to basketball games, restaurants, parts of the city not often visited by former presidents. Of course, theories are put forth as to why they are doing this—Is it just because that's how they are, or is it for political capital? I, for one, would like to believe it's just how the Obamas are; they've always lived in cities—Why wouldn't they want to get out and enjoy one of America's greatest metropolises?

At any rate, it's a cute article. I just really like that family.

Another thing I really like: The trailer for this fall's live-action Where the Wild Things Are movie, which was just released and is available in a variety of formats here. The trailer uses what sounds like a different version of a great Arcade Fire song, "Wake Up," and, though it (the trailer) gets a little bit "In a world where... ," I am confident the movie will be much weirder than it looks. Why? Because it's directed by Spike Jonze, of Being John Malkovich fame, and the big main monster is "played" by (his movements and facial expressions were recorded, and then digitally transferred onto the monster—or at least I think that's how it went, according to a friend of mine who did some camera work for the film) James Gandolfini, aka Tony Soprano, who is a supremely weird and complex actor. I want to go see him in this new play on Broadway, God of Carnage, which just got a killer review (scroll down to the jump in the middle of the page) this week in The New Yorker.

Too Long

2009-03-23T12:51:00.004-04:00

My will to blog seems, slowly, to be dying. Oh well.

Three things:

One: Wednesday is the two-year anniversary of my apartment building burning up. I had a scare last week: I woke up in the middle of the night to a smoke alarm going off, and my room filled with what appeared to be smoke. I opened the door from my bedroom out into my apartment and I couldn't see a thing—The whole room was filled with white. I was confused, didn't know what to do, wondered if the whole building was going up, and if I should try to go down the stairs or out the fire escape, what to grab, what to take ... then my mind starting piecing stuff together—the wet, the loud hissing noise; it wasn't a fire. The cap on the radiator in my living room had blown off, and the radiator was gushing steam into my apartment. So I ran downstairs and got my super and he shut off the boiler and we opened the windows and let the steam escape and eventually the pressure died and the gushing stopped and the next day he fixed it and none of my stuff was ruined. A bit of a scare, though. 1am smoke alarm wake-up calls aren't fun.

Two: Not sure if others of you have discovered this, but Gmail's search function can really ambush you. The problem? Nothing goes away, ever. So today, when I searched for the seemingly innocuous word "GPA," trying to discover if I'd written what my college GPA was anywhere in an email, Gmail dredged up an exchange between myself and an old girlfriend of mine, one who I'm not entirely over. Which of course led to me reading that email, and then more, and dots of water in my eyes. "Jesus Christ," I said, kind of having to laugh at it.

Three: Last week a friend of mine who's recently been experiencing some romantic relationship-based psychic pain related to me what his friend once told him about the pain of break-ups and lost loves. "The pain doesn't ever get any smaller," my friend's friend said. "You just get further away from it."

I like that, and I think it's very true. Only problem is when Gmail, in a flash on an unfairly cold March afternoon, finds some old bit of ocean-lost pain and holds up a funhouse passenger-side mirror to it: "Objects in the mirror appear closer than they actually are." And this will just go on, for the rest of your life—Think about it: If you stick with Gmail, theoretically you could be searching for some word 20 years down the road and instantly be tossed back into that old upheaval.

Hunter Is Interviewed Part 2

2009-03-11T15:45:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine recently interviewed me for her and another woman's blog, Whateverishly: The Greatest Blog Ever Hula'd. Here is the link.

And if you REALLY want to know more about me, here's a link to a similar thing another friend of mine did back in July of '07.

Longest Letter to the Editor Ever

2009-02-26T14:55:00.006-05:00

Dear Esquire,

I loved Tom Junod's recent ode to Waffle House, as part of your magazine's "Best Breakfasts in America" round-up. He hit the nail on the head with his "multiplicity within the homogeneity" observation. I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, which had its share of Waffle Houses. There was one on Bowman Curve, which me and my high school friends frequented, and one on Shackleford Road, where my college buddies, who went to different high schools and who I hadn't really known then, went.

But we all came from the same town, so when we would come home from school (in Northwest Arkansas) for Christmas or Thanksgiving, we would invariably get sick of our families and all go out drinking. More often than not, these nights ended at Waffle House.

You might see what's coming: We'd be at the bar, finishing up, or on the way home, humming down I-630, and we would get into a pointless yet fierce argument about which Waffle House to patronize.

Junod is right: All Waffle Houses are exactly alike. But the two of us who went to Catholic High and the Bowman Curve Waffle House would argue with the two who went to Central High and Pulaski Academy and the Shackleford Road Waffle House about which to go to. I don't even know why; the Bowman Curve one was just "our" Waffle House, and so we naturally loved it and hated theirs—it's similar, I think, to the pride and loyality assigned to local sports teams.

Somewhere along the way during college, though, my friend and I from Catholic began to relent and go to the Shackleford Road Waffle House. The reason was that, in the interim between my leaving high school for college, a quasi-bohemian clique had taken over the Bowman Curve Waffle House, where I used to go after Marine Corps JROTC events with fellow cadets.

Once, home from college, I walked alone into my Waffle House and felt utterly alienated. The place was packed with proto-hipsters. Facial hair, fedoras and porkpie hats, clove cigarettes (this was around 1999/2000, mind), and all manner of pretention had invaded it. One kid was even sitting at the counter playing a goddamned violin. I walked out and rarely returned. Now you can't even smoke in there anymore. The boho clique has cleared off. The fickle wheel of Waffle House history has turned yet again.

In our college town, there was one Waffle House we could agree on. That's because there was one Waffle House. It was out on Sixth Street, near the highway and the tiny liquor store where my roommate, with his fake ID, used to buy us beer, which we would sneak into our dorm in an empty box for a computer printer. The Waffle House was situated in a near-desolate lot that looked like it used to house a Wal-Mart. It was tiny, as Waffle Houses go, and near the road. We used to go in there, sober, and get the All-You-Can-Eat special. Like the baseball rule that you have to touch all bases when running around them, we said that you had to eat a hash browns with each plate, or else it didn't "count."

Count toward what, I don't know.

Once a few of us went and ate there, freshman year, All-You-Can-Eat. I think I did "four laps," which in the parlance meant four entrees plus four plates of hashbrowns. My friend Joe always used to say that, if you were working on an All-You-Can-Eat effort, you wanted to finish with the waffle, because the waffle was like "an expand-cake," and, if eaten first, would swell uncomfortably in one's stomach, limiting the amount one could consume.

You also were kind of required to end with a waffle; it was like sticking the landing.

After this gluttonous effort—which we really did just because we were bored, and had that delicious expanse of free time particular to college life, and which really never comes again—I went out into the parking lot with my friends and leaned, doubled over, groaning against my sky-blue VW bug. I thought I had damaged myself. They asked if I needed to be driven the 0.5 miles home. (I declined.) Keep in mind we were stone-cold sober.

I got back to my dorm, curled in a fetal position on my bed, and waited for the end. At some point I went into the bathroom and tried to make myself vomit, fearing what would happen if I succeeded. (This remains the lone time I have ever tried to make myself vomit in which alcohol was not involved.)

But so that ended, and I got better. Another time, a spring afternoon during my sophmore year, Joe and I went to Waffle House by ourselves. It was a contemplative visit. School would be over soon, and I would move to Austin for the summer, and thence Oxford, in England, for the following year. Our little band would be breaking up, in some ways permanently. All leavings are like that.

Joe and I got the All-You-Can-Eat, but our hearts weren't really into it. I think we had two laps apiece. It was too nice a day, with that spring smell of fresh in the air, to gorge oneself. We talked laconically, easily, in the way of friends who don't have to say much to have a good time with one another. The door to the Waffle House was open out onto the spring day and Sixth Street. I was looking out of the door when I saw a chicken walk calmly and with no great hurry across the parking lot and across the road, entirely untroubled by traffic.

Sincerely,

Hunter Reaves Slaton

We Have a Serious Problem

2009-02-24T08:59:00.002-05:00

According to the Nielsen Co.'s "Three Screen Report" for the fourth quarter of 2008, the average American—average, mind you—watches 151 hours of TV a month, or about five hours a day.

Think about that for a minute: More then one fifth of an average American's day is taken up by sitting and watching a screen. Thirty percent sleep, 35 percent work, 20 percent TV—leaving just 15 percent of one's time free for actual human interaction.

That's the worst thing I've ever heard. I'm very glad that I basically don't ever watch TV, and so am totally outside of that particular statistic. Lately I've been watching, like, one episode of The Simpsons on DVD before I go to bed, and that's virtually all I ever watch.

Take heart! Turn them off!

The Simpsons Gets a New Opener

2009-02-17T09:20:00.003-05:00

Can you believe The Simpsons has been on for 20 years? Incredible. I don't get to see the show much anymore, but whenever I do see it something always cracks me up at least once per episode.

This past Sunday night, coinciding with The Simpsons' switch to HD, the show got a new opening sequence. It's well worth watching, with a lot of in-jokes that long-time fans will appreciate:

Whither New York?

2009-02-13T18:39:00.001-05:00

This is where I live:
“The epicenter of the crisis
and the nation’s largest city.”
I do not have the best job.
I do not live in Manhattan.
I don’t even work in Manhattan!

But I do live in Brooklyn, where I am afforded
the opportunity to leave for work
at seven a.m. and encounter
a sky that, upon exiting my apartment building,
which often smells of good cooking,
pork chops and Dominican food,
makes me gasp with its gaudy beauty.

The blues and pinks!
The clouds and sky that seem, like an animation cel,
to be lit joyously from behind
by a beneficent light.
Then the greens
and reds of changing stoplights, the rust
Don’t Walk and white Walk symbols
that, if you listen on a quiet corner, change
with a clunk-clunk.

I have all the coffee
and cigarettes I need. I fit my fingers
under my living-room window,
to facilitate a cross-breeze.
I write quickly—if not well—
with a cheap pen that pleases me.

Songs apply to me. “Back
in the New York Groove.” “A New York
State of Mind.” They can’t take that away from me.
They cannot kill or jail me.
They cannot make me leave.

Though I may choose to leave. When it comes,
if it comes,
it will be hard. I’ll hate to go.
I’ll say goodbye to people and,
almost more importantly, places:
Corner Bistro, Central Park in the fall on Marathon Day,
the whipping flags of Rockefeller Center where once
I laid on my back on the stone slabs
and mourned a girl I no longer mourn.

The city has become a part of me
and I have become a part of it.

It does not matter if the city doesn’t know it.

Defriending People on Facebook; or, The Times Gets Bitchy

2009-01-29T15:14:00.007-05:00

There's a fun article in today's Times about the etiquette and practice of "defriending" (or, as the paper asserts is the more accepted parlance, "unfriending") Facebook friends. The germ of the article came from a recent online promotion by Burger King that allowed you to "sacrifice" ten of your Facebook friends in exchange for a free Whopper. Until it was shut down by Facebook for violating a user agreement clause, Burger King claimed it had ended 234,000 friendships.

Nevertheless—That's not what I want to talk about. You can, and should, read the Times article, which is here. The part I want to show is this weird breaking of the Times' businesslike remove in this article. Here are the few paras—The last one is the best, but you have to read up:

Nor does Facebook care to be a party to what might be called punitive unfriending, banishing someone from your network for violating one or more of your personal rules of conduct. Perhaps someone annoys you by posting an obsessive number of status updates, or expresses himself in a way that you consider obnoxious?

Those were the excuses that Ehren S., a former co-worker of mine who apparently unfriended me sometime this past spring, offered up recently for giving me the digital heave-ho.

“I believe it was based on a passive-aggressive update of yours to which I sighed, kinda shook my head and pressed ‘delete from friends,’ ” she confessed by e-mail. “I find negativity a bit tiresome and don’t have the patience for it.”

Fine. Though forgive me for pointing out that Ehren, who asked that I not use her full name, initially tried to fib her way out of the awkwardness by saying she did it for a Whopper.

Ha! The writer basically just said, "Fuck you, Ehren" in the pages of the world's most widely-read newspaper. (I don't know if the Times is actually the world's most widely-read newspaper, but whatever.)

Things I Find Hilarious and/or Amazing

2009-01-29T08:23:00.005-05:00

I don't know why, but I find this, from the front page of today's NYTimes.com, hilarious:
There's just this weird desperation and panicky-ness to the headline, don't you think? You can easily imagine an explanation point after "aid": "Ford Has Its Worst Year Ever but Won't Ask for Aid! And You'll Never Meet a Nice Girl If You Don't Go Out!" Love it.

Item: I received the following email earlier this week from a good friend of mine. I laughed harder than I have in a long while. This friend writes:

I just glanced at the NY Times crossword puzzle. The clues for 21 and 23 across were "deface" and "into a pill bottle," respectively. When I merely glanced, my mind saw "defecate into a pill bottle." I thought to myself, "Wow, there is a single word or phrase for that other than the phrase itself."

Follow-up note: Clue 23 had actually been "info on a pill bottle." But nevertheless.

And finally, a great paragraph from a story in yesterday's Good Old Times, about a smoked bacon and sausage concoction called The Bacon Explosion:

He bought about $20 worth of bacon and Italian sausage from a local meat market. As it lay on the counter, he thought of weaving strips of raw bacon into a mat. The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of sausage, covered that with a crunchy layer of cooked bacon, and rolled it up tight.

That is just an incredible handful of sentences: "The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of sausage." That reminds me of the Simpsons wherein Homer, at the breakfast table, orders Bart for some reason to "butter his bacon"—and then, of course, to also "bacon his butter."

For the Bacon Explosion recipe (with amazing or, depending on how you feel about it, horrifying photos), go here.

For the full Times story about the Bacon Explosion, go here.

On the Closing of Guantanamo

2009-01-27T08:59:00.003-05:00

In this op-ed piece published in The Daily News on Sunday, Michael Burke, the brother of an FDNY captain killed on 9/11, speaks out against the closing of Guantanamo. I sympathize with Burke, but what he advocates is wrong—and, thankfully, with the inauguration of President Obama, it looks like we are moving away from this being the dominant mode of thinking.

The whole op-ed piece is sort of insane, but here are a few highlights:

Obama and the Democrats have had a blind spot for 9/11 and have yet to show they have an ounce of understanding what happened that day.

Here is why we were attacked: Muslim extremists hate Americans and want us dead. Our policies in no way influenced the vitriol perpetuated on innocent Americans on Sept. 11, 2001.

Is that it? They “hate our freedom”? Why? What do they care about our freedom? In fact, what they—the largely Saudi highjackers—hated was U.S. support for the Saudi government, plus our backing of Israel vs. the Palestinians.

Contrary to what Burke says, our policies greatly influenced the “vitriol perpetuated … Sept. 11, 2001.”

Burke goes on:

And we do not enhance our Constitution by applying it to those it was never meant to serve. Rather, the move diminishes and threatens the foundation on which our laws are built.

It’s true, the Constitution may not have been intended to serve non-U.S. citizens, but that’s what’s called following the letter and not the spirit of the law. There is another founding American document that pretty clearly addresses how we should treat others, even those who have committed great crimes against us. It’s called the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Got that? All men. Not just Americans. In addition: If America is meant to be a “Beacon on a Hill,” as so many on the Right maintain, shouldn’t we treat all individuals according to the same Bill of Rights that we live under, namely the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth amendments?

More from Burke:

It is impossible to fight the war on terrorism, like every war, under the Constitution. Consequently, we cannot convict our enemies under it. They will get off. Once free, they will, despite having enjoyed the benevolence of our constitutional rights, strike us again. The Constitution then becomes a means of our destruction.

It's true, the Constitution will become the means of our destruction—but not in the way Burke is saying. Rather, if we erode the rights established by the Constitution in dealing with criminals or suspected criminals, we move one step closer to eroding the safety, security, and—most importantly—liberty of our own citizens. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Finally, Burke closes his op-ed with this:

With this order to close Guantanamo, the countdown to the next attack has begun.

That's just stupid, hysterical, and fear-mongering. I would say I expect more from The Daily News—but I don't.

Think Our Losing Streak Is Done

2009-01-24T00:15:00.002-05:00

It's a been a good week.

On Tuesday, my officemates and I gathered in our company's boardroom to watch Obama take the oath of office. As you may know, Chief Justice Roberts and President Obama stumbled a bit over the oath, prompting a "re-do" (just to be on the constitutional safe side) of the oath on Wednesday.

I think, though, that Barack's reaction to the stumble on the part of Justice Roberts was telling. What did Obama do, at a mistake made during one of the most important points in his life thus far? He chuckled. Now that's the temperment I want in office.

Another exchange this week between Barack and Republican lawmakers, that I just read about in a New York Times story, is also telling:

Yet in a polite but pointed exchange with the No. 2 House Republican, Eric Cantor of Virginia, Mr. Obama took note of the parties’ fundamental differences on tax policy toward low-wage workers, and insisted that his view would prevail.

At issue is Mr. Obama’s proposal that his tax breaks for low- and middle-income workers, including his centerpiece “Making Work Pay” tax credit, be refundable — that is, that the benefits also go to workers who earn too little to pay income taxes but who pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. Republicans generally oppose giving such refunds to people who pay no income taxes.

“We just have a difference here, and I’m president,” Mr. Obama said to Mr. Cantor, according to Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who was at the meeting. Mr. Emanuel said that Mr. Obama was being lighthearted and that lawmakers of both parties had laughed.

Mr. Cantor, in an interview later, had a similar recollection. He said the president had told him, “You’re correct, there’s a philosophical difference, but I won, so we’re going to prevail on that.”

“He was very straightforward,” Mr. Cantor added. “There was no disrespect, but it was very matter-of-fact.”

I like that. It demonstrates Obama's reasonableness and good humor—something that's been sorely missing from our past eight years of government. Here's to keeping up this tone.

My Blog Is in Great Abeyance

2009-01-16T08:44:00.004-05:00

Yesterday a plane crash-landed on the Hudson River. Everybody lived, thanks in large part to the pilot, who sounds like an all-around stand-up, cool-headed fellow. Maybe we should elect him president? OH WAIT WE ALREADY DID AND HE GETS SWORN IN ON TUESDAY.

But so: Today, in one of the Times stories about the crash, I came across this paragraph. Usually you don't see such poetic language in Times news stories, so this was refreshing to read. It paints a perfect picture of the scene yesterday afternoon, in the middle of the cold, cold river:

Over the next hour, as a captivated city watched continuous television reports and the Hudson turned from gold to silver in the gathering winter twilight, all of the passengers, including at least one baby, and both pilots and all three flight attendants, were transferred to the rescue boats — a feat that unfolded as the white-and-blue jetliner continued to drift south.

Beautiful. More TK. I promise I haven't forgotten you all.

Emmy, my family, and Dracula

2008-12-29T13:17:00.002-05:00

This is my niece Emma:

(Taken by Jacob Slaton.)

This is my family:

(Also taken by Jacob.)

This is my buddy Joe and his poor, long-suffering, lovely wife Holly:

(Taken by someone else.)

Sparks

2008-12-19T09:42:00.004-05:00

I read today that MillerCoors is neutering Sparks, its popular, radioactive-colored alcoholic energy drink (or maybe that's energetic alcohol drink?), by removing all its caffeine, taurine, ginseng, and guarana. No more will Sparks be liquid cocaine.

Herewith, one of the best paragraphs ever, from the Wall Street Journal blog entry in which I read of Sparks' defanging:

Still, the [attorneys general] noted in their own statement that MillerCoors has also agreed to “cease particular marketing themes that appeal to underage youth, eliminating advertisements that feature a bright orange-stained tongue and not renewing its contract with William Ocean, an air guitar champion who does a back flip onto an opened can of Sparks at all of his shows.” They add MillerCoors will discontinue its Sparks Web site, “which looks like it was created by a college freshman.”

That's why you read, kids—Because every once in a great while you come across a sentence or two like that.

My niece

2008-12-16T10:06:00.002-05:00

Post No. 300—Or, Wa Wa Wee Wa! (Redux)

2008-12-12T12:08:00.008-05:00

That's right, Dear and Faithful Long-time Reader. This is Post No. 300 of FIGHTING FIRE WITH UNLIT MATCHES (now bigger, in bold, and in all caps). In honor of this auspicious occasion, lets take a look back, shall we?

This blog's first entry was posted on October 31st, 2005, a little more than three years ago. It was about some words I like, including "pogonip" and "snowclone," as well as Why I Hate Halloween and Why Last Night's Party (the photo website, not the party) Is Dumb.

My one-hundredth entry was posted on December 18th, 2006, less than one week shy of exactly two years ago. It was a sort-of review of the Beatles "album"/Cirque du Soleil soundtrack Love. (It—meaning the entry, not the album— is not very interesting. But feel free to click through.)

Post No. 200 entered the world on November 1st, 2007—again, about a month and a half more than one year ago. This post I'm kind of proud of. It's a poem about, on a sun-struck fall day, eating dessert with a friend after a movie, and talking about who from college we still talk to.

And now here we are at Post No. 300, on December 12th, 2008, three years and 1.5 months after I started this blog. Suffice it to say, a lot has happened. It's been nice to have this and to write in it, and to occasionally have people tell me that they've really enjoyed something I've placed here.

With that in mind, here's this (Happy holidays!, and thanks for reading):

Two Meals

1.

Cameras were everywhere, both still
and video, in the hot Brooklyn loft apartment.
Periodically, a boom mike swung overhead
of the long table at which we were seated.
It was a dinner party that was being filmed.
Across from me and my date was a lawyer
and his wife. I kept saying to the lawyer—
seated diagonally across from me,
who worked in the district attorney’s office
and whose brother was a friend of mine,
also present, snapping pictures, stonily silent—
I kept saying things like, when the mic neared,
“So how much does it cost really to buy a judge?”

Somehow, as people at dinner parties searching
for topics are wont to do, we got on the subject
of old jobs, in high school and college. I told
about the summer I worked in the hot dog stand
of the minor league ballpark at Ray Winder Field.
That summer seemed like many summers, or the ideal
of a summer. At least it seems that way in memory.

Then the lawyer said, “Yeah, Andy”—his brother—
“is really the only one of us who’s living the dream,”
meaning taking pictures, traveling. I could identify.

The lawyer continued: “My best summer job was
the summer I cleaned pools. All day I’d just clean
pools and listen to Talking Heads on my Walkman.”

And the scene came to me in a flash:
T-shirt, shorts, flip-flops: Handsome Tom,
having not yet met his wife or moved
to the city, having not yet attended law school,
the blue of the pool echoing the sky’s own blue,
the summer after college and no plans yet made,
calmly trawling the pool with the net-on-a-stick tool,
the Talking Heads’ polyrhythms coming in
from the cassette through the cord and on into
his ears, between which was an untroubled mass
exulting, lightweight, in the methodical
and the elementary: warmth, sun, sky, pool.

2.

This was later, on a Sunday in early October
on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Brunch.
My friend was telling me that on the way
to meet me, she’d passed by a building
on Smith Street that was besieged by firemen.
They were ripping and scrabbling at the side
of a building in which an electrical fire
was smoldering. The fighters-to-fire ratio
fell heavily in favor of the fighters, and so
a crowd had gathered to watch. “But,”
my friend said, “There never ended up being
any big flames. Eventually everyone moved on.”

“Sometimes there are big flames,” I said,
“Like when my place burned.” “That’s true,” she said,
“I remember the pictures. And then once
when I was little, there was a big fire
in the middle of the night on our street, and we all”—
meaning her family, including eight-year-old Maya—
“came outside to watch, and all the neighbors did, too.
Just stood in the street and watched the place burn.”

Then I saw Maya, too, on a dark New England street
in the middle of the night with her mother, sister,
brother, and father before he died, dressed
in a thin night-shirt with bed-mussed hair, holding
the hand of an adult as she looked up, face upturned,
bare feet on the asphalt, still-warm from the day’s sun,
orange light flickering over her face, which even then
bore foreshadowings of the beauty that came later—
Looked up with a child’s eyes at the whump and crash
of a big house being taken apart by fire—
and behind her eyes was an unformed mass that saw
the fire not as a tragedy, but merely a heretofore
unseen assemblage of sound, light, and heat.

QUIZ

2008-12-11T08:42:00.004-05:00

Who are news outlets saying that President-Elect Obama will name as his Secretary of Energy?

A) The director of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation.
B) A former venture capitalist and chemicals company CEO.
C) A Nobel prize-winning experimental physicist and director of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory research facility, at UC Berkeley, where he is a professor.

The answer is "C," and his name is Steven Chu. The other two choices were George W. Bush's Secretaries of Energy. The New York Times writes this about Dr. Chu:

"At the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, he has sponsored research into biofuels and solar energy and has been a strong advocate of controlling greenhouse gas emissions."

It's nice to see that Obama is bringing the smart. Also it's nice to see that Obama is bringing the not-bought-and-sold-by-the-oil-industry.

Nick Adams

2008-12-09T18:39:00.002-05:00

I just finished reading The Nick Adams Stories, by Ernest Hemingway. My roommate got it for me, along with two other "manly" books of short stories, for my 29th birthday. (Thanks Steve!)

Man, what a book. I've read some Hemingway before—I guess just The Sun Also Rises, though maybe another; I forget—but this one really bowled me over. I know it's probably cliched and old-news to say, but reading this book really has revolutionized how I think about short stories.

One story, "Big Two-Hearted River," particularly struck me. Not much happens in it. Nick Adams gets off a train in some burned-over country, and then hikes into unburned country near the river where he makes camp. He cooks, he thinks about a friend, and the next day he fishes.

All the while, downriver, there's a swamp. Nick kind of warily eyes the swamp out of the corner of his mind. In the preface to the collection, Philip Young writes of this story that, "Put where it goes chronologically, following the stories of World War I, its submerged tensions—the impression that Nick is exorcising some nameless anxiety—become perfectly understandable."

One of the things in the story that resonated with me was how, at Nick's camp, his mood seems balanced on some sort of knife edge. I know that feeling, the feeling of taking pleasure in some simple thing one is doing while at the same time it all seems very fragile and about to tip over.

Hemingway writes:

He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the ax from a stump. Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the four legs down into the ground with his boot. Nick put the frying pan on the grill over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface. There was a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato catchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off. He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread slowly on the plate. Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato catchup. He knew the beans and spaghetti were still too hot. He looked at the fire, then at the tent, he was not going to spoil it all by burning his tongue. For years he had never enjoyed fried bananas because he had never been able to wait for them to cool. His tongue was very sensitive. He was very hungry. Across the river in the swamp, in the almost dark, he saw a mist rising. He looked at the tent once more. All right. He took a full spoonful from the plate.

I don't know. I remember, as I said earlier in these pages, walking down the street feeling good and then catching myself. Trying to order everything, turn on a dime, precision. Balancing.

Chastised

2008-12-02T14:28:00.006-05:00

I have been chastised by not one but two readers for not posting anything since a day before my birthday, which was Nov. 13. So I relent. I'll post (most of) this from my recent work trip to Aruba and Curacao. Dig it. More TK.

It's night in Aruba. I'm sitting out on my balcony, smoking. I just got back from the casino, where I gave back $135 of the casino's money. Blackjack. It'll get ya. Before the casino, we had dinner at the Marriott Resort's Simply Fish restaurant, myself and the press trip group I'm with. It was a long, leisurely dinner. I was seated between Kara, one of the public relations hosts of the trip, and Jennifer, from Toronto—one of the journalists. Across from me was Carolyn, another journalist from Brooklyn, and John, the director of sales and marketing for the resort. John was from the English island of Jersey, and used to work for Marriott in Manhattan before coming to Aruba about eight months ago with his family. Down the table was the rest of our group—all women. There was Beth, from Nashville; Karen, from New Jersey; Hope, from Atlanta; Jodi, the owner of the PR company who arranged the trip; and Karen, another resort staff member.

These press trips are weird. When I find myself having fun, somehow a mental check comes in and I think but no, this isn't real. We're all just conversing and having fun because there's nothing better to do. We wouldn't be here and talking if we weren't on this trip. And that's true. But it's also a negative way to think about things, and so I try to stop that mental check from occurring when I notice it's happening. It's like when I used to—or sometimes still do—walk down the street and am feeling good, unreasonably happy, and I realize that and then try to check myself, thinking, "Be careful. Easy there. The higher you feel, the further you have to fall." What doom-y thinking. I do it less these days.

Off in the distance are four cruise ships; I can only see their lights, not their outlines, on the black sea which runs seamlessly into the black sky. No stars can be seen. Across from me is one of two time-share parts of the resort; six identical, well-lit stairwells on the outside of the building are stacked atop one another.

[REDACTED, BUT SUFFICE IT TO SAY THIS PART IS ABOUT A WOMAN, AND IN THAT WAY CONNECTS WITH WHAT FOLLOWS]

Six years ago, on the cross-country Green Tortoise trip I took, I was obsessed with S.

S. had a curly afro of brown hair and a cute snub nose. She'd gone to Dartmouth. Once she took too much acid at a party and hid in the corner all night long, thinking she was a squirrel. I hiked in Zion National Park with Scottish John and we discussed S., whether or not she felt what I felt and all sorts of bullshit.

I got really high among the prickly pears out in the desert with [REDACTED], one of the drivers, and then stumbled stoned through the dark, cool Carlsbad Caverns.

When I got home, I kept up with S., who lived in Brooklyn. We went on a couple dates and I spent the night once with her in her apartment, which wasn't far from mine in Williamsburg. [REDACTED] Still, sometimes, in the neighborhood, I think I see her. I'm not sure if she's still in the city. When I was coming home from San Francisco, after the Green Tortoise trip, I wrote a poem for her. Here it is:

[REDACTED]

Oh, the hell with it:

FIRST OFF LET ME SAY I'M SORRY FOR PUTTING YOU ON A PEDESTAL.

1. When I write, You,
in your tall skeepskin boots,

What I really mean to say
is your lighthouse look that illumines
like the green of lightning-bug glow;
no everyday electricity but rather
something more outside
of day-in, day-out laws like
socket, plug, cord, and bulb.

What I really mean to say is
me, deer, headlights,
only that's a cliché –
but then again, so is love.

I was saying, then,
Your tall sheepskin boots –
No, wait;
The underwater octopus-ink explosion of your curls –
Hold, wait;
The butter dish of your brown shoulderblades,
the way your sleeping form,
tucked, curled,
could be that of the first woman
one hour before awakening
when whatever all this is began.

2. I slept by a tree. When I awoke,
I spoke to the animals; there was a raccoon,
and Raccoon said to me,
"Who are you?"
and I replied, "I do not know."

Raccoon said, gesturing with mischevious paw,
"Go and find out, then. It's possible
others will help you, even if only
by eye contact."

And off Raccoon went.

3. Delusion, romance. Deluance, rolusion.
Deluromansionce. 'Twas brillig.

4. Bringing it all back home:

I am on a plane. The cold medicine
has gone to my head, as has
the last two weeks
of no email, the red clay of the Valley of the Gods,
the looming silence of Carlsbad.
Alcohol and all the stars
fraught with meaning up above,
under the massive New Mexico night sky
where I laid out in the desert with you.

Which is all to say,
You are like one of those rare places in the world
where cylinders roll uphill
and compass-points won't stay still,

and in your gaze I'm a magnet,
having deliciously lost its North Pole.

The Color Purple

2008-11-12T18:22:00.005-05:00

At the Republican Governors' Conference today in Miami, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who was considered as Senator John McCain's running mate, said the following about the future of the G.O.P. (these quotes were pulled from this New York Times story):

One perspective is, the Republicans lost their way. There will be calls, and voices across the country for Republicans to return to traditional conservative approaches in almost all respects.

A second viewpoint will be the country’s changing a lot. The country is changing culturally, demographically, technologically, economically, and the like. And the Republican Party isn’t changing in a way that reflects those major, or macro changes across the country.

I think this latter statement is reflected in the following map from this website, which adjusts the traditional red-blue state map by population size and also factors in, using the color purple, gradations in Democratic and Republican voting:

It looks like a thin spiderweb of red stretched across a blue and purple country, refuting the assertion that this is a center-right nation. As Pawlenty said, the demographics of these United States are changing, and I think that's a good thing—not just for the Democratic party, but for America as a whole.

Yes, I'm Writing about The Onion Again

2008-11-06T08:56:00.003-05:00

The Onion, as usual, really nailed it with this one:

Kobe Bryant Scores 25 In Holy Shit We Elected A Black President

It's brilliantly written, how it bleeds back and forth between reportage of the game and awestruck commentary about Obama's win. And it accurately conveys a real sort of national mindset of, well, "holy shit"—Just like they (The Onion) did after 9/11. Several of the pieces they wrote in response to that day had an undercurrent of sadness, fear, and disbelief. One was about a woman baking an American flag cake because she didn't know what else to do—and the tone was perfect: They were mocking her somewhat, because what use is making a flag cake?—But they were also sympathizing, expressing a helpless fellow-feeling and throwing-up-of-the-hands. Read it here.

And finally, just a clip from the Kobe Bryant Obama article:

The 2008 league MVP was solid on the defensive end of the court as well, holding Clippers guard Baron Davis to just 12 points and when they called Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida for Obama, basically ensuring victory, that was a moment in which all Americans, regardless of race, creed, color, or party affiliation had to stand back and say, "Holy shit, this is actually going to happen. Holy shit.... Holy shit. Holy shit! Holy shit!"

Then at the end it just totally breaks down, and The Onion writer is writing directly to us about his or her personal experience on election night. It's really beautiful.

NYC-area newspapers today

2008-11-05T15:16:00.003-05:00

Click here for a round-up of the front pages of NYC-area newspapers today, including the (I predict) soon-to-be-iconic New York Times front page.

And click here for an inspiring short item about New Yorkers lining up outside the New York Times' building to wait for copies of the paper. It contains this fantastic quote from the NYTimes.com design director:

People working on that floor hadn’t noticed yet that the line was forming, and when they realized its purpose, a feeling of delight swept over the newsroom like the friendliest wildfire I’d ever seen. Reporters, editors, photographers, everyone started clapping, hooting and hollering that people still find the newspaper valuable enough to wait dozens of people deep in line for their chance to buy a copy.

YES WE DID

2008-11-05T10:03:00.004-05:00

I won’t add too much to the mountains of words that are even now being written about what happened yesterday. But it was amazing, inspiring, and hopeful.

Last night, after Obama delivered his victory speech, the music swelled and the families joined the candidates onstage. One of my friends (I’d had people over for chili—Obama’s recipe—and apple pie) said, “I’m waiting to see the credits roll!”

Later on, someone else not at my house echoed the same sentiment, with almost exactly the same phrasing. I felt it, too: Watching Barack speak in Grant Park, echoing the words of Lincoln and Dr. King, it felt like an amazing movie where America rises to the occasion and is actually as good as we hope to believe it is.

But this isn’t a movie. It really happened. Barack Obama—Think about it: A mixed-race man named Barack Hussein Obama!—will be the 44th president of the United States. We and the world should be proud of ourselves.

I’ll end with this. Last night, toward the end of his speech, Obama spoke about a woman named Ann Nixon Cooper. Now, usually I hate these little homilies that candidates seem hidebound to work into their speeches. (“Recently I spoke with so-and-so from Nowheresville, and she can’t afford her medicine.”) So I was skeptical when Barack started to go down this rhetorical road.

But then it shifted and widened like a river delta, as Ann Nixon Cooper’s story was expanded and magnified to encompass the whole of the 20th century, now put to sleep. Obama asked what, if our children are lucky enough to live into the 22nd century, will we have changed for them?

This is how he closed his speech. Feel the sweep of history and the hope for the future. Yes we did, yes we can, and yes we will:

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight's about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons -- because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America -- the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.

And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.

Yes we can.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves -- if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.

This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.

Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.

GOBAMA

2008-11-04T09:00:00.003-05:00

I voted this morning. It felt great to fill in that X next to Obama and Biden's names.

I don't have much more to say about this election, except that if Barack loses tonight, I am going to loot my own apartment. I am going to run screaming into my living room, grab my roommate's TV, put it in my room and shut the door. End of looting.

We are about to elect the coolest president ever. As Alex Balk wrote, "Holy crap, it’s like we’re voting for president of The Matrix":

And then there is this, from an MTV news interview. This quote is funny, sure, but it also speaks to something very important and essential about the man—namely, his eminent reasonableness.

Barack said (and thanks to Jen for turning me on to this), in reference to a question about laws against "sagging" pants:

I think people passing a law against people wearing sagging pants is a waste of time. We should be focused on creating jobs, improving our schools, health care, dealing with the war in Iraq, and anybody, any public official, that is worrying about sagging pants probably needs to spend some time focusing on real problems out there. Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants.

True that. Fingers crossed, everybody. I don't want to have to loot your apartment, too.

7/30/07

2008-10-31T15:02:00.002-04:00

Today was a sad day.
Had pho with D.
Shy of Manhattan,
the J enters the king borough
and quickly turns away,
curves back toward Brooklyn.

Then on an everyday Tuesday
afternoon it all at once encrystals:
A bomb-scare morning, the Port Authority
Bus Terminal cleared out by men with badges,
plainclothes, an annoyed commute and late to work.
It was a real tap-tap, sir there’s a line day.

But on the downtown A,
a man next to me’s starting
a book I love. I point and give the thumbs-up.
Then a young woman with an interesting face
and holding a square, clear vase
of purple flowers smiles
at some children in pink, one girl playing
with the other’s ponytail; while a band
whose songs I’ve never been able to get into
suddenly all sound perfect. The lyrics appear
like the scene unfolding before me, into which soon steps
a thugged-out violinist, with an ammo T-shirt
and corn-row braids: He plays,
and, piqued, I pop out my earphones and listen
to subway street-violin, a passionate caterwauling
I’d never known existed.
I give him my last gold Pocahontas dollar
as we ruck into the station, thirty charmed blocks
as the rat scurries.

Hard Times in New York (Magazine) Town

2008-10-30T13:51:00.002-04:00

Well, it's up in the mornin' tryin' to find a job of work.
Stand in one place till your feet begin to hurt.
If you got a lot o' money you can make yourself merry,
If you only got a nickel, it's the Staten Island Ferry.
And it's hard times in the city,
Livin' down in New York town.

—Bob Dylan, "Hard Times in New York Town"

This week and last have not been good for magazine publishing in New York. First it was announced that the twice- or thrice-dead-already Radar would again be folding; then it came down that Rolling Stone would axe seven staffers and Time Inc. would lay off 600 employees. This story in The New York Times detailed the cuts at magazines and in other city industries.

Earlier this week, it was announced that the 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor newspaper—which, despite the name, has always been pretty respected—would shutter its print operation, electing henceforth to publish only on the web (and in a forthcoming weekend magazine).

And then today: It has been reported by Gawker and The Observer that editors and publishers at all titles of the giant of giants in the magazine business, Conde Nast, have been ordered to trim their staff levels and budgets by five percent. (For those who don't know, Conde Nast publishes The New Yorker, GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and many more magazines, and has long had a reputation in the industry for being a citadel of prestige and indifference to market conditions.)

Most sad to me are what's happening to Portfolio and Men's Vogue, detailed in the links behind "The" and "Observer." I always liked Portfolio's quirky, off-center covers—they made you stop and take notice, unlike most business magazines' covers—and I'm a subscriber to Men's Vogue.

Long story short? It's bad out there for those in the publishing industry, and getting worse. If you have a job, be thankful. If you don't, learn to pick rutabagas and perfect your hobo diction.

Hobos 'n' Obama

2008-10-25T10:21:00.004-04:00

Writer John Hodgman (you may recognize him from The Daily Show or, if you turn in early, the I'm-a-Mac, I'm-a-PC knife fight commercials) has a new book coming out soon called More Information Than You Require, a sequel to his bizarrely hilarious The Areas of My Expertise, a fake almanac that contains a list of 700 Hobo names. The best, and my chosen hobo moniker: Cholly the Yegg. ("Yegg" is wonderfully defined as "an inept safecracker.") Other great ones: Douglas, the Future of Hoboing; Ol' Barb Stab-You-Quick. Click here for the full list of hobo names.

Hodgman is one smart cookie. In this long interview with The Onion A.V. Club, it is mentioned that he has been supporting Barack Obama with much vim and vigor, on his blog and his Twitter account and what-not. He's asked, "What has made this election so compelling to you?"

Hodgman answers:

The thing that I find so compelling is that right now Obama's whole campaign strategy is simply [to] speak to people as though they were adults and trust that the truth of the world situation will be evident to them. For him to be attacked as a friend of a terrorist, for "palling" around with terrorists and to simply go back and say, "No, I'm not"? That was such a refreshing political moment. It's like he's saying, "Oh, you know that's not true. You know what's happening here." So much of the past eight years in politics, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you have to acknowledge is based on what the Bush people to themselves have described outside the reality-based community. That the words they were speaking had no basis in reality and they felt no compulsion to exist in a real world. They were creating a world of their own imagining. They were writing their own book of fake trivia and that's a fine way to make a living, but I don't know that it's a very productive way to run a country. And I think we are seeing the results of that right now. So from a very selfish point of view, I'm enchanted by the idea that a politician can come along and speak simply and clearly and truthfully to an electorate as though they are grown-ups and to feel the electorate respond to that. I've found that to be astonishing and especially now that we are in the end game and you see basically the McCain campaign has nothing left but conspiracy theories to throw at Obama. It really has become a fight between fantasy and reality, and although I don't make my living off of it, I endorse reality.

I was just thinking about this very thing the other day; that the reason that McCain and Palin's whole "Americans are cravin' that straight talk," "Joe the Plumber" angle hasn't gained any traction is because ... that's what Barack has been delivering all along. McCain and Palin accuse Obama of all these things, of misleading eloquence, of being elitist—But Obama has consistently been very plain-spoken and direct with the American people. His is not a gilded language; it is sturdy and simple, though also majestic and uniquely American, and I think that is a big reason why he is winning this race. Obama's words, and how he delivers them, are the linguistic transubstantiation of "purple mountain majesties" and "amber waves of grain."

Greenspan Recants

2008-10-24T10:07:00.005-04:00

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Allen Greenspan said the following in a statement yesterday to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

[T]hose of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions [aka self-regulation—ed.] to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief. Such counterparty surveillance is a central pillar of our financial markets’ state of balance. If it fails, as occurred this year, market stability is undermined.

Then this happened, as reported in the New York Times:

“You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the committee. “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”

Mr. Greenspan conceded: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”

And:

Mr. Waxman noted that the Fed chairman had been one of the nation’s leading voices for deregulation, displaying past statements in which Mr. Greenspan had argued that government regulators were no better than markets at imposing discipline.

“Were you wrong?” Mr. Waxman asked.

“Partially,” the former Fed chairman reluctantly answered, before trying to parse his concession as thinly as possible.

OK. Moving forward. John McCain told the Wall Street Journal the following this past March:

I’m always for less regulation. But I am aware of the view that there is a need for government oversight. … But I am a fundamentally a deregulator. I’d like to see a lot of the unnecessary government regulations eliminated.

And then he said this in a speech on March 25th:

In financial institutions, there is no substitute for adequate capital to serve as a buffer against losses. Our financial market approach should include encouraging increased capital in financial institutions by removing regulatory, accounting and tax impediments to raising capital.

"Removing" regulatory impediments. Got that? Removing.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama said the following in his speech at the Democratic National Convention on August 28th:

And it is on their behalf that I intend to win this election and keep our promise alive as President of the United States.

What is that promise?

It's a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have the obligation to treat each other with dignity and respect.

It's a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road.

Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves - protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.

Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who's willing to work.

Keep in mind that these statements by Obama and McCain were all made before the Dow blew up.

In summary:

Greenspan, former acolyte of deregulation, “partially” renounces his ideology; McCain “is fundamentally a deregulator”—While Obama says that American business “should … play by the rules of the road” and that “government … should do … that which we cannot do for ourselves.” One of those things being: Regulate the financial institutions who have dragged the U.S. public into this current mess.

So who you gonna vote for?

Tuning Up

2008-10-21T21:40:00.001-04:00

Angry and running
a little late on the subway rucking
over the Williamsburg Bridge, and rehearsing
what I’ll say to her and why,
with a running color commentary
as to whether I should say anything at all
on the TV in another room of my mind,

suddenly a shaft of trumpet-colored light
bugles its way up the boulevard
through the lots, Luger’s, Bambini Art—
“fans, cups, kites, cops, eats, nights”—
to stop me warm in my thoughts,
like a C major seven amid cacophony.

Diffuse, the light stroked, almost petted
over the tops of buildings and the bay—
I thought of Brooklyn spread out in the morning,
its zip codes strewn like carpet samples.

But soon we were across
the bridge and back underground,
the cars having crept
their way above us, and the hate—
the winter, the jockeying—had returned.

Then I dreamed of spring and coffee,
and of one day not far off when,
layers having been shed
in dribs and drabs,
we’ll ride in rolled shirtsleeves
with the train windows triangled open
and the light returned but changed: opalescent,
like the pearlized snaps on a Western shirt’s front,
the subway car’s air perfumed by the smell of sea.

And Now For Something Completely Different

2008-10-20T09:19:00.005-04:00

I’ve been focusing a lot on politics, which is good and I’m glad people have been responding to it, but one’s gotta mix it up at some point. So today is about music.

One: Two Saturdays ago I was riding into the city on the JMZ train at 7pm and was reading The Onion’s concert listings. All of a sudden I see this Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise Tour thing, organized by former Neutral Milk Hotel member Julian Koster (now performing under the moniker the Music Tapes), along with members of the Apples in Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power, and more. “Oh man,” I think to myself, “this is great! When is it? I have to go!” (Elephant 6 is an old Athens, Georgia-based record label, on which some of my all-time favorite bands recorded.) The bad news: The show was that very night at the Knitting Factory, and I was headed to something I couldn’t cancel.

Oh well. “I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.”

But then on Monday I see a post on BrooklynVegan about the show, and I kick myself even more: Jeff Mangum, lead singer of Neutral Milk Hotel, was there, and sang on a few songs including Olivia Tremor Control’s “The Opera House.” Now, I don’t feel as bad as I might have, as I got to see Olivia Tremor Control a few years back at Bowery Ballroom, when Jeff came out and sang on a couple of songs of theirs, including “I Have Been Floated” (which he sang on back in the day on their record), but I still felt pretty bummed out. Why?

In 1998, Jeff Mangum and Neutral Milk Hotel released their second album, called In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, which quickly became a cult classic. I first heard it in the fall of my sophomore year at school, and it is one of the very few albums that I have loved from the first notes (one other being Yankee Hotel Foxtrot).

After touring on that album, though, Neutral Milk Hotel disbanded and Jeff Mangum more or less disappeared. Stories would surface about him having serious mental problems, about him playing a weird show at a pub in Australia—all adding to the myth of Neutral Milk Hotel, which by that time was legendary.

DIVERGENCE, THEN LOOPING BACK AROUND

But so for any of you out there in TV land who haven’t heard In the Aeroplane, I highly recommend you go out and buy/find it immediately. It is simply one of the best 39+ minutes of music—a real album—that I’ve ever heard. It’s weird, and joyous, and very sad, and angry, and all the stuff that life at its very best is. Strangely, a ribbon of Anne Frank runs through the album, alongside an earthy, sticky-sweet sexuality. See these lines from the song “Oh Comely,” for example:

Your father made fetuses
With flesh licking ladies
While you and your mother
Were asleep in the trailer park
Thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums
The music and medicine you needed for comforting
So make all your fat fleshy fingers to moving
And pluck all your silly strings
And bend all your notes for me
Soft silly music is meaningful magical
The movements were beautiful
All in your ovaries
All of them milking with green fleshy flowers
While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines
Smelling of semen all under the garden
Was all you were needing when you still believed in me

And I know they buried her body with others
Her sister and mother and 500 families
And will she remember me 50 years later
I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine
Know all your enemies
We know who are enemies are

So beautiful and strange. And Jeff’s voice was (is!) so distinctive: adenoidal, almost (at times) unhinged. But sometimes he just sounded sweet. And that’s where I come back around to the Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise Tour. I read today on BrooklynVegan that, in Pittsburgh this Saturday, at the end of the show, Julian and Jeff came and sang in the middle of the crowd a simple song called “Engine.” I first heard “Engine” on Oh, Merge, a 10th anniversary album for Merge Records, which label Neutral Milk Hotel was on, and it grabbed me immediately—a lament with singing saw and Jeff’s voice, about a dreamtime sort of ship:

For I am an engine and I'm holding on
The world is all bending and breaking from me
For sweetness alone who flew out through the window
And landed back home in a garden of green

You're riding alone in the back of a steamer
And steaming yourself in the warm shower spray
And water rolls on off the round captain's belly
Who's talking to tigers from his cafeteria tray

And sweet babies cry for the cool taste of milking
That milky delight that invited us all
And if there's a taste in this life more inviting
Then wake up your windows and watch as those sweet babies crawl away

Here is video (dark, with only intermittent flashes of camera-flash) of the two of them performing the same song the following night in Columbus, Ohio. (Video exists of the Pittsburgh performance, but the crowd is loud and talking and the sound quality is much worse than this one.) Just put it on in the background—You don’t have to actually watch, the video is nothing—and listen to the song:

And then finally, this one goes out to my brother Jacob, who I know—with as much certainty as I know the sun will rise tomorrow morning, or that Obama will win on Nov. 4—will love this song. I am sort of ashamed to say that I heard this song last night during an Axe Chocolate Body Spray commercial (a product which I still don’t entirely understand), but hey—You get older, you gotta catch as catch can; otherwise you end up sitting on the JMZ at 7pm, rucking over the Williamsburg Bridge and wishing you kept up with music like you used to.

Dig, cats:

Enough already about Joe the goddamn Plumber.

2008-10-16T09:54:00.003-04:00

Tell me, who in their right mind buys this folksy Joe the Plumber B.S.? Are Americans really so dense that all it takes to get their attention (and their vote) is laying out economic policy like it's a children's book? I personally am very very tired of:

Joe Six-pack
Joe the Plumber
Hockey Moms
Soccer Moms
NASCAR Dads
And all the rest

I wonder. How can we tell whether or not Americans lap up this Joe the Plumber pablum? Hmm. I wonder. Oh, I've got it! The highest-rated TV shows in America would surely be an indicator of the nation's collective mental and emotional maturity—right? Meaning it would follow that if smart shows like The Office and Mad Men were at the top of the Nielsen ratings, it would indicate that the majority of Americans don't like this Joe the Plumber nonsense, either.

Well let's go to the tape:

Drat. Foiled again.

That's Right, This Is Where I Live.

2008-10-14T14:19:00.003-04:00

Rodney Park is directly across the street from my apartment.

From the New York Post today:

A new offshoot of the notorious Bloods gang has raised its ugly head in South Williamsburg, sparking a police crackdown in the Brooklyn neighborhood, authorities say.

Since September, the Pretty Boy Goonies have repeatedly clashed with the Trinitarios, a Dominican gang whose power base is the Marcy Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

"We have a serious problem here. This escalates from robberies to murder and more youth-on-youth violence," said Democratic Councilwoman Diana Reyna.

"This is not fist-fighting we are talking about. They are using machetes to stab and slash, and screwdrivers. There are brawls in the streets, in broad daylight, stopping traffic.

"We can't revert to the times . . . where gangs took over our street corners ."

The Pretty Boy Goonies, aka PBGs, have about a dozen members, authorities said. Gang members gather to fight for turf in Rodney Park under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway near the Williamsburg Bridge.

In response to the concerns of Reyna and community groups, cops have begun arresting gang members; a sweep last weekend nabbed 14 suspects, authorities said.

Authorities have also increased the number of cops and narcotics detectives patrolling the area, placing some on rooftops and installing a Sky Watch, a video camera manned by a cop at Marcy Avenue and South Fifth Street.

The device has been used to fight crime in Harlem.

That's just great. I saw this Sky Watch thing going up last Friday night (literally a block away from my apartment). I also talked to a cop on Saturday and he told me pretty much the same thing as this article describes, though in less detail.

And yes, Joe, that's right: Pretty Boy Goonies.

Southwest Airlines Moves One Step Closer to Being the Greyhound of the Skies

2008-10-13T09:26:00.002-04:00

P. Solomon Banda reported in the Associated Press on Saturday:

Wallace and the two sisters, ages 9 and 16, were seated in the same row on a San Diego-to-Denver flight Aug. 1. Officials said Wallace did not know the girls or their brother, 10, who was seated behind them. The siblings were traveling without a parent.

In a preliminary hearing, FBI agent Joel Nishida said Wallace tried to take pictures of the younger sister, seated near the aisle, but that she covered her face.

During the flight, the older sister said Wallace took out some strips of white athletic tape from his backpack and used a figure eight pattern to tie her hands together with the tape.

When she asked him what he was doing, "he gave out a creepy laugh," Nishida testified.

The younger sister managed to free her sister, tearing the tape off using her teeth. Afterward, Wallace allegedly tried to tape the younger sister's hands to those of her older sibling. A flight attendant who saw what was happening then moved the two girls to a different row with their brother.

Made me think of this.

McCain to the Rescue

2008-10-11T00:17:00.004-04:00

Frankly, I find this passage—from a New York Times story by Elisabeth Bumiller—utterly fascinating:

[Mr. McCain's] temporary embrace of Mr. Obama came as Mr. McCain was repeatedly implored by voters at the town-hall-style meeting to “fight back” against Mr. Obama at the next presidential debate, on Wednesday, and to stop him from becoming president. But unlike at an earlier town-hall-style meeting this week in Wisconsin, where Mr. McCain sharply agreed with voters who urged him to punch back, this time he drew a line.
When a man told him he was “scared” of an Obama presidency, Mr. McCain replied, “I want to be president of the United States and obviously I do not want Senator Obama to be, but I have to tell you — I have to tell you — he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.” The crowd booed loudly at Mr. McCain’s response.
Later, a woman stood up at the meeting, held at Lakeville South High School in a far suburb of Minneapolis, and told Mr. McCain that she could not trust Mr. Obama because he was an “Arab.”
Mr. McCain replied: “No, ma’am, he’s a decent family man, a citizen, who I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. And that’s what this campaign is all about.” (He did not correct her false depiction of Mr. Obama.) At that, the crowd applauded.

Wow. I have been saying for several months now that I thought McCain would ultimately lose this election because he is, at his core, an honorable man, and that he would refuse to do absolutely whatever it takes, as dirty or underhanded as that might be, to beat Obama.

I said that McCain would not go as far as George W. Bush did against him (McCain) in the Republican primary in 2000, and that given Obama's charisma and intelligence, plus the generally poor view of Republicans right now as a result of eight years of the Bush Administration, that he (Obama) would win.

And I think that unless his advisors, like Karl Rove protege Steve Schmidt, somehow hijack McCain's campaign, this is just what's going to happen. I don't agree with McCain on a number of issues, but I applaud his decency, responsibility (which doesn't unfortunately extend to all areas of his campaign, but still), and patriotism in this matter.

I will refer you now to Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, during which he said the following:

Now, I don't believe that Sen. McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn't know.

It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it.
But what I will not do is suggest that [Senator McCain] takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and patriotism.
The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain.

That, Dear Reader, is what's called Elevating the Discourse. Let's encourage both candidates—and not the crazed supporters at Palin rallies shouting "kill him," "off with his head," and "terrorist" with respect to Barack Obama (and no I am not kidding; look it up)—to keep it up.

The Office

2008-10-10T11:06:00.002-04:00

I never post stuff like this, but last night's The Office contained one of the best lines ever. The episode was about business ethics, and during a meeting Andy proposed the ethical dilemma of, "If your family were starving, would you steal bread to feed them?" To which Dwight replies,

"Trick question. The bread is poison, and it's not your real family. You've been cuckolded by a stronger, smarter male."

Amazing.

New York State Voter Registration Deadline Tomorrow

2008-10-09T10:36:00.002-04:00

Hello all. Tomorrow is the deadline for New York state residents to register to vote in the upcoming presidential election. Why should you care, and why should you vote? Here, let my friend Kevin tell you (the video is only two minutes long, so quit yer whining):

Makes sense, doesn't it? Do what Kevin says. If you live in New York City, click here to download a PDF copy of the voter registration form. All you have to do is fill it out and put it in the mail. Postage-paid. Zero cost to you, and it takes < 5 minutes.

If you don't live in New York City, go here to see A) whether or not you are already registered, and B) if you're not, how to get that way (registered). (Yes, the site is associated with Obama, but it's not a shill for him or the Democratic party; it's a strictly nonpartisan tool to help more people get registered to vote.)

As Mark Twain said, “Where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.”

Sign of the Times

2008-10-08T08:37:00.003-04:00

From Gothamist:

After the end of the Clinton era, the National Debt Clock in midtown was temporarily turned off because the number had actually started to go down for the first time since it was installed in 1989 by real estate developer Seymour Durst. Now, after eight years of The Decider, the number's gotten so vast and incomprehensible and depressing that the sign isn't big enough for all those digits.

Click here for the full post, along with a picture of the sign as it stands today.

What is the real America?

2008-10-06T14:19:00.004-04:00

In a piece posted Friday on Slate, ("Alaska vs. Hawaii: Why is Seward's Folly the 'real America' and the Aloha State not?"), Timothy Noah writes, regarding Governor Sarah Palin and why her homespun Americana doggerel is being viewed as, for better or worse, the "real" America:

Why is Alaska authentically American when Hawaii is not? At bottom, of course, it's a silly question. Both states, while disconnected geographically from the continental United States, are populated with people whose American-ness is beyond dispute. Every corner of each one of the 50 states is "authentically American." But Alaska leans Republican while Hawaii leans Democratic, and the GOP long ago intimidated the media into believing that only Republican strongholds represent the "real America." These Republican strongholds are usually sparsely populated, and I suppose the media's been sold on the idea that because the United States started out as an agrarian nation, rural areas are somehow more authentic than urban ones.

That's spot on, and a nice articulation of something I've been thinking about and noticing as well. Bob Herbert, in an excellent Sept. 8th op-ed in The New York Times, raised sort of a similar issue in his defense of liberals being patriots and real Americans just as much as (if not more so) than conservatives. Herbert writes about something Mitt Romney said ("Liberals don't have a clue") during the Republican National Convention:

Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals—from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers—the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.

And I would argue that without the contribution of the cities and of the values of tolerance, acceptance, and civil rights that the U.S. would be a much, much worse place than it is today. I don't know, either, why liberals "don't stand up to this garbage," fight back. One reason of course in this campaign is that Barack Obama has set out to really change the tenor of the public debate; to not descend to the level of Sarah Palin's mean, sniping, red-meat attack during her acceptance speech at the RNC. And that's good. I think Barack is pursuing the higher path.

But Jay-Z, in his song "Justify My Thug," off 2003's The Black Album, makes a good point—One that Malcolm X might have agreed with, and that I in some ways agree with as well. Jay-Z raps:

They say an eye for an eye, we both lose our sight
And two wrongs don't make a right
But when you been wrong and you know all along that it's just one life
At what point does one fight? (Good question, right?)

Part of me wants to say it's time for Democrats to fight back, to be all like, "Y'know what, Republicans? Fuck you. Fuck you, Alaska. We did this and this and this and you are the party of the past and your time is dying and falling away. We represent the cities, where 80 percent (and growing) of Americans now live. We represent the spirit of progress, tolerance, and learning. We represent the future, and we represent a proud, strong America; and henceforth we refuse to be labeled as unpatriotic or bad Americans."

I don't know. That's probably wrong—in fact I'm sure it is—but I still want to say it. I do think, though, that liberals need to take back that word, to proudly claim their heritage and no longer allow themselves to be marginalized by Republicans and their so-called "heartland" values.

Well then allow me to retort

2008-10-02T10:11:00.004-04:00

My dad told me last night that my brother Jacob's blog had blown up a bit, comments-wise, after his recent post endorsing Barack Obama. So I went there, read the comments, and now have a few responses for Messrs. Skelly and Fatt.

Regarding Obama's supposed lack of experience, here’s a bit of a history lesson:

1983: Obama graduates with a degree in political science (with an emphasis in international relations and a thesis on Soviet disarmament) from Columbia University.

1985: Obama moves to Chicago and becomes a community organizer with a church-based group dedicated to improving living conditions in poor neighborhoods. (Hmm … that sounds familiar, doesn’t it? I bet Jesus would like this guy and his efforts. You know, Jesus? The guy about which Obama said, earlier this year in Christianity Today magazine, the following?:

“I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life. But most importantly, I believe in the example that Jesus set by feeding the hungry and healing the sick and always prioritizing the least of these over the powerful.”

Y’know, that guy.

Moving on:

1988: Barack Obama matriculates at Harvard Law School.

1990: Becomes first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

1991: Graduates magna cum laude from Harvard Law.

1991: Rather than taking a cherry, high-paying job at a prestigious law firm (which, as a magna cum laude graduate from Harvard Law, he certainly could have), Obama instead chooses to move back to Chicago and work as a civil rights lawyer and a constitutional law professor. He also runs Project Vote, which gets 150,000 people registered to vote in the 1992 election.

1996: Elected to the Illinois State Senate. Serves for eight years, during which time he sponsors 233 bills on health care and public health and 125 bills on poverty and public assistance, among many others.

2002: Makes speech against pursuing war against Iraq. You know, Iraq? The country that didn’t attack us on 9/11 and that didn’t, it turns out, have any weapons of mass destruction? Weapons of mass destruction being, of course, the entire reason given to the American public for the Iraq War in the first place. (There weren’t any.)

2004: Elected to U.S. Senate. Serves on the Committee on Foreign Relations; the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs. Sponsors 121 bills and co-sponsors 490 bills since taking office in January 2005. Misses 303 votes in the Senate during this time—117 votes less than John McCain, who missed 109 more votes than Senator Tim Johnson, who had a brain hemorrhage in December of ’06. That’s right: McCain missed more votes than a guy who had a brain hemorrhage.

Now, that should answer the experience question. I am not, of course, saying that John McCain isn’t experienced; of course he is—But “experience” is a slippery metric that doesn’t really mean anything in and of itself. It’s the quality of the experience that matters—not the quantity. I would argue that the quality of Barack Obama’s experience is much better suited than the quality of John McCain’s experience to fixing the problems facing America in the 21st century.

Joe Biden is of course experienced as well. That guy got elected to the Senate when he was 29, which is great—But he’s not a visionary like Obama, and so I think the ticket is in the proper order, Barack on top and Biden in the veep slot.

Quick note: Sarah Palin is not experienced for shit. What was she doing in 1984, a year after Barack graduated from the (Ivy League) Columbia University? She was coming in 2nd in a beauty pageant. Then she went to the University of Idaho and worked as a sportscaster and pitched in with the family fishing business.

This is getting long, so I’ll quickly address the following comment by Skelly, who wrote: “the government is going to be the government, and until they’re stealing my house, burning my clothes, and eating my food - i’ll have a damn good life”

Of course, “they” are not stealing your house—But, according to an editorial in today’s New York Times, “At last count, six million people were expected to default on their mortgages this year and next, putting them at risk of losing their homes unless they can catch up in their payments or catch a break on their loan terms.”

People are losing their homes. Maybe you aren’t, but other people are. And then so what about this?:
This verse enjoins us to care about our neighbor and his or her possible lost home, no matter who or where they are. Biblically, not caring about someone else's foreclosure or mortgage default is clearly not an option.

Now regarding not voting: Of course it is your right to not vote. But I contend that every single vote matters. Sure, one vote in 100 million doesn’t make all that big of a difference—Unless, of course, something happens like it did in Florida in 2000, when the national election was decided by just over half a million votes.

Finally, we should all desire to vote, because only by voting do we keep Washington accountable. The fewer people vote, the more that corrupt politicians (of which not all of them are, believe it or not) can and will get away with. It’s our responsibility to vote for whom we think would best serve the nation and our fellow citizens, for we are our truly our brothers’ keepers.

Also Obama will lower your taxes:

OK, I'm finished now.

And but so: Last thoughts on DFW (for now)

2008-09-23T21:02:00.004-04:00

For the past week and a half, since I learned of David Foster Wallace's suicide, I've been reading the papers, the magazines, online, saving the clippings, putting my favorites in the folder I have on top of my bookshelf where I keep all of my favorite magazine pieces. I've cursed at some of the obituaries and teared up at others. I've read the growing tribute McSweeney's thoughtfully has made a place for (and among which my stab at memorializing the man, previously posted here, is included). People I haven't heard from in a long time got in touch, whether via email, phone, text, or blog comments to express their condolences. People knew what he meant to me. People seemed to like what I'd written about him, after. And but so I sat on Sunday morning, after a good visit from my dad and my brother for most of last week (with a special guest appearance by my sister on Saturday), and flipped through my books of his, including my three copies of Infinite Jest (it's the only book of which I own multiples). I saw the highlighting, the underlining, the notes, the bits of in-class comminques preserved within, the weather, the wear, the tear. All of which I've got, too. And so sitting there in the half-light of my room, Sunday morning, brother just departed—and feeling that sense of disconnection, that sense of one's plug being pulled out from the wall socket that I've begun to see is a pattern for me—I sat there and it got to be more OK. The notes from people throughout the week, the appraisals I'd been reading in the papers, his books on my shelf, my and others' deep feeling for the man and his work—

I got to thinking about Bob Dylan's "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie," a poem from Bob for his idol, which ends thusly:

And where do you look for this hope that you're seekin'
Where do you look for this lamp that's a-burnin'
Where do you look for this oil well gushin'
Where do you look for this candle that's glowin'
Where do you look for this hope that you know is there
And out there somewhere
And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads
Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows
Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways
You can touch and twist
And turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You find God in the church of your choice
You find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it's only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You'll find them both
In Grand Canyon
Sundown

I like that. I also started to think just now about how people used to graffiti "Frodo Lives!" on things back in the '60s and '70s, after the hero of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (which was the first Big Important Book for me). So I hereby propose another graffiti: DFW Lives! And he does.

And but so for now that's where I'll leave my memories of the man. Now, onward and upward. Dave would want it that way. Soon we'll return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

* Last (foot)note: Thank you—sincerely, deep down—to everyone who wrote, called, texted, or posted on this blog or Facebook to say hey, and that they were sorry to hear, and hope I'm OK. I really truly appreciate it.

A Eulogy for David Foster Wallace; Or, Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.

2008-09-14T01:19:00.014-04:00

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is!

Toward the end of 1996 I was in my parents' living room reading a Time magazine. It was one of those year-end wrap-up issues, with various lists and capsule reviews of the best books, films, art, and so on of the year soon to bow out. This was my senior year of high school. I had a girlfriend, or was moving toward having a girlfriend—My first "real" girlfriend. I was reading the magazine and in the books section, one book caught my eye: A book called Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. I don't remember why, but something in the capsule review sparked my interest. I had always been a reader, but this book—1,079 pages, about an "entertainment" called Infinite Jest that is so pleasurable that those who saw it lost all desire to do anything but watch it, and thus died—seemed a whole other order of magnitude beyond what I'd been reading.

I bought the book. I think this was in December. I bought the book and started reading it. For the whole second half of my last year of high school, January through May or thereabouts, I read Infinite Jest. I read it in class, and got in trouble for it. I gave it to my girlfriend, Shannon, for Valentine's Day, and she was touched because a boy had never given her a book before.

Infinite Jest was indeed about this entertainment, but it was about so much more. It was about addiction and a real American sort of sadness; it was about the future, and maybe where we were headed. It was also about two characters, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza—characters that are as alive to me as any other real living and breathing person. They live with me still today.

Infinite Jest turned me on to serious reading, and to the style of writing that I've come most to prefer: the sprawling, encyclopedic novel. David Foster Wallace turned me on to Pynchon, to Joyce, to Gaddis, to DeLillo. DFW—as he would come to be known to me—made me want to be a writer. But why?

For this reason: Infinite Jest made me feel less alone. And DFW meant to do that. In an interview published in 1993 in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, he said the following:

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of generalization of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters' pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple.

I was disturbed and Infinite Jest comforted me. I was comfortable and Infinite Jest disturbed me. Infinite Jest made me feel less alone. And but so, ever since that late winter, spring, and early summer of 1997, I've been trying to write—and trying somehow, in my own small way, to follow in David Foster Wallace's footsteps: To make others, through writing, feel less alone. If I have ever written anything that anyone liked, that even for a moment made them feel unalone, then I have succeeded. And success is entirely relative; though I will in all probability never achieve near as much as DFW did, it doesn't matter—A drop of water is the ocean in miniature.

***

David Foster Wallace is dead. He hanged himself on Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 46.

***

I could go on. I could tell you about reading all his other books, from Broom of the System (his first novel) to his most recent, a collection of essays called Consider the Lobster; I could tell you about how I gave Infinite Jest to a friend once, and how she later brought it back to me, signed; I could tell you how another girlfriend got another of his books, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, signed by him for me, the summer she was in New York, and how she gave him a copy of our school's literary magazine, in which I had a couple of poems; I hoped that maybe he flipped through it on the plane ride back to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was teaching at the time, and read my poems and maybe liked them; I could tell you about how I very nearly went on a pilgrimage to see him in Illinois, but didn't, and how I wish now that I had.

I could tell you about how he was a laugh-out-loud funny writer—He had to have been to have worked into a 10,000-word review of a dictionary an analogy to a stoned person watching the PGA Tour with Oreo crumbs all over his shirt's front and being caught in a loop of thinking about what the color "green" really means. I could tell you about all the times I've told friends,s significant others, and virtual strangers, "You have to read this book." Or I could tell you about how, in the special edition of Rolling Stone published soon after 9/11, David Foster Wallace's take on that day's tragedy, called "The View from Mrs. Thompson's House" (since reprinted in Consider the Lobster), was the most dead-on and honest assessment I've ever read about 9/11, in its throwing-up-the-hands-and-saying-I-just-don't-fucking-know-ness. I could tell you about how once I got to see him in New York, with Jonathen Franzen, as part of The New Yorker Literary Festival, and how he blasted Franzen—no dope himself—entirely out of the water.

Or how now, reading Infinite Jest for the third time around in 11 years, having gotten sober myself, in the last 100-page home stretch, this evening on the couch before a dinner party, and then the dinner party and outside, after, smoking a cigarette with some people, and a guy getting a text message and saying that David Foster Wallace had killed himself felt first like a friend had died, and then like a repudiation of something, a core-shaking of my own personal foundation—

But I'll not tell you about all that. I'll leave some things for memory and choose not to go down certain roads; I think DFW would want it that way. But, I will tell you this: David Foster Wallace's writing made me and millions of others feel less alone. I know that. And for this he should be praised, and mourned. I hope he has found the peace that eluded him in this life.

Rest in peace, DFW. I'll still be here, pushing your books on friends.

I Turn My Camera On; Or, Letter from Bryant Park, Fashion Week

2008-09-10T21:29:00.007-04:00

I'm sitting here in Bryant Park watching people go apeshit over fashion models and designers. Just saw a bunch of photographers run to get shots of Anna Sui, who I sort of recognized but didn't know who it was until I heard someone say "Anna!" The photogs, schlumpfy guys all, are standing around in little clusters of two and three looking down at the little screens of serious-looking black cameras they've got slung around their necks. Then there are also a lot of younger women, Japanese and American, milling more hesitantly, with smaller ordnance cameras.

One guy, earlier, almost fell into me at the little green desk-table I was sitting at, as he got pushed out of a scrum of photogs surrounding two tall black models, with aquiline features and wearing Egyptian goddess, Isis-type garb. The big cameras, when they go off, sound like thwack thwack thwack. Directly in front of me, a middle-aged black photog, with a French bulldog's squished-up expression and the suggestion of an afro, is taking pictures, but not getting up to do so from where he's sitting, of random women who look good but obviously aren't models as they walk by. One other civilian-looking woman saw this just now, as she was standing here. She smiled, and walked on.

The scene has now calmed down somewhat. Directly across from where I sit is the Bryant Park Hotel, all black brick and gold trim. To my right is the green and gold, old-style carousel, ridden by kids on ornate up-and-downing horses. A blue baseball-capped black man just pushed a flat of cases of Peroni beer past me. Impossibly thin models, vaguely Russian-looking, keep swishing by. Photogs move up and away, as the models pose while walking or stop and pose, either giving a smoldering look or smiling wanly. It's like a kind of chemical or magnetic reaction, electrons drawn and then repelled from a nucleus. The models' breasts move around in their shirts or dresses like a sped-up grandfather clock's pendulum. Another flat of 25 cases of Peroni beer, pushed and guarded by five black guys, just rolled by.

It occurs to me that, women-wise, a man could probably clean up in this vicinity of town with civilian women during these Fashion Weeks.

I am wearing a tie and pink tennis shoes. I look good but not great. Thumping, irregular bass is and has been this whole time issuing from the big white tent complex (where the actual fashion shows are held) directly behind me. I am sitting at the back end of the tent complex, away from the entrance, which is festooned with voting- and election-themed Fashion Week slogans, on 6th Avenue at 41st Street.

The photogs have this way of running up ahead of the models, humping gear, about 15 feet, then turning and shooting. I wonder if the civilian women walking by, in their own finery, harbor a secret desire to be mistaken for a model, and shot.

Several people walking by, Anna Sui one and maybe Ralph Lauren another, have been wearing black T-shirts bearing the legend, in a stone color, "Save the Garment District." A leaf just fell from the air in front of me—the first falling leaf I think I've seen this fall. Soon more, soon all, will fall. All of my friends at the Rough Guides office in New York, where I got my first real job, as an editorial assistant, were laid off this week. With respect to Fashion Week: I cannot decide whether I do not care about the models, the hubbub, or whether I do care, deeply, but refuse out of pride to admit this to myself, and move up to the front. I feel sort of the same conflicted way that I do about Anne Hathaway and The Devil Wears Prada, when I see it come on TV.

I have freckles and am 28, for a little while longer.

A white bum named Tim, carrying a metal-frame rucksack and wearing two hospital bracelets—one blue, one white—just approached me. He had a twang in his voice so I asked him where he was from.

"I'm from Savannah, Georgia," he said. "Where you from?"

I told him.

"I just get outta the hospital," he said. "My lung collapsed."

I gave him a dollar and he shook my hand, a strong handshake that lapsed into looseness.

"I been panhandlin'. I just get outta the hospital but I'm gon' panhandle the shit outta these people."

He shook my hand again and asked my name. I told him.

"Hell," he said, "I got a son that's got a son named Hunter."

To my left, a couple dressed in black that both seem very drunk, she tottering on heels and he holding the smoldering ass-end of a cigarette, keep putting their tongues into each other's mouths, slowly and very deliberately. Tim had reeked of alcohol. I don't know whether these fashion shows are ending or beginning. I have an hour to go until my therapy appointment. A motherly-looking handler woman who's holding an iPhone keeps hustling up late girls, coltish, into the back of the tent. She just called one "sweetie." Two women walking with a pair of NYPD just walked by, one woman shaking one of the cops' hands.

The trees are the kind that look camouflaged, from shedding bark, and their green leaves, way up high where the sun breaks in over the skyscrapers surrounding, have begun to have a yellowish tint about them. The flagstones are big gray squares and rectangles. No one has taken a picture of me directly, but I bet I'm in some anyway. Watch the newsstands, the magazines. You might see me there, writing this, mustached, pen in one hand and cigarette in the other.

* Late-breaking correction: A woman did just take a picture of me, a long woman with long brown hair and a handsome face in a white dress and a slim, flow-y, almost ankle-length orange sweater-type thing. She said, with an accent I couldn't place, that "I looked so cool. I like your style, weird and funny." This picture she took was for "her fashion blog." This was right after I ran into my friend, former roommate, and fellow Arkansan Jessica, a red-haired beauty who walked by where I was sitting and whom I wolf-whistled at, to get her attention.

The McCain Campaign, not the Hadron Collider, Will Be the Death of Us All

2008-09-10T12:53:00.003-04:00

By now you've all probably read about the "lipstick on a pig" controversy. If not, let me sum up. Yesterday, Sept. 9th, Obama was talking about McCain and his policies and said the following:

“John McCain says he’s about change, too—except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics. That’s just calling the same thing something different. You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change; it’s still going to stink after eight years.”

Not long after, the McCain campaign comes out blasting against Obama for a "schoolyard insult" against Sarah Palin. Wait, what? Just because she mentioned lipstick in her acceptance speech, suddenly an old idiom is off-limits? Also, McCain's memory may be going: He used the exact same idiom to describe Hillary Clinton's health care plan on Oct. 11, 2007.

Reading about this trumped-up, ridiculous, so-called controversy this morning made my blood boil. And then Obama's remarks about the controversy calmed me down. He's just so reasonable. Really, if you have four and a half free minutes, watch this—He's amazing.

Letter from Raleigh

2008-09-06T22:08:00.003-04:00

It's hot in Raleigh, N.C. Hurricane Hanna's passed, which last night had the weather cloudy and spitting rain, while overnight she hit, blowing over tents downtown and dropping a few inches of rain. This morning was gray, rainy, and windy, too. We ate breakfast at Big Ed's, in the City Market portion of downtown, little shops and old brick buildings. Ed's is famous for its owner, the barrel-chested, red-checkered snap shirt and overalls-clad owner, who sits down to tell stories at table after table—Plus of course for its grilled biscuits and pound cake-batter pancakes.

I'm sitting outside of Big Ed's right now, on a bench flanked by rusty brown farm implements, right across from the 1914, redbrick City Market building, with stucco tile-roofed overhangs around its sides, like the French Market in New Orleans. But the place is empty, disused, with a green and white "available" sign in its window, bearing the logo of Hunter & Associates. There are more than a few H&A signs in windows around here. Journey is playing from the speakers of a bar/restaurant called Woody's @ City Market across the way. A gray H2 Hummer just rumbled by. I'm sitting on the redbrick sidewalk on Blake Street, between Parham and Wolfe. There are a couple of choppers out in front of Woody's. A country-fried voice just called out, "Ain't that a purty motorsickle?" There are more black people in this part of town. Last night at the brand-new Marriott City Center, a debutante ball was going on, all white faces in tuxes and dresses, the girls with their skirts hiked up as they waited for shuttle mini-buses, because of the rain pooling on the ground.

Let's Contrast & Compare, Shall We?

2008-09-04T08:38:00.004-04:00

From Senator Joe Biden's V.P. acceptance speech:

John McCain is my friend. We've known each other for three decades. We've traveled the world together. It's a friendship that goes beyond politics. And the personal courage and heroism John demonstrated still amaze me.
But I profoundly disagree with the direction that John wants to take the country.

From Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech:

Now, I don't believe that Sen. McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn't know.

It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it.
But what I will not do is suggest that [Senator McCain] takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and patriotism.
The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain.

From Governor Sarah Palin's V.P. acceptance speech:

I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a "community organizer," except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening.

My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of "personal discovery." This world of threats and dangers is not just a community, and it doesn't just need an organizer.

Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve all of America's energy problems — as if we all didn't know that already.

We've all heard his dramatic speeches before devoted followers.

Al-Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America ... he's worried that someone won't read them their rights?

Now who's bitter?

From Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech:

I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. And that's to be expected. Because if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.
You make a big election about small things.
And you know what — it's worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn't work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it's best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know.

Bingo: That's the Republican strategy right there, as exemplified by Palin's smug, sarcastic, and mean-spirited speech last night. The Republicans have one worn-out playbook, and they won't put it down. Let's hope that enough of the country has gotten wise to their game over the past four years that we don't allow this cynical strategy to work yet again.

Here are another few lines from Obama, to close out this post:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.

Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.
There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.
The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states.
There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?

That's from the Democratic National Convention—in 2004. He's been saying this all along, and he's calling us to something better, something higher. He is saying (and has said), "America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this."

Are we? Do you want to find out? If so, maybe go here to donate $10 or $25 (or more if you've got it) to this inspiring, historic campaign.

I'll close with a story. Back in early 2003, in the run-up to the Iraq War, a big protest was held in Manhattan. I debated whether or not to go. At this point, most people believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, as our government told us they did—and, if they did, well, I wasn't sure what needed to be done. I had bought some of the lies. But I was thinking about it and I was also wondering, What does it matter if I attend the protest? It won't change anything.

In the end, I went. I talked to my dad and decided that, whether or not we went to war, whether or not Iraq had WMDs, and whether or not the protest changed anything, that I wanted to be on the right side of history. Five years later, I feel I was on the right side of history, and I'm glad I decided to go into the city that day, to stand and march with hundreds of thousands of others—because "they" really, finally, completely win only when no one shows up to say "no."

So, in this election, which side of history do you want to be on?

Hot New Sentences

2008-09-03T13:41:00.002-04:00

Reading the NY Times' coverage of Hurricane Gustav this Monday, I came across this beautiful sentence:

As the wind blew through the deserted streets, a group of bored police officers sat on rolling office chairs outside on Tchoupitoulas Street, watching a few of their colleagues “wind-surfing” down the long thoroughfare, one of them explained. Two officers would hold up opposite ends of a sheet and wait for the gusts to blow them down the traffic-less street on their rolling chairs.

Really the first sentence is the best, especially up until "thoroughfare." Just say it out loud to yourself; it's really musical, rolls off the tongue. Almost poetry.

Then there's this, from an Onion article about Cheney waiting until the last minute (again) to buy 9/11 gifts:

Although Cheney himself has never received any Sept. 11 gifts, with the exception of a pair of silk pajamas from his wife and a second term in office, he insisted that he gets more joy from giving than receiving.

That made me laugh out loud at work today.

And finally, in more serious news, Thomas Friedman published this op-ed yesterday in the NY Times, about the choice between two "green" candidates having been, after McCain's pick of Sarah Palin, drilling advocate, as his running mate, narrowed to just one (meaning: The One).

Friedman writes:

By constantly pounding into voters that his energy focus is to “drill, drill, drill,” McCain is diverting attention from what should be one of the central issues in this election: who has the better plan to promote massive innovation around clean power technologies and energy efficiency.
Why? Because renewable energy technologies — what I call “E.T.” — are going to constitute the next great global industry. They will rival and probably surpass “I.T.” — information technology. The country that spawns the most E.T. companies will enjoy more economic power, strategic advantage and rising standards of living. We need to make sure that is America. Big oil and OPEC want to make sure it is not.

That right there is a bull's-eye. What is going on with respect to oil and energy right now is a challenge, yes—But it's also a big opportunity. The U.S. has the ability to define the debate, to lead the charge, to do what we've always done: Put our best minds to work on a massively difficult problem. We need a new Apollo Program for energy indepedence. And that, Gentle Reader, is what Obama promises. See here, from his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last Thursday night:

And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as president: In 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.
We will do this. Washington -- Washington has been talking about our oil addiction for the last 30 years. And, by the way, John McCain has been there for 26 of them.
And in that time, he has said no to higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars, no to investments in renewable energy, no to renewable fuels. And today, we import triple the amount of oil than we had on the day that Senator McCain took office.
Now is the time to end this addiction and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution, not even close.
As president, as president, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I'll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America.
I'll make it easier for the American people to afford these new cars.
And I'll invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy -- wind power, and solar power, and the next generation of biofuels -- an investment that will lead to new industries and 5 million new jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced.
America, now is not the time for small plans.

Damn straight. Now let's elect him, shall we?

Hard-core Wake-up

2008-08-28T08:28:00.004-04:00

Rise and Shine
Sophomore year of college, my roommate Joe and I developed a radical system of rousing oneself in the morning. The system was as follows: When the alarm goes off for the very first time, immediately get out of bed. No hesitation, no hitting the snooze. We called this system “Hard-core Wake-up.” And it worked. Mostly.

This being college, Joe and I lived in a dorm room. Joe and I being men, we had our beds bunked. I was on top, Joe was on bottom. The couch was situated alongside Joe’s bed, forming a little crib that he would climb into, evenings. When I got out of bed, I would hop from my bed down to the couch and thence the floor. (Can you see where I am going with this?)

Hard-core Wake-up, as I said, worked. The trick, for anyone who’d like to play along at home, is that you must brook no discussion with yourself about whether or not to wake up. You just hit the deck when you hear the alarm, Pavlovianly and immediately.

But sometimes the system of Hard-core Wake-up, my position in the top bunk bed, and the invariable alcohol consumed the night before intersected in bad ways. Occasionally, in leaping groggily from bed, I’d hit the couch wrong or hit the arm of the couch and, still disoriented from sleep, go sprawling. One time it was worse.

This time was at the end of sophomore year. Joe had already left. Classes were over. I’d stayed behind to finish up a paper and for a couple of parties. I wouldn’t be back next year; I was going to Austin for the summer and then Oxford for the next year. One of the last parties was at my friend Collins’ house, out in a little back courtyard parking lot off the street. His was an ugly, squat, four-apartment, white-painted cinder-block building, but I loved that place. We’d sit outside at his little table and umbrella and drink beer from the keg and smoke cigarettes and bullshit and all of that felt like it would never end. Then it did end.

As I said it was the end of the year. I had gone back to my dorm room after Collins’ party to sleep. I was all packed up, my room entirely stripped of furniture and possessions; everything was in my car, as I was driving back to Little Rock that day. I had trained myself in the art of Hard-core Wake-up.

So when the phone rings (with that newsroom-style clanging bell ring that, sadly, seems to be disappearing) at oh, say, 8am, I instantly leap from the top bunk, feet seeking the couch—But no couch. I felt like I fell about six feet, landed like Spider-Man, squatting, arms out, fingers splayed, thoroughly hung-over and thoroughly shaken awake, now. It was kind of like the feeling you get when you pick up a glass expecting it to be one weight, because you think it’s glass, and in fact it’s another weight, because it’s actually plastic, and you end up picking it up way too fast as a result. That was how I came out of bed and to the floor that morning, with a brief flash of terror-filled cognitive dissonance. And dry-mouth.

I snatched the phone’s receiver off the wall and immediately laid down, flat on my back, boxers-clad only, on the bare floor. “Hello,” I croaked. It was my mom.

That was pretty much the end of Hard-core Wake-up … or was it?

Don’t Call It a Comeback
Recently, my buddy Sean was expressing his desire to wake up early, like me (I rise at 6am for work).

“No you don’t,” I said.
“Yes I really do,” Sean said.
“Well then there is only one way forward, Young Grasshopper,” I said, cracking my knuckles and flexing in the fashion of a long-retired martial arts expert who has just made up his mind to return to battle for the sole purpose of avenging the killing of his teacher. “That way is Hard-core Wake-up.”

An amusing musical training montage followed. Sweatbands and jump-rope were involved. Also Sean snapping out of bed and me there with a clipboard, marking down his time and screaming at him that it wasn’t good enough damnit and then throwing the alarm clock out the window in rage and disappointment.

Eventually he got it. Or he’s getting it. See, the good thing about Hard-core Wake-up is that it’s self-reinforcing. The first day you do it is Not Fun. But every day you do achieve Hard-core Wake-up, it gets a little easier, a little more natural. Waking up begins to feel more like an on-off switch, rather than a swim up out of something deep. I've been coming back to it, too. It was good on this weekday for the following reason:

Alarm buzzed, I woke. Got up (almost) instantly. Went into kitchen, poured a cup of coffee from the pot I’d set to brew at 6am the night before. (This, Dear Reader, is one of the great joys of life: Coffee ready the moment you wake up.) Went back into my bedroom and sat on the edge of my bed, feet on the windowsill, looking east. It was 6am and the sun was rising. I wrote the following:

Sunrise, from the window of 322 Rodney Street: The clouds looked like burning canoes, painted wispily by a traditional Japanese artist, frozen in their orange sorbet waves down a river of robin’s-egg blue. And the shoosh of cars from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, behind me. Within minutes the canoe clouds disappeared, the ice-cream fires were extinguished, the painter packed up. And I dressed for work.

Thoughts on the Democratic National Convention

2008-08-25T21:46:00.006-04:00

I'm watching the Democratic National Convention right now; I just saw Caroline Kennedy introduce a tribute video to Ted Kennedy, and then the senator himself came on to give a rousing, fiery speech—he remains the Liberal Lion.

The tribute video choked me up a bit, to be honest: One of his brothers died in World War II, and then they killed his other two brothers. That happening would probably turn a lesser person to bitterness and rancor, but Ted's kept on fighting, all these years. It's inspiring.

And all the people waving Kennedy signs ... of course I wasn't old enough to remember Camelot, John, and Bobby, but I feel the fervor, fifty years later, for Obama. I really think this election represents a restoration of the fighting, proud side of the Democratic party, and I for one am honored to feel a part of it.

It's simply this: The Democrats are the party of the people, the party of the common man, the party of human rights—and I feel fucking great to be a Democrat, life-long 'til the day I die. Go Obama and Biden!

Now for a lesson: Are you in a battleground state? (I'm looking at you, Arkansans.) Are you registered to vote? Are your friends and family? If not, do this: Google "[your state] voter registration" or [your state] board of elections." Look around and find the voter registration form; most states these days allow you to print out a PDF of the voter registration form, fill it out, and mail it in—usually you don't even need a stamp. (Here's Arkansas' voter registration page ... scroll down to download the PDF.)

But don't just print out one PDF for yourself; print out a few. Keep 'em with you. In the next week or two, talk to your friends and co-workers about the candidate you support—and I'm not even saying it has to be Democratic. I don't agree with the Republicans on most issues, but they are a valid voice as well—and it's an axiom that the more people who are engaged and registered and keeping the politicians accountable, the better our government will run for all of us: Our families, our new babies, our brothers and sisters, our husbands and wives.

So talk to your friends, family, and co-workers. Ask them if they're registered. If not, pull out a form and encourage them to sign up. I put together a small voter registration drive earlier this summer and got, with the help of two friends, 51 new voters registered—and it felt fucking good.

What difference does one vote make? Not much. But one voter talking to a couple of voters, who talk to another couple, who maybe gives $10 or $25 to Barack's campaign (click here to do so via credit card), and encourages others to do so as well ... that makes a difference; both in politics as a whole and in your own personal life. Trust me. It'll feel good.

And vote Democratic, the party of the Kennedys, the Clintons, and now the Obamas; the party of the people.

*Addendum: Just watched Michelle Obama's speech, and then her with her daughters afterward, with Barack live from Kansas City. Michelle gave a great speech (and is really sexy, by the way), and Barack seemed like a normal guy, a cool dad. And their little girls—Man, just too cute. THAT is the family we need in the White House.

Sunrise

2008-08-21T23:44:00.002-04:00

Woke up this morning 6am the sky looked like an ice-cream fire, sorbets burning out over Brooklyn. Later West Fourth, walked western SoHo, shopwindows all shot up with light. A bar fight, a ruin, a skinned shoo-in. A friend seen below his store's sign, but the sign seen first and a thought: I wonder if Carlos is here. Carlos was there. Dressed in black, a business, man; discussed old apartments. "354 haunts me," he said. I laughed and agreed. "354 haunts me, too."

Sometimes I really I.D. with my niece

2008-08-15T14:23:00.002-04:00

So Tired of Crying, Must Keep Crying....

File under fragments, fall-related

2008-08-12T15:33:00.000-04:00

Two buildings across the way, with the gleaming Hudson beyond, behind the brick air-vent towers of the Lincoln Tunnel, toward which we are descending amid fall-like morning light, are getting new, mirrored silver skins. Put me down for one too.

Being in Europe, seeing the rowers in boats under a gray Swedish sky ignites in me the desire to be someone else: To not lead my life, to lead another’s, one who speaks Swedish, or lives in Murray Hill, or has a house in Austin. I think of Jibz and her girlfriend, doing what in Stockholm?, and under the same sky I am under, the same spray from the Baltic. But my self always catches up to me.

I Montauk Monster New York

2008-08-08T08:47:00.002-04:00

I rarely post things such as this, but this T-shirt is such an awesome non sequitur that I couldn't resist. (If you don't know what the Montauk Monster is, click here to learn about it.)

Adjö så länge

2008-08-05T18:12:00.002-04:00

Tonight's my last night in Scandinavia. Right now I'm sitting on my bed in my room at the Hotel Grand Stockholm, with the windows open (it's 50 degrees out—a little taste of fall) and Robin Holcomb playing on my computer.

It's been a great trip. Gorgeous cities. I was in both Copenhagen and Stockholm. I love being in European cities, especially when it feels fall-ish like it does now; it feels so out of time, so disconnected from America, and maybe it reminds me of my first trip to Paris, nine years ago now, in October or November, I forget which. And then, in Paris, with my friend Amber and her friends, I drank too much wine (and smoked too much joint) one night, and was down for the count: Threw up, got undressed, laid down in hotel bed, had the spins; But I rallied.

I roused; washed; re-dressed, and came back into Amber's hotel room, where the party was still going on. "I am Lazarus, come from the dead!" I said. "I have come to tell you, come to tell you all."

We went out that night to a basement club, hot and sweaty. We walked along the Seine in the rain. We took a black cab back to the hotel. Later in the trip, we visited the Pere Lachaise cemetary, fall leaf-littered and blustery. We saw Jim Morrison's grave, and Maria Callas' ("whoever she is"), and Oscar Wilde's, which on the observe reads thusly:

And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn
For his mourners will be outcast men
And outcasts always mourn

Now in Sweden I think about that; or I think about that often. Now I'm listening to Robin Holcomb; a cool breeze is blowing in from the Baltic:

Consider, friends, when this you see
How my life was lived by me
How I shall pass I cannot know
But I don't mind to be starting over

And back to New York tomorrow.

R.I.P., McCarren Pool Parties/Movies/Concerts

2008-08-01T10:17:00.002-04:00

It was fun while it lasted. Mostly.

From The New York Times:

It’s Been Quite a Pool Party, but the Days Grow Short

That all said, I can't really complain about it becoming a pool.

Remiss Redux

2008-07-22T19:30:00.005-04:00

Again I've been remiss. I started a post last week titled "White Bread: Not Just for Serial Rapists and Holocaust Deniers Anymore," but I got sidetracked and couldn't find time to write it. The basic gist of it was, Have you noticed how people (at least in NYC) have developed this knee-jerk revulsion to white bread? The other morning I was making a sandwich for work, and I pulled out some white bread, peanut butter, and jelly. (I'm from the South, give me a break.) My girlfriend (who, to be fair, is a chef) said, "White bread? You really eat white bread?" in the tone of voice that you might use to question the seriousness of someone who just said, "You know, when you think about it, that Hermann Goering had some OK ideas" or "Let's see what's on Lifetime."

Another time I was buying the ingredients to make a baked, brown-sugar-and-dijon-mustard-rubbed bologna. I bought a whole bologna: The lowest of the cold cuts but, and I stand by this, damn good when it's baked after being coated in a brown sugar and dijon mustard paste. And then I was buying bread. I went for white bread of course (bologna should be served on nothing other), and my friend Alexis says, "You know, you should get some wheat bread, too—people [I was baking the bologna for a picnic] aren't going to eat white bread."

"Why the hell not?" I say. "People can eat some goddamned white bread for once, it won't kill them." And, I'm pleased to say, they did (eat it, I mean, not get killed) and they enjoyed it, by gum—but probably only because I refused to kow-tow to the nefarious and all-consuming wheat bread lobby which has so ensnared the hearts and minds of Joes Lunchpail and College alike.

So I guess that wasn't really the gist; That was more or less the whole post I had plotted out, though perhaps with a little less anti-wheat bread invective. I mean, it's hot out. It's hard to be vitriolic when it's so hot.

Finally: Here's a treat for those of you who've slogged all the way through this post: A Men's Health video story about my friend Michael's pig roast that I helped out with back on May 31. The text of the article is pretty bare-bones and how-to (though still good, if you want to learn how to run a pig roast), but the video really captures it. I'm in it a couple of times, too: I'm wearing a white T-shirt, white apron, and a brown bandanna tied around my forehead. Oh, and I have a mustache, for any readers of this blog who might not know me in physical person (hope springs eternal).

The Running, Part 2 (Slaton Family Edition)

2008-07-12T17:31:00.004-04:00

Like my brother, my friend from high school Willie, and I did in 2000, my other brother Sam and my sister Carrie just ran the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Sam and Carrie are both studying in Cannes right now and—after urging from my dad—took the train down to Pamplona a couple of days ago to run.

This morning I got a call from my brother Jacob, with whom I ran in 2000.

"Dude," he said. "I think I found a picture of Sam on this San Fermin [the official name of the Running of the Bulls festival] website."

I went to the website, checked it out and, sure enough, there's Sam, a terrified-looking face in the crowd. We weren't entirely sure it was Sam, but later on my dad found another picture that proved it. If you want to see the pictures (unfortunately the pics are in some sort of flash loop, and I can't pull them out for posting here), do the following:

Go here and click on the far-right image of the second row of pictures from the top. That's Sam at the top center of the picture, just to the right of the guy with his back to the camera, wearing a white shirt that looks like it has bloody gore-marks on it. Sam is wearing a red bandanna and sash, and has a rolled newspaper in his right hand (yeah, I know, like everyone else in the picture, but still).

Also go here and click on the far-right picture of the top row for the incontrovertible evidence: That's Sam's face, looking hilariously terrified, in the bottom-right of the picture. I remember that face. I made it back in 2000. One thing that people don't tell you about the Running of the Bulls: It's not fun. I mean, it is before, and it is after, but while you're in the middle of it you're just like Oh shit what in god's name have I gotten myself into, and trying not to get killed.

No pictures of Carrie running are as yet extant. Apparently the locals frown on women running, but hopefully she did it anyway. And for those of you perhaps worried for my brother and sister, worry not: This morning my dad got a quick email from them. The email read:

From: Samuel Slaton
Date: Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 9:58 AM
Subject: pops
To: Dave Slaton

we made it! at an expensive internet cafe right now, so i will let you know more when we get back to cannes. french keyboards are terrible. we love you!

scram and carrie

Well done Sam and Carrie.

Friday was the Fourth of July

2008-07-06T12:46:00.003-04:00

Today's the Fourth of July
Another June has gone by
And when they light up our town
I just think, "What a waste of gunpowder and sky"
—Aimee Mann

I don't really feel that way, save for the another June has gone by part. It always saddens me, how much I look forward to summer—the redemption I ascribe to it—and then how fast it goes, never seeming to be used to its fullest. But that, I suppose, is the nature of things.

It's hot and real muggy today, same as yesterday. My Fourth turned out great. I had folks over to my house for burgers, which at first made me anxious but in the end turned out really well. I think everyone was pleased with the burgers and had a good, relaxed time.

We walked over to the water at 8:40pm, and the air felt charged—not just with the thunderstorm that was threatening all day and never really made good on its threat, but charged, too, with the sights, sounds, and smells of a Brooklyn Fourth: hipster girls in their skimpy finery and stroller-pushing, multi-child Mexican families streaming west to the water along the Williamsburg streets; charcoal briquettes on the grill; and the intermittent sizzle, scream, and pop of illegal—and procured where?—small-bore fireworks, always only ever half-seen, if at all.

Fox News Outdoes Itself

2008-07-03T09:22:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, on the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends, while discussing a so-called "hit piece" of June 28, 2008, in The New York Times ("Fox News Finds Its Rivals Closing In," about Fox News' competitors catching up to it in ratings), the co-anchors, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, showed digitally altered pictures (without giving anyone the heads-up that they were altered) of the Times article's reporter, Jacques Steinberg, and his editor, Steven Reddicliffe.

Here are the pictures they showed on air, next to the original photo from which each was drawn:

For those playing along at home, that's three (in recent weeks): the "terrorist fist bump," Obama's "babymama," and now this.

Past Week's Ledger

2008-06-30T23:49:00.002-04:00

Days covered: 6/25/08–6/30/08
Miles traveled (airplane): 3,240
Miles traveled (bus + taxi): 536
Weddings attended: 2
Rehearsal dinners attended: 1
Strings of lights strung: 10
Cars driven: 2
Wedding brunches attended: 1.5
Tuxedos worn: 1
Suits worn: 1
Dates: 1
Diet Cokes drunk: About 196
Club sodas drunk: See above
Cigarettes smoked: Indeterminate
Dances danced: 10 (approx.)
Fun had: Lots
Times read Infinite Jest, spring 1997 to present: 2.269 (and counting)
Favorite passage from third re-reading (thus far):

Though Schacht buys quarterly urine like the rest of them [Quick backstory: Schacht, like “the rest of them,” is a student at an elite tennis academy, and is subject to quarterly drug-screenings; hence—since Schacht and the rest of them use “substances” (some, as we’ll see, more than others)—the need to buy “clean” urine to use in said tests—ed.], it seems to Pemulis that Schacht ingests the occasional chemical that way grownups who sometimes forget to finish their cocktails drink liquor: to make a tense but fundamentally OK interior life interestingly different but no more, no element of relief; a kind of tourism; and Schacht doesn’t even have to worry about obsessive training like Inc or Stice or get sick so often from the physical stress of constant ‘drines like Troeltsch or suffer from thinly disguised psychological fallout like Inc or Struck or Pemulis himself. The way Pemulis and Troeltsch and Struck and Axford ingest substances and recover from substances and have a whole jargony argot based around various substances gives Schacht the creeps, a bit, but since the knee injury broke and remade him at sixteen he’s learned to go his own interior way and let others go theirs. Like most very large men, he’s getting comfortable early with the fact that his place in the world is very small and his real impact on other persons even smaller — which is a big reason he can sometimes forget to finish his portion of a given substance, so interested does he become in the way he’s already started to feel. He’s one of these people who don’t need much, much less much more.

In the future

2008-06-25T14:40:00.006-04:00

In the future, every goddamn thing on the face of this planet will be classifiable under one of four categories: luxury, artisan, organic, or gourmet. Case in point: This fucking ice cream truck, which as of today is plying the streets of SoHo with its overpriced, precious wares.

George Carlin Has Left the Building

2008-06-23T08:34:00.002-04:00

Rest in peace, George Carlin. You were a funny guy, and one of the rare comedians that really could kind of twist a listener's thinking, expose the absurdity and hypocrisy of those in power.

To wit, from Carlin's famous "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" bit:

I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I uh, I think is important. I love..as I say, they're my work, they're my play, they're my passion. Words are all we have really.

We have thoughts, but thoughts are fluid. You know, [humming in a spacey way]. And, then we assign a word to a thought, [clicks tongue like snapping into place]. And we're stuck with that word for that thought. So be careful with words. I like to think, yeah, the same words that hurt can heal. It's a matter of how you pick them.

There are some people that aren't into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous, to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven. Bad words. That's what they told us they were, remember? 'That's a bad word.' 'Awwww.' There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad Intentions.

And words, you know the seven don't you? Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, huh? Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.

Listen to the whole thing here:

Everybody Here Comes from Somewhere

2008-06-20T08:55:00.002-04:00

Last night I saw R.E.M. play at Madison Square Garden. It was the first time I’d seen them in concert since the summer of 1999. They played these songs:

Living Well Is The Best Revenge
These Days
What's The Frequency, Kenneth?
Bad Day
Drive
Hollow Man
Ignoreland
Man-Sized Wreath
Leaving New York
Disturbance At The Heron House
Houston
Electrolite
(Don't Go Back To) Rockville
Driver 8
Harborcoat
The One I Love
Until The Day Is Done
Let Me In
Horse To Water
Pretty Persuasion
Orange Crush
I'm Gonna DJ

Supernatural Superserious
Losing My Religion
Begin The Begin
Fall On Me
Man On The Moon

It was a great show. Lots of old chestnuts, including three songs from Reckoning, my dark-horse favorite early-period album of theirs, and “Let Me In,” off of 1995’s much-maligned Monster, done up in multiple acoustic guitar and organ (the original is just a ton of melodic feedback). Michael Stipe is a consummate showman. The crowd was pretty good, but you could tell some people were annoyed that they weren’t playing “their hits” (i.e., “Losing My Religion,” which they did play during the encore, thus allowing the two mooks in front of me to leave).

Which kind of leads me to this: To have such a huge fanbase, even if it’s leftover from the mid-90s when they had hit albums Automatic for the People and Out of Time, is bizarre for a band as weird as R.E.M. I mean they are a really fucking weird band: They are dorks. Weird dorks. Mike Mills is a dork, the kind of guy that the mook in front of me probably used to beat up in high school. Michael Stipe is gay — not usually a cheered-for-by-jocks demographic — and sings about summer camp and aluminum tasting like fear. I suppose Peter Buck is relatively normal. But how did this band ever get this big?

Jean Teasdale on Airlines

2008-06-19T09:29:00.009-04:00

This op-ed, by Suzanne Barlyn, is just about the stupidest thing I've ever read about the airline industry. It really reminds me of The Onion's fake columnist Jean Teasdale ("I don't have to tell you Jeanketeers that Christmas is just around the corner, which means it's time for—you got it—TV Christmas specials."). Barlyn writes:

Just when it seemed that air travel couldn't be any more demoralizing, three major carriers announced plans to charge most coach customers $15 to check a first bag.

That's right. American Airlines, United Airlines and US Airways have made a decision to bring the industry's already pitiful customer satisfaction ratings down yet another notch. Passengers who dare to travel with -- gasp -- necessities, such as clothing and diapers, will now have to pay for the privilege, beginning this week.

What's next? A surcharge for the air that I breathe in the cabin?

Zing! Also: Diapers? How many diapers are you bringing? Why do you need so many diapers? Don't they sell diapers wherever it is you are going? (Note: These $15 checked bag fees are only applicable to domestic, not international, travel.) Anyway, Barlyn goes on:

Airlines are, understandably, struggling to remain profitable amid record fuel prices. I can deal with cutting routes to save money. I can even accept raising fares -- probably because airfares already seem so complicated that I would, admittedly, have a hard time understanding when I'm paying an extra $15 for a ticket.

But nickel-and-diming my family for baggage is absurd. If only I could enjoy the privileges of a corner office in exchange for making such stupid decisions.

First of all, the airlines are not "struggling to remain profitable"; they are struggling not to totally and completely flat run out of money. The only airline that is profitable is Southwest, and that is largely because the fuel it is using, because of hedge purchases against future fuel prices, costs about $50 a barrel, as opposed to the $140 a barrel other airlines are paying right now.

Secondly, about your family? Shut the fuck up. You shouldn't've had so many kids, and expect to fly to Florida for $200 for all five of you. It's unrealistic, and it's not the airlines' fault. Moving on:

Checking one bag each for my five-person family can now add $150 round-trip to our already pricy travel expenses. Imagine, paying extra for the hassle of checking your luggage, and then hunting it down when you arrive. I expect service when I fork over extra cash -- such as an expedited baggage claim process. But finding your luggage when you arrive at your destination is often an adventure of its own, and now we're paying more for the same old madness.

I intend to get around luggage fees, and the hassle of claiming our bags, by carrying on every last pair of socks.

What did I just say about your family!? Seriously, enough. And I love this, too: "Imagine, paying extra for the hassle of checking your luggage." Imagine! Imagine having to pay FIFTEEN DOLLARS so that you can put a bag on a flight that goes across the country in three hours! I can't! The horror, the horror.

And that's great: You intend to get around luggage fees by carrying on every last pair of socks. Wonderful. Thanks for fucking it up for the rest of us. Now, not only will we have to contend with your squalling five-ring circus of a family, we will also have to deal with your mountains of diapers and socks spilling out of overhead compartments.

Oy. I could go on but I won't. Read it for yourself. Just such a distasteful, annoying sense of entitlement.

Best Typo Ever

2008-06-19T09:14:00.003-04:00

Check this out:

A former Delta Air Lines employee and two TSA security officers have both pleaded guilty to charges that they were involved in drug smuggling. According to the charges levied against the three former airline industry employees, they were involved in a heroine and cocaine smuggling operation based on Atlanta’s Harstfield-Jackson Airport.

That's right: They were smuggling Joan of Arc, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Batgirl.

Fair & balanced & racist

2008-06-13T08:47:00.002-04:00

Once and for all, this is why FOX News is a racist piece of shit network:

Michael Calderone, for Politico.com, writes:

Since Salon's Alex Koppelman caught Fox News characterizing Michelle Obama as "Obama's Baby Mama," there's been an uproar over use of such an offensive term.

“A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron during the segment,” Fox's Senior Vice President of Programming Bill Shine said in a statement to Politico.

In addition to being insulting, the phrase "baby mama" is also inaccurate. The Urban Dictionary defines "baby mama" as"the mother of your child(ren), whom you did not marry and with whom you are not currently involved."

Although Shine doesn't name anyone responsible, the show's producer is Jessica Herzberg. A Fox staffer said that others internally were bothered by describing the potential first lady and very accomplished women — as the senator's "baby mama."

Unfortunately for the network, this comes just days after Fox's E.D. Hill addressed her use of the phrase "terrorist fist jab" on-air in reference to the famous Michelle-Barack fist bump (or pound) made just before his celebratory speech in St. Paul.

That is all.

More disallowed words (now with suffixes!)

2008-06-11T08:38:00.003-04:00

Esquire magazine recently published a piece on epithets, specifically those of the swear word variety. The package included an admonition to quit using the word "douchebag"—the argument being that we are stripping it of its meaning by using it so much, and that if we keep doing so it won't have the necessary sting when we really need it. I agree that we should quit using the word, but for different reasons: Namely, that a grown person should not be using any childish, gleeful, of-the-minute swear word. Here, Paul writes to the Corinthians:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Damn straight. If the level of a man's hatred for another person does not rise above "douchebag," then he should hold his tongue. Douchebags are, by definition, not even worth acknowledging—and like the crazy preacher on your college campus, with whom students would futilely try to engage and debate, the best offense is no offense at all. If a man really needs to tell another man off, there are plenty of fine, still-harsh words on offer. It's all about tone.

Addendum: All of the cousins of douchebag are also disallowed: douchetard, asshat, etc. (Basically just read Gawker: Whatever they call someone there, or in the comments section, don't say it. Ever.)

Other disallowed words/suffixes:

Any reformulation that uses "-erati"; i.e., "glitterati," "literati," etc. Just fucking quit it.
Any reformulation that uses "-ista"; i.e., "fashionista," "Clintonista." Everybody's gotta be famous.

Let me just say this:

2008-06-04T06:56:00.007-04:00

Any Hillary supporter that votes for McCain (or no one) in November is a party traitor and should be excommunicated, and maybe deported. (Where's Putin when you need him?)

Watching the election returns last night, US News & World Report columnist and CNN panelist Gloria Borger said that she'd received an email from a Hillary supporter—in justification of Hillary's combative non-concession speech—saying that it was "her night." (Just to demonstrate that this wasn't a random lunatic supporter saying this, Terry McAuliffe, Clinton's campaign chairman, echoed this sentiment today on CNN's American Morning. John Roberts asked McAuliffe why Clinton didn't concede, and he responded, "In fairness, it was her night.")

"Her night"? Are you batshit insane? That's enough! Enough about yourself! Last night on CNN, when New Yorker writer and fellow panelist Jeffery Toobin heard Borger say that, he just about choked, remarking on the Clintons' "deranged narcissism." And you know what? As much as I love and have loved the Clintons, I'm well on my way to agreeing with Toobin.

What I've Been Reading

2008-06-03T08:59:00.006-04:00

1. Last week’s New York Magazine cover story, by Adam Sternbergh, about the Brooklyn real estate blog Brownstoner and the commenting imp who goes by the Seussian name (as the piece’s illustrations brilliantly convey) “The What.” The piece, linked here, is a perfect example of excellent magazine writing: Ostensibly it’s about the tiniest of subjects—the comments section of a niche blog—but really it’s about so much more: class anxiety and hatred, fear, racism, gentrification, money, renters vs. owners, and more. The excellent soft lede—and this is a great idea, really—is nothing more than an aggregate of comments from the site, all mashed together.

Note: The What’s blog-commenting “signature” is Robert Duvall’s famous line from Apocalypse Now: “Someday this war’s gonna end.” It’s unfortunate that Sternbergh doesn’t point out the way that Duvall says this line in the movie, which is in a wistful fashion that betrays his fondness for the war, from which he draws so much of his self-image and meaning. Would have added another good wrinkle to the article—The What loves the war, and maybe many involved on the Brownstoner blog do, too.

2. Emily Gould’s New York Times Magazine cover story from two Sundays ago, “Post-Blog Confidential.” In it, Emily, a former Gawker blogger, writes about starting a personal blog of her own, and then the ecstatic highs and disillusioning lows of her time as a snark blogger for hire with Nick Denton’s evil empire. It’s a bit self-involved (as I suppose any 10-page article about blogging must be), but it’s well-written and provides some insight into the acrimonious world of blogging. Emily writes this about her former employer:

Sometimes Gawker felt like a source of essential, exclusive information, tailored to the needs of people just like me. Other times, reading Gawker left me feeling hollow and moody, as if I’d just absentmindedly polished off an entire bag of sickly sweet candy.

In the parlance, I feel her. That’s the precise reason why I cold-turkey quit reading Gawker a few years ago, save for the occasional post forwarded to me by a co-worker or a friend. I switched to Gothamist, a much more optimistic and (I feel) healthy diversion, about all aspects of New York City. I highly recommend it.

3. The Ends of the Earth: The Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert and Francis Spufford. Lately I’ve been easing back into what I’ll call Ice-lit, and I’ve been remembering what I like so much about it. It’s not the subject matter per se, it’s more the way in which the poles are like those weirdly magnetized places on the planet where cylinders roll uphill and compasses go crazy: They are places where the normal laws of the planet break down, and therefore I believe they are great “becoming” places. See this passage from Robert Peary, for example, from his (disupted) account of being the first to reach the North Pole:

It was hard to realize that, in the first miles of this brief march, we had been traveling due north, while, on the last few miles of the same march, we had been traveling south, although we had all the time been traveling precisely in the same direction. It would be difficult to imagine a better illustration of the fact that most things are relative.

And:

… at some moment during these marches and countermarches, I had passed over or very near the point where north and south and east and west blend into one.

Brilliant. I felt the same way when I was on Antarctica, even though I did not reach that continent’s equivalent point. But I remember sitting on top of Observation Hill once, with someone, crouched in the lee of a rock and quietly looking out onto the frozen Ross Sea, which stretched in a solid white sheet to the horizon. All was still and silent and white, and a growing sense of unmooredness—from life, from the flow of time, from place, from purpose—spread throughout my body. It was like a hole opened up in the fabric of reality, and for a moment I could see through and beyond this hole into the heart of the universe's monolithic silence.

Poor Hill

2008-06-02T14:01:00.004-04:00

From an article in today's Times:

“There’s nobody taking Hillary’s side but Hillary people,” said Donald Fowler of South Carolina, a former national party chairman and one of Mrs. Clinton’s most prominent supporters, referring to her campaign’s suggestions that she might seek to challenge the way the party resolved the fight this weekend over seating the Michigan and Florida delegations. “It’s too bad. She deserves better than this.”

Aw, how sad: No one is taking poor, pitiful MILLIONAIRE SENATOR Hillary Clinton's SIDE. (What is this, grade school?)

I like her and her supporters less and less each day. The rules of the contest were established before the contest began; you can't just go changing them mid-game when it suits you—that's a basic tenet of sportsmanship. Nor can you claim to have won the popular vote when you do not count voters in the states that held caucuses. (How, Senator Clinton, does that square with your "count every vote" mantra? Also: Shame on you for invoking the specter of Florida in 2000 for your own personal gain.)

Regarding the Dems' decision to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, but with only a half-vote each—I think they made a good decision. This is not disenfranchisement, either—this is a political party's internal nomination process. I would have preferred for Michigan's delegation to not be seated at all, because how can this be fair—Obama's name wasn't even on the ballot—but I'm willing to accept compromise in the spirit of party unity. Hillary and her supporters should demonstrate that they are willing to do the same—and soon.

How Not to Get Around Abu Dhabi

2008-05-27T22:31:00.008-04:00

(The ceiling above the bar in the Emirates Palace Hotel.)

I’m back at the Emirates Palace bar, waiting ‘til 11:45pm when my car leaves for the airport. I scammed a shower in the hotel spa earlier, and then changed clothes and freshened up in the public bathrooms, so I’m feeling pretty good—better, at least, than after my super-aimless trek around Abu Dhabi this afternoon and evening.

(Me looking fat in my hotel room, with fruit.)

After the trade show I went back to the hotel, changed, and then got a cab to Hamdan Centre, which I believed to be more of a center than it turned out to be. I ate some weird chicken curry with no rice at a ramshackle café with a rattling air conditioner and then caught a cab to the Iranian Souk, or market. Only problem was, the driver spoke zero English and had no idea where the market was, even though I pointed it out to him on a map of the city—so we circled and drove for a half-hour, the driver calling people for directions all the while until we happened upon the not-at-all appetizing-looking, very minor market.

By that point I was sick of the whole enterprise, and knew I wouldn’t be able to get a cab from the very out-of-the-way and deserted-looking market back into the city, so I just told the guy to take me back to the Corniche, which is a waterfront esplanade/park that runs the length of Abu Dhabi.

He either didn’t know how to get back there or didn’t understand me, so eventually he stopped and passed me off to another cab, who took me back into the city with a relative minimum of confusion. He dropped me at the InterContinental—aka, a luxury Western hotel, which I’ve come to realize are the only foreigner-friendly waystations in this city—and from there I wandered, mostly along the Corniche, which is pretty and well-manicured and looks like it was built yesterday.

(Not the Corniche, but the Arabian Sea behind.)

The wind was high, and I sat down by the whipped blue water and watched the hazy, yellow Arabian sun set. I took a picture for an odd threesome—a Vietnamese woman who walked arm-in-arm with what appeared to be an English grandmother, and a German (I think) who I guess was the Vietnamese woman’s husband.

My feet hurt. I redid my shoes’ laces and set out again, trying to decide what to do until I had to be back at the Emirates to leave for the airport. Little did I know that it would take me about two hours to find a cab, as night fell and the streets became more crowded and, at sundown, the call to prayer echoed nasally from several mosques in a row, which men trickled into. I felt when this was happening that I was in a very different place indeed.

(A prayer mat, with compass to point towards Mecca, in my hotel room)

At one point during my walk I passed by a very modern building and then curved around its back, trying to find a taxi stand and, in the process, walking through what I took to be a VIP car park for the building. As I rounded the building’s backside and headed for the (security gate-fronted) exit, two Emiratis in white approached me. One spoke up and asked what I was doing, was I taking picture, what did I have in my pockets. I showed him the contents of my jacket pockets, a five-dirham note fluttering out in the process (his friend, who seemed more amused than my interrogator, was moving to help me grab the note as I picked it up), and he said No—all this in broken English, mind—what’s in your bag. I showed him—books, papers—and, seeming satisfied that I wasn’t a threat, dismissed me with, “OK. But next time you can’t come in.”

(Sheikh Zayed and his father, one of the primary founders of the U.A.E.)

I was pretty demoralized by this point—I thought maybe I should have been like, “Fuck you, man, this is a free country, I was just walking”; but then I thought, well, probably better not to say such a thing unless you’re certain just how free of a country it is that you’re in.

I kept walking, at this point actively trying to find a cab, which I had discerned only stopped at these little pull-off points, once a long block or so, and had no luck. There were four or five people waiting at each pull-off I stopped at, in no recognizable queue, all having as much luck as me, trying to flag down passing taxis, many of which were empty, with a half-assed, waist-level, arm-extended handwave. This did not work. I walked and walked, eventually passing the café where I ate earlier.

(A sign on the beach outside of my hotel.)

I got frustrated enough to stop, at a relatively empty turn-off occupied by just one other group, a white-veiled mom and her son, who looked to be ten or so. At one point, the mom looked at the son and brushed, with her fingers’ tips and a smile, the hair back from his forehead, and I thought OK maybe we are all the same.

Eventually the pair got a cab and I moved up to pole position near the head of the turn-off. Soon, however, a younger Indian or Pakistani guy stepped out in front of me and started the half-assed flagging (which, to be fair, I, too, had adopted). I was like what the fuck. In New York this move will get you knifed.

Finally another cab stopped at our flagging and the guy went to get in. I moved to the door as he did and said Excuse me, I was here first. Excuse me. He stared me down for a second and then backed off as I went to get, and got, in. I didn’t look back as I got in—though I had a brief flash of panic that the guy would brain me from behind—and said “Emirates Palace” to the driver, who sped off as I thought, “That guy must be thinking, ‘That fucking American….’” But, fuck it: Abu Dhabi or no, certain laws of the jungle—the cabstand line is inviolate—must still apply, or else all is lost.

The End.

(Sheikh Zayed's personal entrance gate to the Emirates Palace Hotel. No, really.)

Why I Want to Go to the South Pole

2008-05-27T10:53:00.002-04:00

Behold the Telectroscope!

2008-05-22T14:54:00.003-04:00

This is pretty fantastic—an old, recently completed tunnel, and attendant viewing portal, connecting Brooklyn and London.

(Here's the real story.)

News Roundup

2008-05-20T15:49:00.005-04:00

On Monday, the Chicago Tribune reported on the wreck of a truck on Interstate 80 that was hauling 20,000 pounds of Oreos. Here is a link to the story—and here's an excerpt:

Several lanes of Interstate Highway 80 were shut down for hours overnight after a truck hauling Oreos crashed into a median, spilling tons of the chocolate cookies across the highway, police said.

The crash occurred at about 3:40 a.m. Monday on I-80 just east of Morris, said Master Sgt. Brian Mahoney of the Illinois State Police.

The bolding is mine, and here's why: Imagine if you were high—I mean baked out of your mind—at 3:40 in the morning, driving down I-80, and you are consumed by an all-consuming munchies whose hunger seems to gnaw at the very fabric of the cosmos—

—and then, like a gift from the universe, or like somehow winning both (both!) Showcases on The Price Is Right (by coming within $250 of your opponent's Actual Retail Price, naturally), a truck jackknifes in front of you, spilling black-and-white gold like manna from Heaven.

Imagine!

***

More seriously, I take back what I said about West Virginia being the most racist state in the nation. Kentucky is.

Charles M. Blow had a great op-ed in the Times on Saturday about Appalachia, and how it relates to the presidential campaign. Dig it here. It contains this fantastic sentence:

So, when [H. Clinton] stops casting the nomination as a standoff between the Dukes of Hazzard and the Huxtables and accepts the outcome as a fait accompli, the party can unite, and there will be a better sense as to which states are in play.

Finally: Obama's daughters are cute as hell. That's what we need in the White House.

No Sleep 'Til Park Slope

2008-05-19T09:10:00.005-04:00

This morning I was turned on to a story in The New York Times by my managing editor, about the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope and why, in the vernacular, people be hating on it.

For non-New Yorkers: Park Slope is a formerly radical, now upscale Brooklyn 'hood that abuts Prospect Park and has, in recent years, come to be known for its yuppie militancy, as embodied by anti-bar, -nightlife, and -noise activists, huge off-road strollers that take up half the sidewalk, and its overall entitled insufferability.

For New Yorkers: Need I say more? And you can probably guess on which side of the debate I come down. (Apologies to friends of mine that live in or love the Slope; I don't really hate it hate it, I just kind of get annoyed by it, and also see what about it annoys.)

At any rate, the Times article discusses how Park Slope, in the latter part of the Sixties, became "the leading edge of urban revitalization” (this is according to John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University Graduate Center).

The article goes on:

[These people who began to revitalize Park Slope in the late 1960s] were part of a “postwar middle-class search for urban authenticity as a refuge from mass consumer culture,” said Suleiman Osman, a Slope native and assistant professor of American Studies at George Washington University, who is writing a book about the history of gentrification in Brooklyn. That authenticity, he said, generally lasts only for the first phase of gentrification. It’s a theme in modern urban history: the sense that authenticity is always slipping away. In short, this place was authentic until you people showed up. Repeat.

I bolded the above sentence because I think it’s really the key to unlocking all of this, and maybe much more. The phrase would be even more true, or truer on a larger scale, if the word “urban” were deleted, and maybe if “authenticity” were replaced by any number of words. As Tony Soprano tells his new therapist, Dr. Melfi, during the pilot episode of the classic David Chase television series, “Lately I feel like I came in at the end of something. The best is over.” Dr. Melfi responds, “I think many Americans feel that way.”

I can identify with the feeling that “it’s” always just running through my fingers: Time, the seasons, relationships, good moments, records that defined the last year. (Whence the love I felt for Arcade Fire's Neon Bible last spring, or Feist's "Feel It All"? Where do these emotions, the city's collective listening to a few albums for a short time, go? Maybe they're mothballed somewhere in a DUMBO storage facility.) In summary and return: I would like to stop the clock, to live for years in that one good summer when we had the garden parties.

At any rate, the bolded phrase in the block quote holds true in other NY neighborhoods: I know I feel that way about Williamsburg, that is was better five years ago, and that the kids who are moving in are ruining it—But certainly someone who was in Williamsburg in the late 1990s feels that way about me, too. So what is this? Why this tendency to hate what comes after and to romanticize what comes before?

Until this weekend, I had never before seriously considered kidnapping.

2008-05-13T14:54:00.003-04:00

One For the Fam
Originally uploaded by Jake Freedom

Here's why that's no longer the case:

The Onion Weekender

2008-05-02T08:27:00.002-04:00

This picture is the laughter equivalent of a snowball rolling down a hill. I looked at it, said, "Ha," then looked again ("Ha ha"), then, "Ha ha ha"—and then I had to close the window on my computer because I was going to lose it if I continued looking at it. Dig, Lazarus, dig:

Two Things

2008-04-30T13:14:00.003-04:00

Both from the Times:

From this article on seven new sandwiches in NYC and environs:

One day last year at the Watchung Deli, at the request of a student from a nearby school, Ben Gualano piled mac-and-cheese onto a chicken cutlet sub with barbecue sauce and bacon, squeezed it shut somehow, and the Benny Mac was born.

They left out a phrase before "student"; namely, "high-as-shit."

And, more seriously, this, from an editorial on the Obama/Wright fight:

Senator John McCain has continued to embrace a prominent white supporter, Pastor John Hagee, whose bigotry matches that of Mr. Wright. Mr. McCain has not tried hard enough to stop a race-baiting commercial — complete with video of Mr. Wright — that is being run against Mr. Obama in North Carolina.

That is damn straight. It's about time far-right Christian pastors began to be held accountable for their lunacy. But will he be? No he will not.

Hell's Kitchen

2008-04-29T22:00:00.004-04:00

At the backside of Columbus Center,
which previously was only a Circle,
I kill time—
having walked twenty-six blocks up Ninth—
in a café, not a bar.
The movements are the same.

The center’s twin towers rise
in perfect parallel
like a key from the future. The two frame,
between them, an equally shaped bolt
of severe blue; together the three
look like the optical illusion
in which a fork’s tines appear variously
to be four or three.

I am unfamiliar
with this part of the city,
save for the day, nearly
a year ago now, when I went
to inspect an outpatient rehab
with a soon-to-be sponsee,
and coming here

assaults me and my balance,
a head-rush when one stands
up too quickly, or how in Abu Dhabi
the city spread out before me
like a dusty Oriental rug:
I can only ever know a corner
of anything.
And what if everything
is similar?

Only a corner of Carolyn,
ever a sliver of Serena.
Perhaps within my own self under
thick opaque ice
warm seas I’ll never see
slosh and wash, submerged,
unknown underwater peaks
of my blinkered consciousness.