Pilgrim at Rodney Street

Waking up Saturday morning, it's begun to get warm; the heat through the open window is warming the left side of my face as I type. Last night I had some books returned to me: For the Time Being, by Annie Dillard, and The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. He (Apsley) is one of my heroes; the book, which I'd loaned to a co-worker nearly a year ago, is just a monument. Apsley—or "Cherry," as he was known to friends—was a member of Robert Falcon Scott's last Antarctic expedition, during which Scott and a small group of men reached the South Pole for the second time in history (they were beaten to the prize by about a month by the Norwegians under Roald Amundsen) and, on the return journey, died.

Today, on the top of Ross Island's Observation Hill, there is a cross commemorating the five men—Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers and Evans—who made the Polar Journey and died on the way back, inscribed with a quote from Tennyson's Ulysses: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." You're goddamn right.

Also on my desk is another book by Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I first read Dillard back in college, when I reviewed her then-new release For the Time Being for my college newspaper. In For the Time Being, Dillard attempts to answer the following questions, in the roundabout, impressionistic, enchanting linked-essay style that has become her hallmark: "Does God cause natural calamity?"; "What might be the relationship of the Absolute to a lost schoolgirl in a plaid skirt?"; and, "Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?" It is a stunning book, one that I've returned to over and again in the close to ten years since I first read it.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, however, I've only had for three years, and have never fully read (until now). On the back of my copy is a price tag that says Scorpio Books and $29.95. This is because I purchased it in New Zealand, on the one free day I had back in that country after I got fired from my dishwashing job at Antarctica's McMurdo Station, in late-January of 2005—about 93 years to the day after Captain Scott achieved his greatest victory, I achieved my greatest defeat.

But I bought Pilgrim and I flew back across the Pacific to L.A. and I had no fucking idea what to do; it was so weird to get off the plane into LAX and have nowhere to go, no one to meet, nowhere to be. I wandered to a hostel in Venice Beach and I went out to the boardwalk and I sat at a cafe with my newly purchased copy of Tinker Creek—I'd gone from great dreams of Worst Journeys, my lodestar before my Antarctic folly began, to meek, supplicant Pilgrims, seeking stupidly on a beach in the warm (everything is relative) L.A. winter.

I started the book then but I never finished it. But I wrote two things in the book three years ago, on blank pages in the front and back. Now they live in the book, and, as of late, they have been going with me where I go. They are unfinished, like Captain Scott's final entries, which Cherry includes in The Worst Journey in the World. Scott wrote:

"Thursday, March 29. Since the 21st we have had a continuous gale from W.S.W. and S.W. We had fuel to make two cups of tea apiece and bare food for two days on the 20th. Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more."

And his last entry: "For God's sake, look after our people."

My entries are equally (if unjustifiably) dramatic. But everything is relative, and in my world the journey I'd just experienced was My Personal Worst. So, gentle reader, be kind. I wrote:

I'm thinking of a fish I never saw, sitting here at the Sidewalk Cafe in Venice Beach, the very end of America. The smell of patchouli is on the air and across the way is this painting of a fish that's mottled orange and white, with whiskers and feathery fins and a purple lotus blossom floating on the water behind him. The sun is going down behind clouds to the west, and in a few hours' time will sizzle out orangely into the Pacific. It's January and everywhere are people, but no one I know. The fish I'm thinking of which I never saw (but you did, in the ocean) is what Art studied, the Antarctic toothfish, an ugly, though ethereal, creature. They had"

Like Scott's, it, too, ends abruptly.

And then there is this:

"Antarctica was, in the end, like a dream. Which is not to say dreamy, or magical, but rather dreamlike, along with all that a dream can be: unreal, beautiful, disturbing, exultant, comforting, dull. I fell into this dream for six months and awoke suddenly, stupidly blinking at the bright Christchurch light, a Kiwi summer of babies and skirts and birds and bars and foodsmells. Ducks in the water, diving their heads in for food, seemed to me like pictures of ducks come to life, surprisingly duck-like."

So, now: I've picked up Pilgrim at Tinker Creek again. It's time. The book, which was published in 1975, Dillard's second (the first was a collection of poetry), won the Pulitzer Prize, and for good reason: It is literally changing the way I'm looking at the world. She writes about how blind people who have operations to restore their sight, in the first days or weeks after their surgery experience the seeing world as patches of bright and dark color, without depth. I've been trying, as she was trying when she wrote the book, to see in this way: The other day I got a bagel at work and smeared some strawberry jam on it; the color kind of stopped me in my tracks, and I put my eyes close to the rich red splotch. Walking home three nights ago in Brooklyn, to my apartment on Rodney Street, I passed a small tree on the street, flowering with pink flowers. I put my nose right in the flowers, and saw the little gold and black stems coming out of the middle of the flowers, and the pink petals. I both inhaled and saw deeply.

Try it sometime: Put your eyes really close to things. Just look at them, I mean really look. You'll be surprised at how it can affect you. After all, as Dillard writes in Pilgrim,

"It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get."

And again I say: You're goddamn right.

Urge to kill rising

Just a minute ago, I sent this email to a friend of mine. I thought it's worth reposting here.

This article about something being somehow spoiled and not-right and anti-women about Obama supporters is WAY too long, but it raises some interesting points: Namely, the point that I want to hurl my computer through a plate-glass window after reading it.

It contains such gems as the following:

“Maggie Merrill, a 31-year-old graduate student in urban studies ... is a Clinton supporter who told me that she will happily vote for Obama in the general election. But, she said, "There is this Obama-mania, where these young men get glassy eyes and start spitting out vague things about how Barack Obama is going to save humanity. Really, have you seen their eyes? It's this faraway look. It's scary."”

So now we’re cult members, huh? Sort of like wild-eyed feminists who see a woman-hater on every corner? Is that right?

And this:

“Obama loyalty, like white masculinity itself, has become normative -– if you're not for him, you'd best be prepared to explain your deviation.”

Yes, that’s right: Obama loyalty—loyalty to a BLACK man—is somehow “like white masculinity itself.” What a beautiful fucking backflip of doublespeak.

And this:

“That does not mean that all privileged white male Democrats are sexist, anymore than it would be true to suggest that all working-class white Democrats (the segment of the party that is breaking for Clinton) are racist. But a lightly disguised uneasiness with female power, as well as the "we love women, just not that woman" rhetoric will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the reception of the feminist movement.”

Oh, thanks, that's sweet of you. Thanks for saying we are not all sexist. All Arabs aren't terrorists, either, by the way. You see what that does? Saying "All X aren't Y" implies, without having to actually commit and say "Most X are Y," that in fact, really, "Most X are Y. I mean, come on. You know it to be true."

Also, and: Except maybe it’s not rhetoric? Maybe we think that Hilary has—sadly, because lots of us once liked her—chosen to take the lowest possible road as she has descended into a primal panic over not winning, and THAT’S why we don’t like her?

And this beautiful para:

“Valenti continued, "I pinpoint sexism for a living. You'd think I'd be able to find an example. And I hate to rely on this hokey notion that there's some woman's way of knowing, and that I just fucking know. But I do. I just know." When it comes to feminism, she continued, so much proof is required to convince someone that sexism exists, "even when it's explicit and outrageous. So when it's subdued or subtle, you don't want to talk about it."”

Oh that’s great. “You just know.” Wonderful. I’m a UFO expert, and I just know that there are aliens. So now it’s true. Also, relying on the stereotype of “some woman's way of knowing" (aka "women’s intuition”) to “prove” a point about the existence of sexism in a particular instance is so fucking beautiful and symmetrical it kind of makes me happy.

But so: Doesn’t this all smack a bit of McCarthyism, and the Red Fear of the 1950s? I think so. And of course I will vote for Hillary come November if somehow she subverts the will of the electorate via superdelegate shenanigans and ends up the nominee—I just won't be as happy about it as I could have been if she had run a more hopeful, inspiring, high-road campaign, LIKE OBAMA HAS DONE (which is why I like him).

The world is over

From the Washington Post review of the new Gaylord National hotel in D.C.:

There is a lot of "above" to be had in the Gaylord National, the newly opened, $800 million resort and convention center built so ridonkulously large that it makes you think of those Bruce McCall cartoons in the New Yorker.

That's it, I quit.

Black Ice

In today's New York Times, there's a story about a black Harlemite who is going to be teaching from Antarctica this fall. A guy called Dr. Stephen Pekar, a geologist at Queens College, recruited Shakira Brown, a 29-year-old science teacher, for the following reason:

“I’m tired of having a bunch of white people running around doing science,” said Dr. Pekar, who is white. “When it comes to Antarctica, it isn’t just the landscape that’s white.”

That's very true. When I was at McMurdo Station, station population was around 1,200—and yet there were only a small handful of black people, maybe less than 20 (or perhaps that's just how I remember it). Which leads to a funny story:

I was talking with a guy one day while working in Antarctica and he was trying to tell me a story about someone else, but I didn't know the guy he was talking about. He was telling me, oh, he's in the carp(enter) shop, he hangs out with so-and-so, he's about this tall, etc.

I'm trying to think who he was talking about and then I realize it. "Wait," I say. "You mean the black guy?" "Uh, yeah," my friend says. "Yeah, he's, um, he's African-American."

That seemed to me the height of absurdity. If we had been living on an island of four-foot-tall pygmies, would my friend have hesitated in describing the island's only pro basketball player as, "You know, that tall motherfucker"? I doubt it.

Some people have brown skin. So what? That's not usually the most easily identifiable characteristic about them—but it is when people with brown skin make up 1% of the population of wherever one's at.

But maybe my attitude on this results from growing up in the south, where it's no problem to say, Oh, yeah, the black/white guy. Also, African-American is often a misnomer: Not all black people come from Africa.

At any rate, I like this development and the story—diversity is always a good thing, and that'll be a treat this coming fall for Ms. Brown's students to see her working and teaching on the Ice.

Shotgun Stories

My friend Jeff Nichols' movie Shotgun Stories, which I saw last year at the Tribeca Film Festival, and which is being shown at the IFC Center in Manhattan starting on the 26th, just got a fantastic review in New York magazine. Read it here. I highly recommend the movie to anyone looking for a strong shot of Southern heat, violence, ennui and brotherly trouble. Congratulations, Jeff!

All Quiet on the Blogstern Front

I saw Joanna Newsom play with the Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM. Lines like "In the trough of the waves, which are pawing like dogs, pitch we, pale-faced and grave, as I write in my log" jumped out at me; I had heard the words before but I had never heard the words before. I thought of the jump in complexity from Milk-Eyed Mender to Ys and how it echoed, in its unprecedentedness, the leap that Dylan made from The Freewheelin' to Blonde on Blonde and, in his only "V" song, "The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face, where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place." But then Joanna came back out, a vision in a short hot pink dress, and I heard evidence of her genius presaged: "There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road." Early on Dylan meditated on roads, too, singing in tribute to his idol, "I'm a-leaving' tomorrow, but I could leave today, somewhere down the road someday."

Joanna's come home but Dylan's on the road again. In Todd Haynes' fractured biopic I'm Not There, which I saw last Sunday, Dylan morphed as a small black boy jumping trains, living out of time, to a work shirt-clad Freedom Rider to a symbol-addled French dreamer to an arch embodiment of that high thin wild mercury sound to a broken family man to a man of god to a bespectacled, wily outlaw witnessing the sunset of that weird old America only to end up again, as he remains, on a train, winking and forever receding from view yet not ever disappearing. He's in whiteface at the ballpark this summer. He drives SUVs in black mirror shades. He sells ladies underwear just like he said he would. He wears bolo ties and can't keep from crying over Alicia Keys, who was born in Hell's Kitchen when he was living down the line. Woody, Dylan, Johanna, and Joanna, they "will be fine; but what was yours and mine appears to me a sandcastle that the gibbering wave takes."

File under fragments, Ice-related

Though not quite sastrugi*, the Jersey swamp's
wind-whipped, frozen hillocks on the way in
to work put me in mind of Antarctica,
and the cold-storage smoking-room's window,
through which I looked out onto the alien
Ross Ice Shelf, busted-up and jackknifed
like a California freeway after an earthquake,
and wondered, "Where in the holy fuck am I?"

* sastrugi = wavelike ridges of hard snow formed by the wind

Three weeks in the life

Forgive my long absence, Faithful Reader; In the past few weeks I have been really busy.

Two Tuesdays ago I saw Vampire Weekend play at the Bowery Ballroom, hands-down the best place to see a show in the city. They were great: It was the day of their self-titled album release, and during the show I had a smile plastered across my face the entire time. The drummer was like Stretch Armstrong mixed with Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem's drummer, with college-kid thrown in; the keyboardist spent large chunks of a couple songs goonily scratching at his face; the bass player shook and strutted as if he thought he were in a much cooler band than he actually is; and the lead singer was confident and guileless. The music (sort of Afro-pop or, in a much better term, "Upper West Side Soweto"—kudos to whoever coined that) was simple, weird, incredibly catchy and just a lot of fun. The woman I was with, whom I brought to the show without her knowing the band at all and who had been having kind of a bad day, couldn't deal with the very crowded crowd and went to the back of the room during the show—but she texted me during to say, "They are really good!"—They are that irresistible. They won't ever "save music," but they are a great band whose album, since I purchased it at the show that night for $10, I've been rationing so that I don't wear it out too quickly—an honor I reserve for only the albums I love best.

Next up: Joanna Newsom at BAM!

Linda's Tavern, Capitol Hill

All these black-and-white pictures of patrons
on the wall of Linda’s, a bar I’ve never been to
in a city I arrived in yesterday—

an arm-wrestling match between a guy and a girl;
lit cigarettes at the bar, clearly dating the photo;
a woman with fine red lips
and thin arched eyebrows, smiling
with her mouth open;
four band guys sitting at a table
with a sign saying
“drummer wanted”;
a bride and groom, come presumably back
on their wedding night
for a drink at the bar where they met;
a dead-drunk, slumped Santa Claus—

remind me
of the boxes of antique photos
in the Chelsea flea markets:
glossy-haired, stoic farmers;
women in black dresses right up to their chins;
grubby-faced kids now our grandfathers;
a forgotten-named dog, dead now eighty years—

for Linda’s will one day close
the photos taken down and stored away
until our tattoos our mustaches,
our self-consciously cocked hats our jokey outfits
our complicated hair our loves our lives
will be rifled through disinterestedly
by a Saturday shopper in search
of something for her bathroom.

R.I.P.

Normally in these pages I would not comment on goings-on within the world of celebrity, that glittering mirage ... but as I'm sure everyone by now knows, Heath Ledger, 28 and a fellow Brooklynite, was found dead of a sleeping pill overdose yesterday afternoon in a SoHo apartment.

My friend called and told me this around 5:30pm—and it really affected me. Perhaps because of his great talent, perhaps because he's my same age, perhaps because of this friend's recent dealings with him, he had become more real to me—though more likely the reason that it affected me so was because he died by his own hand (though unintentionally) as a result of drug use.

If, as Auden wrote, "poetry makes nothing happen," then a blog post must surely do less—but I feel I must say, no matter if it does any good, that if you think you have a problem, or know someone who does, try to get you or them some help. Trying to help someone else probably won't work, but you can try. If it's your own self, though, I know with total confidence that it can work. Just be careful out there—there's no coming back from where Heath Ledger, god rest his soul, has gone.

Nearly forty years ago

Nearly forty years ago, on April 3rd, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech at the Mason Temple in support of the black sanitation workers then on strike in that city. The speech, which has since become known as his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address, would turn out to be his last: Dr. King was killed at the Lorraine Motel the very next day. Anyone interested in listening to or reading this speech can find the audio and text here; I highly recommend it. It deals specifically with the problems in Memphis at the time, but it also grapples with the wider problems in America as well; Dr. King was an amazing speaker, and even now, listening to the speech, little chills, some strange emotional electricity, runs over my skin and through my body.

Toward the end of his speech, Dr. King relates how, in New York City in 1958, he was nearly killed by a mentally ill black woman who stabbed him while he was signing copies of his first book. He then touches on the fact that, on the way from Atlanta to Memphis that morning, his plane was delayed due to a bomb threat. And he seems to know what's coming, or to feel that his time on this earth might not be long—but he is at peace with that. He says:

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.

And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

I hope we get there someday. Which brings me back to the present: Earlier in Dr. King's last speech, he says something that is just as applicable today, in this very important election year, as it was forty years ago. He says:

Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.

We do have an opportunity to make America a better nation; we can help make that change in the primary elections, when those of use who are affiliated with a political party can choose who we want to have represent us in the general election. And we can all—each and every one of us: white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Christian, Jewish, or any other of the unique colors, cultures, and religions that make America great—affect that change in November, when we can, at the polls, either make a choice for fear and xenophobia or, in concert with Dr. King, reject fear, embrace the world, help put a new, hopeful, and inclusive face on this great nation.

I encourage everyone who is not registered to vote to do so today, in honor of Dr. King and the ultimate sacrifice he made. Each state has its own rules and regulations, but the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization Declare Yourself can help facilitate the process. Go here and get registered now. Make Dr. King and his memory proud: Be an "extremist for peace," take on a mantle of "dangerous unselfishness," and let's do what we can to change the course of this country for the better both now, in November, and after. Dr. King would want it that way. As he said, in the last words of his last speech:

And so I'm happy, tonight.

I'm not worried about anything.

I'm not fearing any man!

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

*If you want to help get others involved in this election year, send the link to this blog post to your family and friends. Here 'tis: http://hunterslaton.blogspot.com/2008/01/nearly-forty-full-years-ago.html

Anna Wise

This morning on NPR I heard one of the best, most moving things I've ever heard: The story—told in her own voice—of how this 96-year-old woman Anna Wise met and courted her husband, to whom she was married for 57 years. It's only two minutes long. Go here but don't read the story, which spoils it. You need to hear Anna Wise say it. Click the "Listen Now" link and dig it.

Also, I'm back from Seattle. More about that fine city TK.

He makes a good point

In light of Hillary's recent showing of emotion, I think we should all watch this clip of Ali G interviewing Newt Gingrich. Ali G makes some very good points.

And this, from The Onion's What Do You Think? section, way back in 2001. (I found this, by the way, by searching for "Onion menstruates legislation"—some words from the bit that I half-remembered.)

N.H. postmortem

I was talking to my dad last night at around 10:30pm, when it was looking like Hillary would—as she ended up doing—win New Hampshire. My dad remarked that, going into the primary, polls were showing Obama to have as much as a 13 percent lead over Hillary. So what happened to that lead?, my dad asked me. His theory was that Hillary, in her rare display of emotion and vulnerability the day before the primary, may have won the women back to her side. And, according to this NY Times article, my dad was half right, if not more—Hillary did win back the Democratic women of New Hampshire, though just how and why are not speculated upon.

David D. Kirkpatrick, with Megan Thee, writes in this Times piece:

Democratic women rallied around Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday, according to statewide exit polls, confounding expectations and providing her margin of victory over Senator Barack Obama.

In contrast to polling results in the Iowa caucuses, half the women who voted in the Democratic primary gave her their support, the polls showed. Four in 10 voters said Mrs. Clinton was most qualified to be commander-in-chief, while 3 in 10 said the same of Mr. Obama.

Now, my question is: Was Hillary's display of emotion genuine? Or was it merely the last, best card she had to play? I dunno, and really we can't ever know; we can't ever truly know anyone's inner motivations and thoughts—oftentimes we only barely know our own. But what do the readers of this blog (both of them) think? Were they crocodile tears, or the real deal Holyfield?

Manganaro's

Hopping off the bus before
Port Authority, I look right to make sure
nothing’s coming—then I hit the avenue
running, up to meet one from the spring before,
with whom, on stoops, I had coffee and chocolate croissants.

That was a good spring. This January day
feels like spring: high fifties, fresh in the air.
Every year it seems
I write about the trees blooming
confusedly, their wood-brains believing
or wanting to believe it’s spring.

Up Ninth with a spring
in my step a sign
flashes red: Manganaro’s,
at which I’ve eaten—chicken parm subs the size
of footballs, and a story of two brothers
in a decades-long fight
over the red sign’s name. I, too, have a name,
but no brothers up here share it.
A little winter goes a long way
for this Southern boy.

Arrived at the park, I find the park’s been made
into not-a-park, rather a rink,
for the winter.
The buildings above, however,
with their white floodlights,
remain the same.
In the city and the buildings and the streets,
in the seasonally shifting park,
I seem to perceive an analogy
or a metaphor for me.

Hola amigos

It's been a long time since I rapped at ya—hope everything's still attached where it oughta be.

Item! Go Obama! New Hampshire's primary is tomorrow, and I hope against hope that Obama edges out Hillary—polls are showing them to be in a dead heat. It's not that I have anything (or much) against Hil, but after seeing Barack's speech following his win at the Iowa caucuses, I really feel that he is the man of the moment.

Item! Phosphorescent is a band on the GROW! I and a friend saw them open for White Magic in December. Even though I had never heard or heard of them until that night, they totally blew me away: They were like Wilco playing Spirtualized songs, just beautiful, chest-swelling, fractured, hopeful rock 'n' roll. They are playing Wednesday, February 27th at Union Hall in Brooklyn, and Friday, February 29th at Mercury Lounge in Manhattan; I have tix to the latter, and I highly recommend that others join me.

Item! I don't know why it's taken me so long, but I finally went—by myself, on a whim—to Fette Sau, the barbecue joint in Williamsburg, last night. The place opened last March, almost a year ago, but I stayed away until now. I think it had something to do with the place's very un-barbecue name, which means "fat pig" in German. Generally speaking, you do not want to visit a 'cue joint that's highfalutin enough to use another language in its name.

But the name is the only false note: The ambience, the music (Otis Redding and the like), the smell and, most importantly, the food and sauce, were spot-on. Yestereve I had the pulled pork and the burnt-end barbecue beans, with healthy chunks of both beef and pork involved in the latter. And man, I was in heaven. I brought a book I didn't even look at. The meat and the beans were spicy and smoky, done just right. The sauces, made in-house, were strong and had a real kick. There weren't any ridiculous fine-dining flourishes: just metal cafeteria trays covered with wax paper, whitebread rolls, wetnaps, and Mason jars. I tried to order a Diet Coke and they don't have it; they only have regular Coke. Now that's a barbecue joint I can respect, pretentious name or no. I highly recommend the place to barbecue-lovers and Southerners in the City.

Item! I watched Cool Hand Luke for the I dunno how many-ith time the other morning. Man, that is just such a great movie, one of my favorites. "Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand. " Anyone who hasn't yet had the privilege of seeing Paul Newman in what I think is his best role should run not walk to the DVD store or the Netflix queue post-haste.

That is all for now. I hope not to be gone so long, blog post-wise, in the future, though I am headed to Seattle on Friday for work. I can't wait to visit one of these "Star Bucks" I've been hearing about.

Here lies the cigarette. May he rest in peace.

Smoke-free college trend growing.

France faces end of coffee and cigarettes.

Smoking now permitted only in special room in Iowa.

The Path Sick Sorrow Took

When I went out
I'd been in twelve years. It was kind of quiet,
very much a whimper. I moved to San Francisco
and two nights after I went
to a place in North Beach called Vesuvius.
I just walked in on a cool afternoon and it was all
as I'd left it: the dark, scarred wood bar,
the familiar, not unpleasant gloom, the bottles arrayed against
the mirror. I went in and sat down
and ordered a scotch on the rocks.

It was amazing to me how easy it was.
The glass was sat before me
without comment or question.
I picked it up and hefted it, felt its weight
in my palm and then
took a deep drink.

The heavens did not crack open, the bar did not split,
I did not drop where I sat, struck down.
It was really rather anticlimactic.

I felt like the reformed thief
who once more takes up
his lockpick. I felt like when,
after having been in England for a year,
I drove again. The movements, the patterns
were all still there though rusty. They did not take very long
to warm up, to loosen, to work back in.
I'd uncovered a rut worn an age ago
through a field long since overgrown.
The path remained.

What happened after, where the path still led,
I don't have to tell you. The path still led
where it led. I may still be breathing
fighting fucking crying loving lying
but mostly I am dead.

Participate in Democracy

Go to Daily Candy (click here) and vote for Smart Fitzjerrell, the punky, sexy clothing line by Arkansas native and personal friend of mine Mary Kathryn Wells. If you don't, another Arkansas native might be elected our next president. And none of us want that to happen, do we?

Mixed tape v2.0

This is pretty fantastic.

It's just not the same, making mixed CDs instead of mixed tapes; the care and craftmanship involved are so much higher with a tape, so much more personal. You really had to sit with the songs, crouched over a boombox, hitting play and pause, cuing it all up just right. When you finished one—that you'd invariably made for a woman—you felt there was a bit of your own personal body and soul in that tape. And they make great documents, little solid items, the plasticky rattle, the handwritten songlist, the cut-and-pasted tape jackets, the old pictures.

File under jokey fragments, recent

1.

In retrospect,
my life was tits and whiskey.
I'd be lying if,
on this late-November night,
I said I didn't miss it a tit. I mean a bit.

2.

I need to write more about other windows.
I'm getting bored of my own stories:
Yes, Antarctica, dishwasher blah blah blah.

3.

I have sat imperiously, tie'd and jacketed,
in the lobbies of luxury hotels.
I have sipped coffee in Venice Beach hostels,
washed up from a firing.
I have mopped floors at the world's bottom
and fallen before bulls.
I'm 28. I should have spread things out more.

First feature

My first feature article for Meetings & Conventions has been published, just this month. Go here to read it. I'm quite proud of it; I hope you all out there in TV Land enjoy it.

Beachblogging

I'm sitting on the beach in Puerto Rico right now. Insane to bring your laptop to the beach, you say? Yeah, you're probably right—but the beach is only a few steps from my hotel, the El San Juan, so, y'know. The hotel is nice but for the pervasive, thumping techno soundtrack that is seemingly impossible to get away from: in the elevator, in the halls (which you can hear, faintly, the insistent bassline, at night in bed, in your room—no kidding), and even right here, right behind me on the beach. So maybe having a laptop out here, with a just-fine WiFi signal, isn't so strange. The waves are rolling in and the breeze is cool. There are a few scattered people in beach chairs nearby.

Puerto Rico has been great, if a bit odd. The city seems strangely empty—at least, Old San Juan, the 500-year-old downtown area, does. It's beautiful, though, the Creole (I think) architecture, all the pastel colors, the little lizards sunning themselves. I like a lizard, I've decided. They are cute little critters, how they are totally unmoving and then, bam, in a flash, they're off.

We've seen a lot of interesting hotels. The new La Concha, which is being renovated right now in time (they say, though I don't see how they will get it done in time) for a Sunday, Dec. 8th opening. The La Concha is an old hotel built in the Tropical Modernism style which has lain fallow for 10 years now—just went to seed. They're doing a ton of work on it, though, and it looks like it's going to be a beautiful hotel when it is finished.

That's all for now. Think I lost the signal.

Friday Funnies

I hate the word "Funnies." That's why I used it. If I could have written "Friday Funnies" in that googledy Comic Sans font, I would have.

But so. Here are a few things, one about bombs and two about Obama.

1. Beware, those who use urban slang! No longer can you shout, "This pretzel mix is the fucking bomb."
2. I just found out Barack Hussein Obama is a smoker. I can't tell you how much this pleases me. And, yes, yes, I know: Smoking's bad blah blah blah. But I like that Obama smokes. Why? Because it shows that he hasn't had all of the humanity wrung from him by politics. Humans do stupid, pleasurable things—they have bad habits—like smoking; and I, for one, would rather elect a fallible human than a perfect robot. It's funny, but in in this way Obama reminds me more of Bill than Bill's own wife does. (Not that spouses are necessarily similar, but you get my point.)
3. Time for reader participation, via the comments function: What do you think Obama's brand is? I've got my money on Camel Lights, but damn do I wish he smoked Lucky Strikes.

11/27/07

The dates dotted in this journal, with gaps
amidships, are clicking on up inevitably,
as they are wont to do. Three years now,
and my want for you, my want of you,
keeps coming back like an old football injury.

I never played, but the metaphor seems apt:
prior glories, hard hits, a longing looking-back
that, too rigorously examined, having kept reading,
proves not to hold up so well. Well oh well.

Used to I could induce rapture
at will, by picture, poem, or rereading
old emails. Often, substances got in on the act.
A doomed, dready dreaming, mouthing a memory
like an ice cube in August: delicious, but gone quick.

Now not so much. Sobriety's conspired
to make life realer. Clarity can be a bit dull.
That old pull's perhaps been dispelled
by my newfound stability. The pilot light's lit
but I've turned off the gas.

Back in Black Tie

From this past Friday night at the M&C Gold Awards, held at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts on Manhattan's Lower East Side:

Birthday 2K7

I had a good birthday. Thanks to all of you who wished me one—and nuts to all of you who didn't. (Not really; I just like saying "nuts to you." Makes me feel like a 1930s "newsie.")

My mom and my dad both called yesterday to wish me a happy birthday. Both of them sang the happy birthday song to me; it's kind become a family tradition to do so.

After that, though, on the phone with my dad, he said, "Man ... you're 28. Two years away from 30, 32 years away from 60 ... unbelievable."

"You're right," I said. "I know. It's just a bad calculus that don't ever get any better, does it?"

"No, it sure doesn't," said my dad, laughing hard.

Post No. 200!

Happy Post No. 200 to me! To celebrate, here's a something I wrote:

On Sun and the Interest of What’s Happening

In the Viennese café, after the movie,
we chose a sunstruck seat
in the covered outdoor garden’s corner.
“How have you been doing?” we asked one another.
“How was Japan?” “How are you and your man?”
“Japan was good,” I said. “Japan was really great.”

Maya was enjoying Brooklyn: the quiet, the space,
the more-laid-back life. But she wasn’t sure she’d stay

in the city forever. In fact, Maya was sure
she wouldn’t stay. I sipped my latte and picked at
the strudel with schlag. The light made it all
seem somehow unreal, like when in shadow
you view a street thoroughly smashed by sunshine
across the way. “And I don’t know where I’ll go.”

Earlier, in the movie, a bad-for—but mad-for—one-another couple
looked out, arms around waists, onto a Paris dusk.
I thought of my girl like that, then, and London.
It wasn’t good but it was something.

“So who do you see?” Maya asked. I stirred
from my sunny reverie and rearranged the cutlery, anxiously.
A minute earlier I’d have had an answer, but the sun seemed
to shut all that down;

the light a viscousness in which I’d been trapped,
sap slowly surprising an insect, henceforth caught,
preserved for eons, dust motes dancing in slo-mo.

Everything telescoped. “Joe,”
I said. “I talk a lot to Joe.”

Something stupid this way comes

Loyal readers of this blog (both of them) are likely familiar with my hatred for stupid neologisms. In these "pages," I have previously excoriated The New York Times Magazine's use, in an otherwise fine profile of the band The Arcade Fire, of the word "ginormous." It has come to my attention that another terrible word is upon us: vajayjay. Apparently this word is being pushed/popularized by Oprah, after being used on Grey's Anatomy (though of course the word predates the show). I learned of the plague-like spreading of this awful word via The Onion A.V. Club's blog The Hater, which is written by Amelie Gillette. (Also, isn't that a great name? Nothing like a nom that conjures both a cute Frenchwoman and shaving.) In the entry in question, Ms. Gillette introduces us to the word vajayjay, "aka the world's most annoying word popularized by the world's most annoying popularizer of annoying things, Oprah." Well said.

I'd just like to go on record here and say that I am sick and tired of the infantilizing of everything. Ginormous is a word a teenager says. Vajayjay is a word a toddler says, or a toddler's mommy says to her (or, I suppose, him, though I can't imagine why). Similarly, men are not to wear shorts unless at the beach or engaged in some vigorous outdoor activity; enough with the T-shirts sporting clever sayings or kitschy nostalgia, like Mr. Bubble—in fact, enough with T-shirts, unless they are of the plain white variety, altogether. All these words the people who write Gawker use: douchebag, asshat, and the like are what junior-high students call one another. So fucking knock it off already. Wear your pants like a man, your skirt (or pants or dress or whatever, I don't care, I'm not trying to start a thing here) like a woman, say "fuck" when you want to, and lay off the childish euphemisms for your naughty bits. Let's start to elevate the discourse by—oh, I dunno—elevating the fucking discourse.

It has been my experience

that people are split more or less evenly between two differing camps when it comes to Halloween: there are those who love it and there are those who think it's stupid. And, much like Republicans and Democrats, you don't find too many switching sides. Also, it's often disastrous when a member of one group tries to date a member of the other: much like the Montagues and Capulets, only with one person (girl or guy) dressed up like Romeo or Juliet, and the other in street clothes, or "civvies," because they think that dressing up is stupid.

I fall in the latter camp. I dunno, I just don't care.

Done with my chores, Pa.

Here at work, one of my bosses calls our work "chores." As in this week, after getting back from Japan, his asking me amiably, "So, are you catching up on your chores?"

I kind of like that. It makes me feel like the magazine is a family that is obligated to care for you; you just have to earn your keep by writing stories, chopping firewood, and toting water.

This one goes out to Dad

I read this recently in The New Yorker. I was surprised by the use of my own personal dad's favorite hymn, as well as by the—not onomatopoeia, but something close (does anyone know the word for this?)—that ends it. An excellent poem.

Aubade in Autumn

by Peter Everwine October 15, 2007

This morning, from under the floorboards
of the room in which I write,
Lawrence the handyman is singing the blues
in a soft falsetto as he works, the words
unclear, though surely one of them is love,
lugging its shadow of sadness into song.
I don’t want to think about sadness;
there’s never a lack of it.
I want to sit quietly for a while
and listen to my father making
a joyful sound unto his mirror
as he shaves—slap of razor
against the strop, the familiar rasp of his voice
singing his favorite hymn, but faint now,
coming from so far back in time:
Oh, come to the church in the wildwood . . .
my father, who had no faith, but loved
how the long, ascending syllable of wild
echoed from the walls in celebration
as the morning opened around him . . .
as now it opens around me, the light shifting
in the leaf-fall of the pear tree and across
the bedraggled back-yard roses
that I have been careless of
but brighten the air, nevertheless.
Who am I, if not one who listens
for words to stir from the silences they keep?
Love is the ground note; we cannot do
without it or the sorrow of its changes.
Come to the wildwood, love,
Oh, to the wiiildwood as the morning deepens,
and from a branch in the cedar tree a small bird
quickens his song into the blue reaches of heaven—
hey sweetie sweetie hey.

Back from Japan

Back from Japan. A crazy, bizarre, wonderful trip. Among other
things, I:

1. Sat at the bar where Bill Murray first saw Scarlett in Lost in Translation.
2. Got attacked by deer outside of a temple in Nara.
3. Fell in love.
4. Saw Mt. Fuji from the window of the Shinkansen, or "bullet train."
5. Ate many, many things which I had no idea what they were.
6. Bowed about one million times.
7. Got offered a naughty massage.
8. Shook the hands of about 50 Japanese schoolchildren, who wanted to try out their English on me.
9. Saw all these tiny, nearly three-person bars down back alleys in Osaka.
10. Stayed in five-star hotels nightly.

... and much, much more.

I don't know how to put this, but I'm kind of a big deal.

Go here now: Smart Fitzjerrell

Prison Break

I see ads for this show, and I don't get it: do they just keep breaking out of prison every episode? Do they keep getting put back in? You'd think that such an inept crew of prisonbreakers would eventually just settle in at the ol' hoosegow.

Which brings to mind:

Hoosegow: NOUN: Slang. A place for the confinement of persons in lawful detention: brig, house of correction, jail, keep, penitentiary, prison. Informal: lockup, pen. Slang: big house, can, clink, cooler, coop, joint, jug, pokey, slammer, stir. Chiefly regional: calaboose. See FREE.

Thanks, Roget's II!

A remnant

Harry Stares It Down

God, the long weekend looms,
a cold spot in the hallway, lonely fullness
of action outside, the flecking
Christmas lights up far too early.

Saturday stretches out like a hungry animal.
It growls: alarm, wake, shower, coffee,
pacing the floorboards until 5pm arrives
and unlocks the liquor cabinet.

Later later later later

Later, a smile stuck stillborn,
Harry doesn’t laugh with
the others at the bar, their jokes.
Like a retarded kid capering, he thinks cruelly.

So, what to do. Only this:
Crush the fucking can, cracked cherrywood
bar and buy another. Good buybacks here.
And mostly, drinking’s better than not.

But then comes
last call and
still there’s Sunday
to stare down, sweet Jesus Sunday,
an arid expanse inhabited only
by twenty-four smirking hours,
an orange light blinking on the percolator.

And when that day’s duly weathered, again it’s:
alarm, wake, shower, coffee, until

work and a blessed white mind
on Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday.
Thursday. Friday.

Dying for the weekends to quit coming.
Too chickenshit to do it.

Bill O'Reilly Is a Horrible Racist

Recently, Bill O'Reilly took the Reverend Al Sharpton out to dinner at Sylvia's, the famous Harlem soul-food restaurant, to thank him (the Rev.) for appearing on The Factor. Here is what that classy fellow Bill had to say about the place:

"It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all."

My god! Can you believe it? Blacks — blacks! — behaving themselves in a restaurant!

O'Reilly went on to add, "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M.F.-er, I want more iced tea.'"

I mean, can you believe it? Who woulda thunk it?

At any rate, Media Matters for America posted a clip of Bill saying the stuff above on its website, thus stirring the pot (appropriately, I might add — I feel like lots of the ridiculous shit O'Reilly says just gets ignored, 'cause he's such a lunatic) and prompting Bill Shine, senior VP for programming at Fox News, to comment, "This is nothing more than left-wing outlets stirring up false racism accusations for ratings. It's sad."

Yeah, it's very sad, isn't it, Bill and Bill? Terribly sad. I mean, here O'Reilly was, trying to give the coloreds credit for behaving themselves in a restaurant, and what happens? The vicious left-wing media attacks him for it. Poor O'Reilly.

That fucker should be fired just like Don Imus. But it won't happen — or it won't happen easily — because it's Fox News.

Flavorslaton Strikes Again

Upcoming goings-on include:

Thursday 9/27 @ Jacques-Imo's: The SugarTone Brass Band
Friday 9/28 @ Webster Hall: Okkervil River
Saturday 10/6 @ Randall's Island: Arcade Fire
Wednesday 10/10 @ Southpaw: The Raveonettes
Friday 10/12 @ JFK: Hunter (ooh ... meta) goes to Japan!
Thursday & Friday 11/1 & 11/2 @ Terminal 5: The Decemberists

Any & all are welcome to attend any & all events!

Nathan Rabin's Year of Flops

I don’t know if any of you out there in TV Land have seen these before, but one and all have to start reading The Onion A.V. Club’s series “My Year of Flops.” Here’s a link to the entry on the movie The Fountain, which made me choke back laughter (“Maybe they figured they could fire Aronofsky right before shooting wrapped and give Hugh Jackman a ...”).

Basically the guy, Nathan Rabin, just reviews the most terrible movies of all time. It’s amazing. Here’s what he had to say about the recent Lindsay Lohan movie Georgia Rule:

“The film’s bizarre tonal left turn from Evening Shade sassiness to emotion-choked family soap opera suggests what Golden Girls might look like if they decided to shut off the laugh track for a three-episode arc illustrating that Rue McLanahan’s geriatric sexual adventurer was raped during college and that all her vamping and lustful one-liners were really a desperate way of overcompensating for not feeling desirable or pure sexually.”

Wow. I mean, that is just a colossus of a sentence. I am in awe. That might be up there as one of the greatest sentences ever, no kidding.

A beautiful paragraph

Herewith, please find a beautiful paragraph from a beautiful story about the parrot named Alex who recently passed away:

Many linguists argue that only human brains have the ability to nest ideas within ideas to form the infinitely recursive architecture of thought: When you’re done eating breakfast would you look in the box at the back of the table for the yellow rubber glove with the middle finger turned inside out?

Man, that's just, wow. I highly recommend the (short) article, which can be found here in The New York Times.

Kid Nation

This Wednesday evening at 8pm is the CBS premiere of Kid Nation, a new series wherein 40 kids aged eight to 15 are left in an abandoned mining town to fend for themselves.

Yes, that's right, it's Survivor but with children. This, I think, has the potential to be one of the best shows ever—maybe even better than Joe Millionaire. Can you imagine the possibilities? What if they form a pudding-based economy? What if they elect a dog president? What if they start eating each other? Man, I hope they start eating each other. I hope it ends up like the Simpsons in which Bart takes over Kamp Krusty, I really do. (I'm fully aware that it won't, but a man can dream, can't he?)

NOBODY NEEDS ANY OF THIS SHIT

The street profiled in this NY Times article is Grand Street, which is about 5 minutes from my apartment. The writer writes that "those looking to find what made this neighborhood [Williamsburg] cool a decade ago need to venture a little farther these days, to Grand Street — where a good-looking mix of old and new restaurants, experimental galleries and girlie boutiques have carved out a more relaxed way to burn through a Saturday."

She then proceeds to take a little tour down Grand, enumerating the best of the street's shops. There's Pop, "an adorable little shop that sells colorful dresses and graphic t-shirts," Armoire, which "serves cold mimosas to members of the local fashion set as they paw at exquisitely crafted silk dresses," and Chopin Chemists, which "looks like an old apothecary shop, but ... sells designer candles like Paddywax ($16.99) and Voluspa ($21.99)."

Adorable ... paw ... fashion set ... designer candles ... (elsewhere in the article) pretty ... popular with laptop users ... storybook ... arty ... splurge ... and so on and so forth.

Just let me ask: when did hipsters completely transform into yuppies? Maybe it's been happening all along, and I haven't just been paying attention, but the smug, self-satisfied consumerism with which this article is shot through makes me SICK TO MY STOMACH. You do not need a goddamn twenty-two-dollar candle. You do not need to burn through your Saturdays. You do not need cold mimosas. To hell with storybook, pretty, arty, splurging and the rest of this nonsense. It's all escapism, it's all worthless and it won't make you happy.

Long time no blog

Hola, amigos. What's goin' on? I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but it's like life keeps raining shit down on me and I don't have a shit shovel big enough to clear it all away.

Anyway, in the news today, CNN's obtained a transcript of the new Bin Laden tape. I think you can also buy it on iTunes for $1.99. Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that "the United States follows a standard procedure to analyze any tapes it receives."

He goes on:

"We review it for authenticity, we review it to see when we think it was made, if it's a single tape or a compilation of outtakes. We look to see if there are overt messages or hidden messages."

A compilation of outtakes? Is that, like, a blooper reel? Or a "best-of" mixtape? Deleted scenes? Alternate endings? I wanna see the one where Bin Laden keeps cracking up when saying the name of Russia's president.

Story Em Donich

Yesterday I visited my friends John and Andrea at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where late Thursday night Andrea gave birth to Story Em Donich. After a somewhat-fraught birth, Story and Andrea (not to mention John) are now doing just fine. I think they went home today.

It was great to meet Story, less than three days old. She sucked on my pinkie finger for a bit, and it was amazing the force of suction she had. And she wailed a bit, but was very sweet as well. Here are some photos of her, so cute (she's the one on the right, this is no Ted Brogan birth):

Autumn comes and the days all start late

All at once one October morning you wake up and the light’s different, angled through the open window which, all night long, eyes closed and mouth ajar, you faced, a bit of breeze come through to flutter the curtains. It’s fall in New York, and it’s as if a crew of window-washers threw a bucket of sudsy water on the city and then squeegeed it clean. A film’s gone, hot August haze burned off, and everyone’s friendlier, more calm, not sunblind and sweat-soaked, sticky.

It’s one of the city’s two annual periods of transition, spring and fall. Summer and winter are static, owning the days and weeks with unquestioned authority—but spring and fall are interregnums, chinks in the armor, breakdowns in the system that summer- and winterly holds total sway.

Today, the twentieth, ten days later, is a gray day; now we should be sweating through shirts, the city reeking of garbage and last-gasp sex, hail-mary flirting, the end of a season; a sort of madness like in Sam’s summer, with which you empathize—but no, you’re wearing a sweater and so’s the carved-blonde beauty sitting across from you, her front to the window and her back to you, in profile.

Urge to blog fading ... fading ... rising ....

Last night I saw The Simpsons Movie with a friend. It felt, in the first few minutes of the movie, like I was watching something really generation-defining; seeing The Simpsons on the big screen kind of felt like a ticker-tape parade, a flag planted on a summit, a long-overdue victory lap.

On top of this, the movie was really funny, in that uniquely sweet way The Simpsons has really made its own. I maintain that, no matter what people say about the decline of The Simpsons, that I still, at least once a new episode, laugh out loud at something. Last night was no different: I laughed, harder than I've laughed in quite awhile, at maybe four or five moments in the film. I mean really laughed hard. The best part by far was at the end, when Bart reunites with Santa's Little Helper (aka "the dog") and asks him how he managed to survive. I won't say what the dog says (or, rather, barks, with subtitled translation), but it's a twisted, golden moment.

I highly recommend it.

She was the sort of woman

She was the sort of woman in whose face one could see her male relatives. She didn’t know this, though, and so at the bar with girlfriends she’d wonder why the boys would give her a quick look and then slide in next to not her. Or if one, for whatever reason, did slide in next to her, the next morning she’d wake and he’d be there but then go, a sort of look of panic on his face when in her face he saw her brothers. She’d look in the mirror, after they’d left, and wonder why; she’d tilt her chin up and to the side, then check her profile. She saw nothing, though, having for all her life looked at herself in the mirror, and indeed her brothers and father straight in the face; nothing looked off.

Save for one thing: her nose, which was not a bad nose; it was her grandfather’s hooked nose, and she loved her small, feisty grandfather—but she recognized nevertheless that this was not a woman’s nose, at least not an American woman’s. It would have looked OK on a Slavic peasant girl, evoking everyday nobility and feminine tenacity—but on her it declared itself too assertively, and assertive was not the current American female ideal.

So: she got it chopped off, planed down, turned up—retroussé. When it was done the boys slid in more often next to her and, mornings, didn’t leave so quickly. But in the mirror, into which she still of course looked daily, she now saw the difference. Absence announced itself: she no longer looked like the male members of her family. This made her sad in an odd way, mourning the loss of something she’d never been aware of ‘til it was gone, but also happy and damnedly free, cut loose from familial history and entirely her own as she studied the sidewalk’s flecks of mica while walking home in the cool city night.

Is it just me ...

... or do many of the paragraphs in this New York Times article about the mysterious Higgs boson, or, more colloquially, "God particle," sound like the dissection of some internecine gangsta rap conflict?

To wit:

The team, known as the D Zero collaboration and numbering some 600 physicists from 19 countries and 88 institutions, will not even say whether there is a bump in its data until the scientists have decided for sure that it is nature calling and not just a random statistical fluctuation.

And:

D Zero is the younger of two rival detectors at the accelerator. The other, known as the Collider Detector Facility, or C.D.F., was built and staffed by an equally large group that is scouring its own data for the Higgs and other new phenomena.

More:

The race is further complicated on the American side by the rivalry between the C.D.F. and D Zero groups. Earlier this summer, Fermilab had to schedule a pair of back-to-back seminars so each group could announce its own discovery of a new particle, a combination of quarks called the cascade-b.

Oh, snap!

Dr. Konigsberg, of the rival team, said they had their own analysis of their own b-quark measurements underway. He compared the rumor to a game of telephone that “starts one way, ends up the other.”

Them physicists are straight gangsta macks, 187 on the Higgs boson, son.

A heartwarming story

Courtesy of my good friend Joe Gordon:

So I went to this place called the White Star Tavern on Saturday. It's a dive down by Drake Field. A guy at work told me about it and says that he goes there all the time. A few of us from work, Todd, my colleague in employee relations, my old boss Robert, and Brent, our guide, went for the sheer hell of it. And let me tell you, if Roger's Rec [a filthy Fayetteville bar—ed.] is a 6 on a 10-scale of nasty redneck bar-dom, the White Star was a good 8.5 if not 9.

It's one of those places where, when the door opens, you immediately go from blazing sunlight to smoky, neon-lit ambiance. The Johnny Paycheck song blasting from the jukebox seems to be turned down and all conversations cease when a stranger (me) walks in. Robert was already there, so I strolled over to him at the bar and then ordered a Busch (not Busch Light) in a bottle. They only serve beer ($2 anything) and they only take cash. The music seemed to get back to it's normal level and the conversations resumed. Soon after taking a pull on my beer, a gentleman also by the name of Joe asked me if I wanted to play pool. And, if I did, I had to use the cue he was offering to me: an old mop handle with blue chalk rubbed over the nub end. I politely declined, but Joe gave me the crook eye nonetheless. We took a seat at a table. At one point a sign fell from the wall revealing the sole window in the place allowing sunlight to stream in. The crowd at the far table erupted in jeers toward the bartender who quickly ran over and wedged the old metal Budweiser sign back in place, thus calming the rowdy redneck vampires. I stayed for about an hour and a half, had four beers and then left. Quite an adventure.

I should say so. Here's to broke-down bars and mop-handle pool cues. Long may they live.

Doesn't this picture of this hotel room ...

... look a bit malevolent? It’s like a conspiracy cabal meeting of pillows and chairs. Or it’s like the Simpsons wherein the babies at the day care stage a coup d’etat and liberate all the pacifiers from the locker. And then when Homer, Bart and Lisa come to pick up Maggie, they creep tentatively through the day care and then back out slowly, carefully, through the piles and piles of staring, satiated babies all sucking with a wet, echo-y sound on their pacifiers.

It's not narcissism ...

... if someone else asks the questions.

But so: I invite you to visit my friend Ross Mote's blog, where he's posted some questions answered by yrs. truly.

Dig it.

Back from hiatus

Hi all. The above is a pic of me at Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard, after a 20-mile bike ride that wore my ass out. Note the clay cliffs in the background—they're really cool, all different colors.

To see more pics from our trip to Martha's Vineyard, go here. I highly recommend the joint.

More TK.

Happy Trails to Me

Today is my last day at Vault. It's been a good run; I had fun.

As of Monday, July 9th, I'll be a Senior Associate Editor at Meetings & Conventions magazine. I'm psyched.

So ... to anyone out there in TV Land who might be so inclined, no more sending stuff to my Vault email account, nor the physical Vault address.

Also, I'll be on Martha's Vineyard from tomorrow, June 29th, through Saturday, July 7th, without access to email—so if you wanna get in touch, give a ring on the ol' cell phone.

Cheers—

Hunter

Overheard in New York

"I can make you talk like an Indian."
"How?"
"I went in that Internet cafe the other day and it was really sketchy."
"How many are you? You? You? C'mon."
"You're still a soldier in your mind ..."
"But nothing's on the line."
"Excuse me. I just want to look at the menu. Excuse me."
"I think what it is is it's a way of detachment."
"I'm trying to finish before I leave. I shouldn't care, but I care."
"Well, apropos of your sister's trip to Cairo."
"It smells like updog in here."
"What's updog?"
"Not much, man, what's up with you?"

Yes, Virginia, there is a mustache

It was August 2002, the hot ass-end of summer, and I had just moved from the East Village to Williamsburg. I had barely moved into the place when I took off on a cross-country bus trip on the Green Tortoise.

I had a goatee at the time. The trip was two weeks—down the Eastern Seaboard, through the South and Texas, and into the Southwest, where we hiked the Valley of the Gods, Zion National Park, and more. I smoked up in the desert among the prickly pears with one of the bus’s drivers (named "Razz") and wandered real high through Carlsbad Caverns.

The last stop on the trip before dropping folks off in Bakersfield and continuing on up to San Francisco, where Green Tortoise is based, was Vegas. I had never been to Vegas before. Like I said, I had a goatee at the time, and had not shaved for the whole two weeks—so I was looking pretty scruffy. I thought it’d be good for a joke to shave my shit off and have only a mustache in Vegas, so at a gas station outside of town I bought some Bic razors and shaving cream. Put it in a brown paper bag and, when we got to the Strip, went with my brown paper bag into a very nice, plush bathroom in the Bellagio, right off the casino floor.

Now, I’d been on a bus for two weeks, so I was pretty rough-looking. So I’m in the bathroom of the Bellagio, people coming in and out, and I lather up my face and get to cuttin’. And cutting, my friends, it was. I dunno if you’ve ever tried to shave off a full beard with a Bic razor, but it don’t work so good. But anyway, I get about halfway done—I’m bleeding all over the place—and suddenly I realize how sketchy this looks: like I’d just fucked over some people at the poker table and was now trying to change my appearance.

They didn’t call security on me, though, so I finished “shaving”—more like hacking through jungle underbrush with a dull No. 2 pencil—and emerged, fully mustachioed, into the cool Bellagio. I took up with the curly-headed girl in black that I was hollerin’ at and we went to play blackjack. The mustache stayed for the rest of the trip and has stayed since (save for one drunk night on a dare).

Beasties

Every once in awhile, a rumor would make its way around town—town being McMurdo Station, on Antarctica’s Ross Island—that a penguin or two had wandered into our rough-hewn hamlet. Not being accustomed to seeing much besides humans locomote in these environs, our ears would prick at these reports and we’d rush out on break from the galley to see the little Adelies in their self-important huff and waddle.

The short, fat little black and white birds looked like nattily attired, curious tourists as they poked their beaks around town and we humans watched, rapt, but kept our distance. The best way, though, to see an Adelie was when out on the white, flat, endless expanse of sea ice when you’d see one rushing, Alice and Wonderland White Rabbit-style, headlong toward some very important date for which the bird was, invariably, late.

Other than the Adelie (our immediate corner of the continent lacked the Emperor and Chinook penguins found elsewhere on the Ice), our only other oft-seen cohabitants were the seals and the skua birds.

The seals—fat, grey, impassive yet, in a way, graceful creatures—you’d see sunning and lazing in groups of three or four out on the sea ice. Sometimes pups—from their happy, near dog-like faces you’d understand why they were called that—would be with the adults, who would raise up from their flop and look at you purposefully if you got too close. But we rarely got too close, out of respect for the wild environment and the Antarctic Treaty.

Lastly, the skua birds, or just skuas, were scavengers that looked a bit like dirty gulls and had no natural predators, and so were utterly unafraid of humans. They would walk right up to you, entirely unruffled—or, more likely, if you were carrying food, divebomb you, Ride of the Valkyries-style, when walking between buildings. They were ornery neighbors, but we took it all in stride and enjoyed the chance to see these charming, sometimes cantankerous beasties in their natural habitat—after all, we were the visitors; they, unlike we humans, could survive and indeed thrive on that harsh continent.

DO NOT READ FURTHER

... if you haven't yet seen the final episode of The Sopranos.

OK, I warned you.

I posted this just a minute ago under this thread on Gothamist.com:

Amazing episode, and entirely true to life: most of the time in life, not all that much happens—not even to trigger-happy mobsters. My roommate, brother and I were on the edge of our seats for the final seven minutes in the restaurant, as every little look from someone looked like a hit coming: but it never came. That's the hell that Tony has devised for himself—not a hell handed down by the universe, but one of his own making, wherein neither he nor his family will ever be truly safe.

But, he lived; and things were going pretty well for him and his immediate family there at the end. And that's life, that's what David Chase & Co. have been trying to tell us (among other things) all along: the universe does not punish bad deeds or reward good ones; it is what it is, and there's no old man up in the sky throwing lightning bolts or sending bread from heaven, however much we may want to believe that.

I think that what Tony "got" during his peyote trip out in the desert was that, yes, there is another plane of existence, another something out there, but—like the sun that flashed at him, it is indifferent to what we do on this earth. We may come from somewhere, but whatever that somewhere is doesn't have any feelings one way or the other about what we do here. This was the only true way The Sopranos, given its entire preceding run, could have ended—no matter how many red herrings David Chase threw us along the way.

Congratulations to everyone who has been involved in this incredible show—which, if I may be so bold, deserves to be mentioned alongside such great and timeless works of art as Ulysses, Guernica, Citizen Kane, et al. Job well—and, most importantly, honestly—done to the very end.

My dad's thoughts

on high school reunions, the attending of:

At some point everyone should attend at least one just to experience the experience. Kinda like eating Jello—perhaps fun while being slurped but not too satisfying afterwards—but, hell, it ain’t natural to live in America and not experience Jello.

Well said, Dad.

Strangling Karl

Things being today
what they are, all my old things begin
to become mythy and massive—
my economist friend from Oxford,
I’ll tell the kids—or maybe
he’ll come visit and we’ll tell, in tandem,
the story of how he strangled Marx.

To have a fondness for what’s past—
like Woody Allen for Annie Hall, or me
for the Bodleian and the Firkin, mornings
on the river vomiting up beans on toast,

is a good thing if taken rarely,
like a dozen donuts bought and downed
on a Sunday-morning whim—then
it’s like when the wind brings
a sudden scent of sea
with no sea in sight.
But dwell overmuch

and it edges toward what
the old sea captains called Nostalgia
and Debility—an overripe August stink
that threatens to overwhelm
with its too muchness, a realm
of malignant growth, a pestilential
purple cabbage plant,
a garbage-fed mulberry tree
that leaves a fermenting carpet
of fly-wracked berries.

So these are my thoughts
with respect to returning
for my high school reunion.

But kept in check, forward momentum maintained,
with second sight I see a morning
years from now—though I may never
take a drink again, a cigarette
can always be snuck: we’ll recreate how,
in Berlin, we came upon a looming stone statue
of Engels, standing, and Marx, seated—and Kevin,
lover of capitalism, acolyte of Adam Smith,
managed just barely
to get his arms around the stone neck of Karl,
with a gleeful grimace on.

I’ve still got the picture.
He got that Marx sumbitch something good.

What is lazy writing?

Main Entry: lazy writing
Function: noun
1 : the first sentence of this story from Sunday's New York Times, about the opening of the as-yet unnamed state park in Williamsburg (my neighborhood), Brooklyn.

This is why people call The Times elitist and out of touch with reality—and are sometimes correct.

Dishwashing for fun and profit

This guy ain't got nothin' on me ...

... though I still might read his book, since he is, after all, a fellow dishwasher-in-arms.

This is terrifying.

OK, so, Mayor McCheese. No big deal, right? Look more closely.

Isn't this picture sort of vaguely terrifying, like in a decadent Weimar Republic-type way? Note the mayor's accusatory glare and malevolent expression. Doesn't he seem to be staring into the depths of your soul? What about the weird shadows on his head, and the raised eyebrows? Can't you just see him yelling "Schnell! Schnell!" to some poor gypsy, or perhaps calmly torturing a suspected spy? There's something just so bad-trippy about this picture.

I take the subway. I also eat the Subway.

On Saturday I was on the G train heading south. A man sitting with a bike across the aisle from me said, "Got a bike here for sale, real cheap."

"I don't need a bike," I said. "I ride the subway."

"You do what?"

"I ride the subway. I don't need a bike."

"You ride the subway?"

"That's right."

"You know the restaurant Subway?"

"I do."

"You ever eat at Subway?"

"Sometimes."

"So you ride the subway ..."

"Yes."

"And you eat at Subway."

"That's right."

"OK then," he said. "Just checking."

Is it just me

or does this CNN.com article about Prince Harry not being able to go to Iraq make the British Army sound like the Boy Scouts? Not just because of the word "troop," but also because, at the very end of the article, there's this sentence: "Jobson said he did not believe Harry would quit the army, despite being kept out of Iraq."

"Jobson said he did not believe Harry would quit the Boy Scouts, despite being kept out of the Annual Troop 23 Jamboree."

I have been remiss

lately, w/r/t blogging. ("W/r/t" means "with respect to"—it's a David Foster Wallace tic that I picked up about ten years ago, when I first read Infinite Jest.)

But so: a few weeks ago I wrote a review/recommendation (here's the link) of a book by Tom McCarthy called Remainder. A fine book, and it fairly crept into my system.

The reason I bring it up today is because, on Sunday, I got the keys to my new apartment and went over there. I had, of course, been there before—but what struck me on Sunday was how much the building reminded me of the building that plays a central role in Remainder: the cooking smells (though not liver, as in the book), the noise from behind doors, the little window in the bathroom looking out onto a courtyard of sorts, the wide, airy stone stairways ... it was an interesting bit of déjà vu.

It's worth posting here, from Merriam-Webster, the def. of déjà vu; I was not aware of the second def., though I love the implications:

Main Entry: dé·jà vu
Pronunciation: "dA-"zhä-'vü, -'v[ue]
Function: noun
Etymology: French, adjective, literally, already seen
1 a : the illusion of remembering scenes and events when experienced for the first time b : a feeling that one has seen or heard something before
2 : something overly or unpleasantly familiar

Kind of cool and creepy, hmm?

It is this sort of writing

that visits me in my nightmares:

Recruitment and selection

Members of the Human Resources Department work to source, identify, and attract top creative and business talent to [company name redacted]. Our mission is twofold: to partner with business units to achieve the goals and objectives of the Company and, through this process, to sustain the Company’s premier status within the fashion industry. Our Company aims to provide every employee with a comfortable and professional experience with [company name redacted], from the first point of contact and beyond. [Company name redacted] believes that it takes people with different backgrounds and views to strengthen a well-rounded company. It takes diversity of culture, style, education, experience, and geography to add value to the Company. This ultimately results in a positive impact on the Company’s global business.

It is anti-writing; it is virulent and damaging. It drains words of their primary use—as carriers of meaning. Orwell was right:

"The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought...We're destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. In the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else...A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good', for instance. If you have a word like 'good', what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well...Or, if you want a stronger version of 'good', what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning; or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still. In the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else...

In the end thoughtcrime will be literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word...Every year there will be fewer and fewer words and the range of consciousness will become a little smaller...By the year 2050 - earlier probably - all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron - they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of Big Brother will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now...There'll be no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime ...The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect."

Miscellany

Here are some words which may no longer be used:

1. Sunworshippers. Noun. An awful word used by hacky travel writers when trying to sound bougeouis and at a loss to come up with some new way to describe people that go to beaches.
2. Landed. Verb. "I landed my dream job at Glamour magazine yesterday." A word used chiefly by new female initiates to the New York publishing world. Often travels in packs with Cosmopolitans and very bad music on iPods.
3. Ginormous. Adj. See previous post.
4. Gawker Stalker. Noun (proper). An "app" made by the blog Gawker.com, which plots, on a real map of Manhattan, where various celebrities have been sighted. Now you can know exactly where the person who is no different from yourself except in that they had the bad taste and hubris to pursue a dubious career in self-promotion, aka acting, buys a hammer!

And here is an amazing story from The NY Times about Kool-Aid pickles, or "Koolickles." Further proof that kids in the South are the smartest kids ever.

Go Go Arkansawyers

It's a big week for Arkansans in New York.

Today, on DailyCandy, the inimitable Little Rock native Mary Kathryn Wells' clothing line, called Smart Fitzjerrell, is featured. Check out the fun write-up here, and the clothes here.

Last night, I saw Jeff Nichols' movie Shotgun Stories as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. I can't give enough props to Jeff—the movie was moving, funny, pretty, sad, and hopeful; aka everything a great movie should be. If you live in New York and want to see it, there's one more screening, this Saturday at 2:30pm, at the AMC 72nd Street East. Go here (scroll down to the movie's title) to read a synopsis and buy tickets.

As for me, another Little Rocker in NYC—I ain't done shit. But I'm having fun.