Do Good-Looking People Have Souls?

Alright already. Enough of the Annual Holiday Introspectacular. Let's talk about good looking people.

I wonder if they don't see the teeming mess of population. If they have a kind of infra-red vision for attractiveness, a glaze that relegates the rest of us to the blurry background. They operate on the slick surfaces of the world. The construction of inner life becomes a necessary effect of our secret automatic banishment from this world.

Or something. SO I ASK THEN: ARE THERE ANY HOT GENIUSES? I'm trolling and polling for hot geniuses. This is hard ... try image searching the names of philosophers and scientists. Yikes. Granted, most of them are old men, but I'm beginning to wonder whether genius has lain dormant in the good-looking because they had no use for it. Let me know if you got any. One of my professors said that Nathaniel Hawthorne was "dishy." Made Melville want to Moby Dick his Scarlet A-hole. Made Herm's Billy Budd for Nate's Young Goodman Brownstar.

There's definitely something Bogarty about Albert Camus: But that's mostly his boho posturing, no? Put him in a Cosby sweater and khakis and he's a French-looking highschool teacher. But this is no boys' club. Dig poet Anne Sexton as Mrs. Robinson: She is trying to seduce me.

Bring me your good-looking geniuses. I've got kind of a humanities bias going here, so I welcome other disciplines. But NO ACTORS or MUSICIANS. That's way too easy.

That said, for the first time in a long while, I have a celebrity crush. You might know her. Her name is Zooey Deschanel. Not just because she is cute (which she WAY is); lots of actresses are cute. But you might not know that she sings and has been playing out and recording with M(att) Ward. Here is their version of Sam Cooke's Bring it on Home to Me And here is Stormy Weather accompanied by a photo montage. Here is me blushing.

Forever and Ever Okay

During the drive to grandma's house my dad told me that he had seen a show about the Kennedy assassination on the History Channel that refuted all the conspiracy theories with a neatly assembled menagerie of experts and some snazzy digital animation that showed straightarrow sense where Oliver Stone sees magic bullets. He's convinced. Casket closed. The commies will keep yammering because that's what commies do. Yammer.

I tried to tell him that I thought that that's all well and good but it's one story and you could easily tell the opposite story with experts whose credentials are equally well laminated. In fact it's been done. Many many times. Conclusion, in this case, is a choice ... the shadow of one doubt or another covers the whole field of possibilities. So you can get aboard with one of the two bigger, older, warring stories 1). The individual is a threat to the system (the crazed, godless, and ill-intentioned can emerge from any crowd at any time, flout the rules, and kill our symbols ... this is why we need government in the first place) 2). The system is a threat to the individual ("a" man is no match for "the" man).

But it's hard to communicate these things through a fog of familial emotions, to stand watch on poor-lefty-effete-ivory-tower-patrol and still have a constructive conversation with patriarchs and patriots.

But that's where my nephew comes in. My nephew is almost two.

At Christmas mass at Catholic church, where the the Lord's prayer comes out like muscle memory and sounds like a mono-chant from a bad dystopian novel and the priest's homilizing is staler than Eucharist but still delivered in that serene "priest voice" with pretense to something more than wisdom - beatitude? ... there after the droning was done and everyone's supposed to say "Amen," my nephew, with what I can only retro-project to be baby Vonnegutian pith and brio, says "Okay." Like a beat after everyone else, really loud and clear in the echo-y acoustics and in his naturally adorable voice.

So I think that's the answer - "Okay." That might be a model for keeping an open mind - being thoughtful, not dismissive or arrogant, but resisting a verdict. The priest recites the prayer and your answer ("okay") means to convey something like this:

"Alright, sounds good. That's one of the many things I'll consider. I'm completely fine with you believing that ... in fact part of me is envious of that certainty of yours. If that sounds condescending, like 'I wish I could be blissfully ignorant' well then I apologize. I don't mean it like that. Or maybe I do. Maybe this hypereducated secular humanism is just another doctrine and I'm an unholy warrior. Anyway I don't mean to offend. This isn't a glib critique. I know someone, maybe Ben Folds, had an album or song called "Whatever and Ever Amen" and, though I think that's very clever, that's not what I'm going for here. Not 'whatever' but 'okay.' It's respectful. And not in a sort of hippie way either, where everything everyone believes is beautiful and it's 'your trip' and the sound of intaking breath coincides with bobblehead-nodding vapid approval. Not like that. Something in between. I don't think I'll ever pick a side but I want to think about the sides and PARTS of the sides. Like I really like the sound of the organ up there with all of the pipes. I don't like how you insist on reminding us that Mary was a virgin - that's creepy to me that people put on sweaters and fold their hands and get reverant and then participate in a story that's overly concerned with a teenage girl's virginity. Basically, I want to listen to as many stories as I can."

Okay?

Let Us Now Raise Blameless Men

It's a peculiar migration, heading back-in-time for the winter. Your parents pick you up at the airport and drive you home, as if it were from the mall or the movies.

There should be a genealogical-archaeological art project in which there are a series of snapshots of this particular lot of East Main Street over the years. It could be called "Life Goes On (in the Suburbs)"

Back from my first year of college (Train from NYC to New Haven) - Burger King
I was in San Francisco (man that went by fast) - Video Store
Now I live in Boston (Peter Pan Bus to Hartford) - Chinese Buffet
Thousands of miles away (older) - Walgreen's

We can think about how landscapes beget mindscapes, we can think about hills and mountains vs. the great wide open. My dad tells me that those are "basalt" mountains and that's pretty unique to this area due to some ice age event. He tells me he considered studying geology. I didn't know that, I don't think.

We can consider our parents' bodies to be our first houses. [Imagine you have that kind of speech problem where your R's become W's. Now say "I really miss my old room."]

We can consider our parents' houses.

DEN: Newsweek's Wonders of the World Coffee Table Books, "I Loved You Before You Were Born," "Aushwitz," Crossword Puzzle Dictionary, Illustrated Guide to Shrubs and Trees, Calvin and Hobbes 10th Anniversary (2 copies), H.W. Janson's History of Art, "Saturday Shrines - College Football's Most Hallowed Grounds," "Tuesdays with Morrie," "Kiterunner, "Who Moved My Cheese," The Memoirs of Harry S. Truman, Here Grisham, There Steele, and books I bought them for Christmas.

KITCHEN: Shiny new hardwood but the same yellowtile countertop when we moved in 1984.

OFFICE: Used to be my bedroom.

BATHROOM: Still the best shower water pressure I've ever felt.

There are "figures" everywhere, throughout. These bears in various kinds of dress, seasonal? period? on beds, chairs, stairs, stands ... and where there is no furniture to hold them, furniture has been built to hold them. Little shelves that jut from the wall. There are snowmen too, and Santas. Those ones that are behind glass, white children sleeping or praying, I think they're porcelain. And my least favorite of all - the "Time Out" doll that leans against the railing with her arms over what would be her face if she had one.

We are the new ghosts of ourselves in these houses, recarpeted, rewallpapered.

I Shall Wear the Bottoms of My Trousers Rolled - Dates (with Death)

Today I'm 30.

Here are some people who are just slightly OLDER THAN ME:

John Mayer
Orlando Bloom
Shakira
Fiona Apple
Edward Furlong
Sarah Michelle Gellar
Brittany Murphy
Dustin Diamond
James Van der Beek
Jason Reitman (director of Juno)
Joey Fatone
Jon Heder
Kal Penn
Liv Tyler
Maggie Gyllenhaal

Here are some people who are just slightly YOUNGER THAN ME:

Clay Aiken
Josh Hartnett
Ashton Kutcher
Katharine Heigl
Kobe Bryant
Katie Holmes
Usher
Chad Johnson
Kevin Federline
Brian Urlacher
Julian Casablancas
Audrey Tatou

Here are some other people born on December 17th:

Ernie Hudson (Winston Zedmore from Ghostbusters)
Bill Pullman
Giovanni Ribisi
Beethoven
Chris Matthews
Milla Jovovich
Chase Utley
Eugene Levy


Bands who made their American Television Debut on December 17, 1977:

Elvis Costello and The Attractions

People who NEVER LIVED TO BE AS OLD AS I AM RIGHT NOW:

Joan of Arc (played in a film by Milla Jovovich)
Anne Frank
Ryan White
Billy the Kid
Sid Vicious
The Big Bopper
James Dean
John Keats
Notorious B.I.G.
Tutankhamen
Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker
Steve Prefontaine
Nick Drake
Lee Harvey Oswald
Otis Redding
Percy Shelley
Sharon Tate
Joseph Merrick
John Wilkes Booth
Robert Johnson
Stephen Crane
Caligula
Christopher Marlowe
Hank Williams

People Who Were Born in 1977 That Have Done Things With Their Lives That Make Me Burn With Envy:

Jonathan Safran Foer

Trade Agreements signed on December 17th:
NAFTA

Brothers who built and flew the first man-powered flying machine on December 17th:
Wilbur and Orville Wright

Unearthed Arcana

[The title of this post is from a memory. There's a long lost childhood friend of mine who I recently became "facebook" friends with. And his brother was a D&D "Dungeonmaster." So he had these pricy hardcover game supplement books and I somehow, through the years, remember that one of them was called "Unearthed Arcana."]

That last post about shitting required me digging out an old leatherbound journal which I kept up for a couple years once upon a time. Because that whole scene with my boss really took place and I really wrote about it then and I wanted to consult it. But in its pages I also found some quotations that had moved me to transcription somewhere between like 1999 and maybe 2002 or so.

No doubt there are better ones that I've come across since. But I thought I'd share some of these and invite you to contribute some of your favorite quotations, if you have them handy. Predictably in those years (21-24) I seem to have been preoccupied with love, sex, the meaning of life, and my notion of poetry.

"But what did Zdena mean by accusing him of making love like an intellectual?" - Milan Kundera

"The blood was coming. The blood stank terribly."
"Her face was like a cup of milk dashed with coffee in the sweet warm emptiness."
"I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth."
- William Faulkner

"All those mint-julep swelling gentlemen confused the spiritual butt-rape of other races and sexes with gallantry" - Tim Sandlin

"It no longer avails to start with creatures and prove God. Yet it is impossible to rule God out. The only possible starting point: the strange fact of one's own invincible apathy - that if the proofs were proved and God presented himself, nothing would be changed." - Walker Percy

"Yesterday upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
How I wish he'll go away!" - Hughes Mearns

"You came down here to murder love and call the murder love" - Salman Rushdie

"But what I really want is just to swim around in a warm baby pool of these friends, jump in their dry leaf pile - to rub them all over myself, without words and clothes" - Dave Eggers

"Let spirit wet you like a hose."
"I put my small penis in her. Only the chair was moved. And I came like an ad in the mail." - William Gass

"The apparent ambivalence of Rennie's feelings about me. I'm afraid, like the simulataneous contradictory opinions that I often amused myself by maintaining was only a pseudo-ambivalence whose source was in the language, not in the concepts symbolized by the language ... it was both single and simple, like all feelings, but like all feelings it was also completely particular and individual, so the trouble started only when she attempted to label it with a common noun such as love or abhorrence ... it is merely a matter of x's being part horse and part grammar book, and completely neither ... Assigning names to things is like assigning roles to people: it is necessarily a distortion but it is a necessary distortion ... Rennie loved me, then, and hated me as well. Let us say she x'ed me and know better than to smile."
"There's little need for weakness, reader: you are freer, perhaps, than you'd be comfortable knowing." - John Barth

"There are no atheists in foxy holes." [a play on the maxim "there are no atheists in foxholes" ... sorry for explaining]
"Nouns verbed by, adverbially adjectival." - David Foster Wallace

"The sixth grade at Horace Greeley Elementary is a furnace of love, love, love ... the distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love." - Donald Barthelme

"How strange it is to be anything at all."
"I just want to dance in your tangles." - Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel)

"She kept crying on my shoulder about somebody; I finally persuaded her to settle for my shoulder." Michael Ondaatje and Anthony Minghella (The English Patient)

"We demand something more from artists than this facile affirmation that the existent also means, that things are also symbols." - Frederic Jameson

"I remember the first time we took off our clothes in front of each other. It was like unwinding bandages."
"So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love." - Jeffrey Eugenides

"What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about." - Walter Benjamin

"The more a man cultivates the arts, the less often he gets an erection ... only the brute gets really good erections, and fucking is the lyricism of the people." - Charles Baudelaire

SCAT or LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) Soundsystem

Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop ...

Once I had this really smug boss, the kind with purposeful strides and bad suits and a superior air. The kind that doesn't have time for you. Whose pleasantries are tossed-off, absent-minded, and frankly unpleasant.

So this one time I go to the bathroom to pee and I see his brown shoes in the stall. So I'm voiding myself, flowing out, minding the blank eggshellscape of the wall in front of me. And then I hear his bowels get moving. A less than superior air. He's conducting a symphony of shit, a veritable cacophony of crap. I wince. I finish and go to the faucet to turn it on hard. Drown it out. Then he comes out and I turn to grab some paper towels and our eyes meet and he is shamed, leveled, made base and animal. He knows my ears and nose have been privy to the fouls of his body underneath the necktie and the "oh...can you get me the..." And for that moment, that gleaming moment, the power balance has tilted. I'm the boss. I'm #1 and he's #2.

Bop bozadee bozadee bop zitty bop

So I think you can have your "cut me, do I not bleed," but it's our butts and their primal music that makes our pluribus unum. Shifty-eyed, embarrassed creatures. The lowest common denominator soundsytem. The intimate (b)utterance. Corporeal punishment. The scatalogy of eschatology, the final judgement. So when I have to do my backdoor business in a public bathroom and someone else walks in, I'll wait and dam the terrible rush at its sphincter gate until I've got the place to myself. And I suggest you do the same. I don't want to know you like that.

Chipa-Dee-Ba-Ba-Dow

[Sorry that was gross. Props to anyone who can identify the 2nd and 3rd "scat" samples ... In my head they go "bizzy bizzy bop diddy bop" and "Shooby do bop ba da" respectively but I actually looked up the lyrics.]

I Want You ...

... to correct me if I'm wrong.

Bob Dylan's "I Want You" and Elvis Costello's "I Want You" are the two greatest songs in the history of music that share a title.

(what are some other *distinct* songs ((not covers)) that share titles, even if one or both of them are not good? ... I guess this goes for films as well, as last night I was reminded that there is a half-baked Will Ferrell soccer coach comedy called Kicking and Screaming, a title that to some of us belongs to Noah Baumbach's witty, pretentious debut about witty, pretentious people uncertain of what will come of themselves)

A Shaggy But Nonetheless Exquisite Blorpse

As you may know, "Exquisite Corpse" is a game invented by those madcap modernists known as Surrealists in which a group of people contribute sections of words or images to produce a collaborative (and monstrous) artwork. The rub is that they make their contribution sight unseen, so the artist continues the drawing using only the most minute portion of the previous one (hidden by folding the paper over) or the writer uses just the last word of the previous writer's contribution. According to legend (that or wikipedia), the name comes from the first game played, which resulted in the phrase "The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine."

NOW: it has been suggested by the entity the people at ghost of paper will henceforth refer to as "Pulp Zombie" that a version of this method be launched into the blogosphere. As we are 1) touched by the connections being made across space, across people, across blogs ... the implications of minds stuck on the web, and 2) worried about the current distance between posts, we decided perhaps it's worth a shot.

THOUGH: Of course, the circumstances make a true "exquisite corpse" unfeasible, as each contributer will be privy to what came before, our beast will be built in sections and without blueprint. A virtual narrative daisy chain.

OR: Perhaps a better model would be the beloved so-called "shaggy dog joke," that brand of comic jazz in which the teller stretches his story out to include absurdly specific and tangential details, building and building a palace of useless information until finally the punchline ("fuck you clown," for example ... if you know that one) is the height of anticlimax.

IDEALLY: A goodly number of peeps will contribute - in large amounts, small amounts, named or unnamed, tamed or untamed, putting as much or as little time and effort into it as possible.

SO: as to what goes here ... here goes nothing. A shaggy, but nonetheless exquisite blorpse.

So there's this really fat beekeeper named Gary. And Gary lives in this old house way up on a hill by himself. He has no wife, no friends, and no pets - other than the bees, but they're more of a vocation. In fact when his sister Melinda, who lived in town with her family, suggested they go see Bee Movie, it took him a while to register why she'd done so. When he's not making sure those bees are kept, his hobbies involve other minature microcosmic worlds - he builds model ships in bottles, he collects model trains, and he reads political science voraciously. Anyway one day he's eating Hamburger Helper (which he liked) and watching that new reality show Kid Nation (which he didn't) and the doorbell rings...

Television Doesn't Need Your Pity

It occurs to me that television is simultaneously at its HIGHEST and LOWEST point. Dragging the lake for the corpses of ideas like Skating With the Stars and that Caveman show. But that's obvious. Easy targets. Remember years ago there was this show called Change of Heart where people that were dating got set up with other people and at the end they had to vote whether they wanted to stay with their partner or get with the new person? You weren't sure whether it could get any worse, but if you were anything like me you sat in a beanbag chair in 1998 getting Cheeto-powder on a 22oz Colt.45 and said "someday they'll have a show where you just watch people break up." And now they have this show Cheaters ... have you seen Cheaters? The host, one Joey Greco, rivals only John Edward (who would con grieving dimwits into thinking he spoke to their dead relatives) for a place in the hallowed halls of douchebaggery.

But what's more important are the high points. I'm here to tell you with the straightest of faces, that the greatest shows in the history of television were all on HBO and either just ended, are ending soon, or were just canceled. They are 1) THE WIRE 2) DEADWOOD and 3)THE SOPRANOS. Have a look here at a salon debate.

The Wire's Baltimore expands with each episode, unfolding into an idea map that covers more social and intellectual terrain than a film or even a novel can cram into its limits. It spreads out but its networked - there's a system in place in service of illuminating the systems in place - legal and illegal. And it takes on the always troublesome issue of white people writing the stories (and dialogue) of black people (as well as white people) with an admirable earnestness. Its world is actively 'multicultural' without feeling in any way forced or too self-conscious.

Now Deadwood is one hell of a demonstration of writing chops. Not only are the scripts compelling and the characters fleshed and rounded, but the dialogue is high-stylized - mannered to an almost Shakespearian level AND twice as profane as Tarantino. Ian MacShane's Al Swearengen is larger-than-life luminescent - cocksure, theatrical, and toughassed. But the wonderful thing, particularly about Season Two, is how the other players are more and more finely drawn. They can't outshout Swearengen, but they slowly start to matter to you.

And neither show would have existed without the Sopranos, which I'm now finishing. I wonder if someone started watching the show now, it might even seem outdated, as it premiered in 1999 (back when Change of Heart was still on). But they're still meditating on the pop-cultural resonance of the mafioso in freshly meta ways. In one sense, these are minstrelized "UNCLE DOMS," mugging in tracksuits and chesthair, but the show thinks about this before our eyes. And as I move through the latter episodes, I can see their lives falling apart but also 'deconstructed.'

And I'm never quite sure how to talk intelligently about these things, but these shows are shot in such rich and distinctive color palettes, starting with the candlelit and oak tones of the Sopranos that seems to nod to Coppola. And the filthy mouths of Deadwood pontificate from such dusty environs that your own mouth feels filthier in the watching.

And lest we forget the comedies. There are ways in which when I see a rerun of Cheers or The Cosby Show or Family Ties I can appreciate the artistry of 80s sitcoms in that they were out to build relationships with the viewers ... to draw caricatures but somehow in a HUMAN way that maybe registered as less than a laugh, even less than a smile but nothing less than a general pleasantness that radiated throughout the living rooms of our youths. And of course Seinfeld was revolutionary in its playfully cynical and quirked-out worldview and its narrative structure. But NONE of THESE shows can make me laugh like ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT (R.I.P) or 30 ROCK. These shows are flat out funnier than anything a network has ever aired. And of course, the BBC Office and the American Office are laugh out loud funny and occasionally genuinely emotional affecting, which might make them even better. Although both the Office and 30 Rock seem threatened by the corporate dicks at NBC, who want to force the one show into overlong 'supersized' episodes and the other into selling Jerry Seinfeld's animated project or NBC's "Green Week." Being self-conscious about shilling doesn't make shilling any less lame.

TV-Q:

I've seen Tracy Morgan on talk shows taking his shirt off and talking streaming (is it) consciousness about guys breaking up fights while holding babies. Is he the black Andy Kaufman. Some kind of high-concept comic genius? Or art imitating life?

And the adorable John Krasinski. Are we tired of his oh-my-god-do-you-believe-these-people camera takes ... or are they still adorable?

AND, of course, what are the best and worst shows in the history of television per you ...

Carry On, Carrion Birds

The dog got way too shaggy and had to be shorn. I had my first idea for a post that had to be scrapped. But I'm going to take the scrap and fashion it into some kind of po-mo mobile to dangle overhead. I'm going to pick at its carcass, as it rots by the road and the wind carries the stink of self-indulgent obnoxiousness to your unsuspecting noses.

It was a sort of too-ambitious concept piece about an encounter with personified versions of MYBOOK and MYBAND, the sort of untapped potential that we imagine to be locked up or otherwise stunted, held back. Like I would interview these walking talking embodiments of my unwritten novel and my unformed band. So I was going to call it "The Undone Sessions" and I was then going to ask you if you knew YERBOOK and YERBAND and what they looked like. Maybe too insubstantial but I thought it was enough to go on.

Where I think I took the real wrong turn, though, was when I decided I wanted to use the subtitle "Interview Without the Vampire" because the whole thing would be 'set' in a dream and there wouuld be this sort of creature that sucks out the will or confidence or drive to do these things you want to do and ... from there the thing got way too out of control.

I did like the beginning, though. It went like this:

"Let's pretend I had a dream. And in the dream I'm sleeping. And dreaming. Let's pretend I had a dream and in the dream I'm sleeping and dreaming about being at an R.E.M. show. I like R.E.M. but I'm not like a huge fan or anything, but maybe sort of subconsciously I am because there I am at the R.E.M. show and I'm DEEP INTO R.E.M. They've been playing for about 90 minutes and I'm transfixed, not really moving, but it's hard to focus. Stipe and the other guys keep bouncing around in my vision. And I have a boner. Not quite sure why. So Stipe gets finished doing some weird dance - it looks like he's hugging himself or maybe trying to curtail some involuntary muscle spasms, and he sits down at this piano and he starts to play "Nightswimming" from Automatic for the People. And I really like that song: "The fear of getting caught / Of recklessness and water /They cannot see me naked /These things, they go away /Replaced by everyday."

BUT THEN I'm awake (in the dream) and the vampire is there,"attached to my mouth by its mouth." Yikes. Just a whole different vibe here. Uneven. And I'm tangled up in the amount of time it takes to explain all the details I've made necessary when I began down this path. So the thing is kind of sagging from its own weight at this point. And I can't decide if I want to be funny or "literary" or how to combine the two. And so the vampire thing starts out trying to be creepy and ends up trying to be silly. The colors clash. This is what that section said right before being euthanised:

"I had just never woken up in flagrante disgusto like this before. Anyway, I wasn't able to make all of it out but it said it was some kind of toothless vampire that fed on the sufferers of any number of related and Seuss-ly mellifluous afflictions - moxie pox, gumption consumption, stuff like that. So anyway, in the dream I'm still awake and the vampire can't exactly go back to "work" so I offered him some Powerade and Cheez-Its(all I had) and he sort of thought about it for a minute and then turned it down and then he asked me if I played World of Warcraft and I said no I didn't and then after a few more excruciating minutes he finally took off."

And by now I've invested too much time in the thing but I still haven't gotten to or even thought of a "plausible" way to get to these interviews with MYBOOK and MYBAND, so there was just no way. Or if there is, I can't see it from here, what with the glaze of failure coating my eyes.

Anyhow, I'll be posting something less pretentious real soon. But I did mean for this one to open out. So please do tell me about YERBOOK and YERBAND if that isn't completely idiotic.

DOWN BUT NOT OUT.

Syllygism, Quickly

Syllogisms. You know, like
1) Every song by Air Supply is laughably saccharine yet oddly irrestible
2) "All Out of Love" is a song by Air Supply
THEREFORE: "All Out of Love" is laughably saccharine yet oddly irrestible.
I challenge all comers to detect any airholes in that logic. Hermetically sealed.

So in a recent New Yorker article by Steve Martin he includes some stretched out syllogisms by logician and Jack-of-All-Bandersnatch Lewis Carroll. Apparently the logic holds despite its elaborate container.

1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste
2) No modern poetry is free from affectation
3) All your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles
4) No affected poetry is popular among people of real taste
5) Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles
THEREFORE: All your poems are uninteresting.

That cracks me up. Me and Steve Martin. Anyway, I invite you to compose your own SILLY-GISMS and post here. Conventional or otherwise. C'mon it'll be fun. Don't you wanna ... just give it a ... You think you're better than me, don't you? Sitting there with your smarm and your shirt and your not blogging things. And the judging. That's what gets me. Who do you think you are anyway, Oliver Wendell Holmes?? Do you think you're Oliver Wendell Holmes?? Do you??

Seriously, donate syllogisms.

[And I would be remiss if I failed to point out that the dual Aussie warblers that head Air Supply are Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock. So it is both my dream and my earnest intention to form a softrock supergroup called GRAHAM RUSSELL HITCHCOCK that will play Air Supply covers and the occasional original jam. Our first album will be called TAKE A DEEP BREATH. And we will only play at dentist's offices and maybe other offices and supermarkets or wherever they like to play the literock radio station.]

Ultima Thule

My all-time favorite wordsmith / lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov (whose image on this blog appears left but is also captured right and captioned wrong - or maybe "write," anagramatically correct) was born into a White Russian family that fled the Red Revolution in 1917 when Vlad was 18. In 1922 in Berlin, his father was killed at a political rally, trying to shelter another man from an assassin's bullet. Perhaps these are among the reasons why EXILE and the AFTERLIFE are themes that echo throughout his writing. And perhaps this is why he liked to activate the arcane idea of Ultima Thule, "the northernmost region of the habitable world to ancient Greek geographers," to represent "a distant territory or remote goal or ideal" [http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/ zembla.htm]. In his memoir, "Speak, Memory," Nabokov called this "unreal estate." True North becomes a sort of imaginable but inaccessible celestial space. [I write this, by the way, having just witnessed Matt Lauer at halftime of the Sunday Night Football game reporting from the Arctic Circle]

I bring this up because last night I had a sort of vision of my own that leads me to concur with VN that distant northern lands may indeed approach heaven on earth. I saw Swedish pop singer Jens Lekman, whose wry wit, baritoned balladry, and lush orchestral soundscapes I've been enjoying for a short while. I thought that the show would likely be a fun, even whimsical experience but I did not expect Lekman to walk onstage smiling and trailing seraphim, a band of Scandinavian ladies (FIVE of them? SIX??) all in white. They played horns, strings, accordians, maybe a triangle ... and occasionally Lekman would quit strumming and defer to his DJ (the only other male on stage) and then he and the women would spin around gleefully in unison. Lekman's encore even included a solo cover of Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al," during which he coyly refused to sing the chorus. The crowd did it for him.

I don't mean to make this about the rampant adorability on stage (Jens included), because if I was drooling, I was thinking too. If an American singer leads a band of uniformly dressed women then he's Robert Palmer - and the women are ironic, objectified, and not really playing their instruments. Maybe it's the Social Democratic systems of Sweden and its neighbors - standard of living, health care, etc. There was unabashed joy on the stage last night. Now American rock bands can certainly bring joy about, but they wouldn't dare embody it, busy as they are with icy-cool posturing. [Yes, I've heard of the Polyphonic Spree]. The only other time I've seen vibrations this good was when I saw Architecture in Helsinki, another traveling co-ed indie rock bliss festival. Now they are from Australia, but their name is Exhibit B.

I know that 1) Norway has a really high suicide rate and 2) this association of "norths" with everything wonderful flirts with both Santa Claus and Hitler's eugenics. But risking traveling too far afield, I think, for better or worse, these might be Un-American activities. And speaking of dangerous generalizations and endangered gyrations, have you read or read about New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere Jones' complaint about the "whiteness" of indie rock ("A Paler Shade of White: How Indie Rock Lost Its Soul" in the 10/22 issue)? A provocative article indeed. He defends it here on his blog and a rebuttal can be found here from slate.com's Carl Wilson (which, by the way, is the name of the Beach Boy who sang lead on the gorgeous pet sound "God Only Knows").

Lonesomeness is a Swath of Neck Hair

Happiness is a warm gun. I know what the Beatles meant when they said that. They meant that they were weird and on mushrooms. [HEAR: a rimshot. PICTURE: the drummer yawning.]

But lonesomeness is a swath of neck hair. I can see it there in the bathroom mirror. And there's nobody back there, where my eyes don't go, to shave it for me. To keep me maintained.

And so I navigate the thicket myself. Bravely. Stupidly. Taking a guess, clearing a path on the frontiers of what I can see. And this is why LONESOMENESS and not LONELINESS, with its lilting alliteration, dressed up in ribbons and bows. It's easy to trace the tracks of its tears. Lonesomeness, on the other hand, is a swath of neck hair but it is also a barstool, a loaded sixstring on my back, the basement of the Alamo, the head chopped off a parking meter. Lonesomeness sleeps just fine with a Stetson pulled over its head, having just put out the fire and kicked the empty can of beans. But not out of frustration.

And the skies are not cloudy all day.

Imagined Communities

(thnx for the picture, s. More community or more stealing? Cyberspace 'realizes' the virtual space of intellectual property).

Now that I'm getting the hang of floating out here in the blogosphere, I might as well look around. And this one is adorable (is this green or blue enough for you to tell it's a link?) - a bit of the one-note gag its title would indicate but executed with a care and precision that transcends juvenalia.

The Magnificent Contraption or The Fallen Have Mighty

We've had this discussion before, and I told you that BASEBALL is The Magnificent Contraption. A 19th century mechanism. Gears and Levers. Wait - there's space in between. And time. And then parts set in motion like a Rube Goldberg machine. Patched by bubblegum and oiled by tobacco spit.

And those heady sportswriters wax about its waning with peanutshell nostalgia. And Fox dusts off McCarver and Buck's voice reminds us of his father, so the execs hope that will remind you of yours. The new World Series theme music is all brass and pageantry, swollen with old-timey reverance. And John Williams' rendition of the National Anthem with the Boston Pops.

But you and the rest of them were busy watching football with lite beer and chips. The NFL is a 21st century gizmo, a shiny gadget, a relentlessly marketed product. And of course, it's a war game, technologized and pointed at conquering space. Collision and pressing forward, whereas the ballsmen circle the bases (If you aren't familiar, see George Carlin's bit about how the respective sports come to terms - being "safe" at "home" versus "endzone" and "sudden death," etc.). Don't get me wrong, I was watching, too. But my point is that football is glitchridden - yellow flags on every third or so play. Do over. Should we do it over? Let's watch it over on video and decide if we should do it over. They haven't figured out how the game is to be played. They don't need to. In addition, though the NFL regular season is 16 games long (less than one-tenth of baseball's), its players can rarely manage to play in them all, as the game's violence is too much for its padding.

But I digress. I didn't come here to fight but to say cheers to the second Red Sox championship in four years. The cursed have become the blessed. Some may say this is evidence of the toxic corporatization of baseball and the former lovable losers have bought themselves an evil empire. Some of that, yes.
But the baseball historian knows the Robber Baron and the snakeoil salesman have shepherded the grand game from the beginning. In a different way, for sure, as the so-called "Curse of the Bambino" stems from the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees by Sox owner Harry Frazee in order to finance another business venture of his, a Broadway play called "No, No, Nanette." For someone who grew up with bluecollar Boston-accented relatives, there's a mystique to the Red Sox that wouldn't stick to even the NFL's oldest teams. Lombardi smacks of history but his Packers were winning Super Bowls in the late sixties. My grandfather was in the same war as Ted Williams. And while Joe Namath is still spry enough to get soused and hit on lady sideline reporters, Williams head is cryogenically frozen. And the bitterness and disappointment of Red Sox fan is generations older than Williams. It's been percolating. You can taste it in Dunkin Donuts' coffee.

The fact that this Sox team prevailed over the Colorado Rockies to take the series took some of the teary haze from my soft focus. The black-and-purple (along with the easteregg turqoise and hospitalscrub teal) is all 1990s expansion. Denver's baseball history is as thin as the air. But today the team took their victory parade in "Duck Boats" - World War II amphibious vehicles converted to tourist carriers - and what's better than that?

(If you are not familiar with baseball, here is an instructional video. thanks c.)

Postcards From the Trash Heap: The Disappearing Tracks of the Thought Thief

So the previous entry "Postcards From the Edge" was an old idea meant to be workshopped here with an eye on submission to McSweeneys Internet Tendency, which I thought suited the tenor of the piece, anchored as it is to easy wordplay and pop-obscure allusion. Turns out I was right, because McSweeneys published somebody else's version of the same concept last year:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2006/10/20malla.html

This writer takes a different approach, tracing U2's career through the ages and ultimately it's a MUCH more polished piece than mine. And funny. The writer has published extensively on McSweeneys.net as well as on Nerve.com and a number of other lesser-known literary-type-places.

I could swear that I rehearsed a voiceover version of this in a bad Irish accent on a disgusting plaid couch in Boston before I ever even journeyed midwestward, so over FOUR years ago. I could swear. But maybe my mind plays tricks and I unwittingly plucked the idea out of the ether. It's possible the memory is fabricated or out of sequence. This, ultimately, is why we write things down. As a supplement to our cobwebbed memories. It's an idea at least as old as Plato's Phaedrus. So this is the marshy terrain of intellectual property. I thought of it, you thought of it ... but if you write it down (and publish it), you stick a flag in the idea and all else is relegated to the status of hearsay.

Coincidentally, just a week or so ago, I dealt with plagiarism in a student's paper for the first time. I was incensed, and then saddened, and then nervous and she was contrite and then tears... But then I was shaken from my righteousness by a conversation that roused a dormant memory. I cheated when I was an undergraduate too. I went out to do godknowswhat and roommate and energetic philosopher Mike wrote my paper on Rousseau. He may have even volunteered to do it (he would read Nietzsche WHILE doing pushups). It's not the same as pasting sentences from Sparknotes into your paper, but still cheating.

AND THEN (as if life spun out like the "threads" of the web) last night, I finally saw the documentary about Marla Olmstead, four year old painter. And though her story certainly does generate questions about modern art and its interpretations, Marla's paintings seem to be a HOAX of the first order, which resonated with the discussion of my dissertation writing group earlier that day, as a friend and colleague is writing about "fake" autobiographies (I just now realized she should call this chapter "Grand Theft Auto," a stolen self). She's looking at early 20th century examples like James Weldon Johnson's "Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man," which was a fiction presented as fact in 1912 to cash in on the cache of African-American true-life testimony that had currency since the slave narrative and then re-presented as a novel during the Harlem Renaissance, when it was ok for a black man to be outed as an avant-garde Modernist . But it made me think of Oprah-disgraced James Frye or doubts clouding the veracity of Dave Eggers pomo-memoir. In each case, it's a convoluted idea market.

To sum up: sometimes you get there and there's already a flag. Sometimes you plant your flag in someone else's rightful spot. Sometimes you willfully plant the wrong flag.

Postcards From the Edge

C:

Greetings from The Big Easy. I know it's kind of stupid that I'm here in New Orleans because my Wikipedia page says I'm "currently focusing [my] humanitarian efforts on Music Rising, a charity that provides musical instruments to those who lost instruments in Hurricane Katrina," but I'm really here. Doing that. One guy lost a tromboon (a combination of the trombone and the bassoon) ... where'm I gonna get one of those??? Lots of zydeco stuff too, rubboards and accordians.

So explain this to me. You want to write fake postcards from me from locations like The Joshua Tree and the site of Martin Luther King's assassination in Memphis and one in which I'm confused about which street I'm on, dated things like "January 1st" and "Sunday," and call it "Postcards From the Edge"? To tell the truth, I don't think I've even heard of that movie (Carrie Fisher wrote it? Princess Leia? That's you, man ... you're totally like this hologram projected from a robot's belly that's like "Help Me, Edge, You're My Only Hope"). In 1990 we were recording "Achtung Baby" and I was spending all my time messing with new pedals and stuff. I think that was the last summer that I saw Bono's eyes. I know it's kind of obvious to say he's hiding from something, but come on. Anyway, you can do it - knock yourself out - but are you sure it's funny? Like the whole thing rests on that pun with the movie or whatever and then the fact that we've written a bunch of songs about places. I've never read this "McSweeneys" magazine, but is that enough? I mean, don't let me stop you, but I don't really get it.

-Edge

P.S. Thanks for the copy of "Lost in the Funhouse." I'll check it out on the plane tomorrow.

C:

The weather is here. Wish you were beautiful. Just kidding. That's from a song by this group called The Mr. T Experience. You probably think it's weird that I'm into late 90s pop-punk bands. That would be way more likely to be the kind of stuff you're into, right? Did you know the guy Dr. Frank from that band writes "young adult" novels now? Maybe you should write fake postcards from him? No, I guess that ruins the whole "edge" thing.

I'm still thinking about your postcard thing. What about one from, like, the top of the Empire State Building and you could say something like "gotta go, I'm getting Vertigo." Or better yet, from on top of Mount Rushmore, like that Hitchcock movie, North by Northwest. Or that other one with Jimmy Stewart where he's up high in that church tower. What's that one called again?

Well, you can do what you want, but I don't think you should start wearing knit skullcaps year round like I do. I kind of have to at this point because people expect it, you know. And sometimes I just wanted to be like "look ... my hair is thin, whatever ... I'm married." I mean I just turned forty-six. Forty-freakin-six, man. Besides, if you start doing it, you'll end up having to explain to people why you're doing it and they know your hair is thinning, but I don't know if they know mine is. So maybe you should just cut it real short.

-Edge

P.S. Have you ever seen a postcard that was quite this size? I mean, I was able to write THREE FULL PARAGRAPHS just now. That's not your garden variety postcard in terms of size.

C:

Yeah, I don't really like "Vertigo" either. The "Catorce" thing. I KNOW. It was actually Larry's idea and he hadn't suggested anything since like 1986 so we had to sort of humor him.

Why don't you just use these? I mean, nobody knows that you really know me, right? (They'd never believe the story about how we met anyway). And these are "postcards from the Edge." It's like looking through a two-way mirror or something - they can't see you back there.

Infinite Guitar,
Edge

Geats of Hell

Sorry this is about poetry again (I swear I hate poetry as much as the next red-blooded manimal), but it is my honor to bring you to this glistening bit of blasphemy if you haven't been. My favorite English professor, vested and snarling, left me two blessed nuggets regarding W.B. Yeats that have weathered the years. Teaching Yeats for the first time tomorrow, I thought I'd spit into the river of my students' boredom and try to pass them on. The first involves the poet's own two blessed nuggets and specifically "the Steinach Operation," which, in my memory, involved Yeats getting "monkey glands" implanted into his body in order to revitalize his sexual and creative energies. Now, this procedure was real ... but it was apparently performed by a wackier quack named Serge Vonoroff:

"Voronoff puts his patient and a healthy young monkey side by side on operating tables. A local anaesthetic is given the man, and a general one to the monkey. The incisions are made, and one of the monkey's gonads is sliced into six pieces thin enough for the interstitial cells of the patient quickly to interpenetrate them" (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,727231-2,00.html)

But Yeats' procedure, the brainchild of Eugen Steinach (Freud had one too) didn't involve transplanting any animal parts. It was just some kind of vasectomy. So no monkey nads for Bill Butler Yeats. Alas.

HOWEVER ... this short poem which the aforementioned prof read to us remains as wonderfully disgusting as ever. Enjoy.

A Stick Of Incense

Whence did all that fury come?
From empty tomb or Virgin womb?
Saint Joseph thought the world would melt
But liked the way his finger smelt.

-WBY


Now you can scoff and titter and pretend this is not about the digital penetration of HolyMaryMotherofGod, who we are told art "blessed...among women" and whose "womb-fruit" (paraphrasing) is blessed among everyone. But it is about that. And that takes balls. Transplanted Monkey Balls.

Pray For Us Sinners,

So Much Depends on What You Meant By That

I like to (try to) teach William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" because it makes the kids hostile, skeptical, uncomfortable, or defensive. Here is the whole thing:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

They want to know where the beef is ... where's the poem in that poem? And I stand there in blue jeans and tell them that sometimes art is "conceptual." And this one is a manifesto of sorts, or at least a meditation about what poetry is, what it does, and what it's for. But Williams can say as much. And, I'm fairly certain, he did. But even if he didn't we know he's a poet (a poet/doctor) and an esteemed one, we approach him through the actually flimsy but metaphorically sturdy pages of the Norton anthology. But, the students say (or maybe some brightly ideal, imagined one would) "what if I found this written on a napkin in the bathroom at Applebee's?" What is it without its canon armor and hermeneutical apparatus? And, praytell, "would it have been worth it, after all ... If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say: “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” Eliot was too nervous to leave his poems to "interpretation," so he made them labrynthine, footnoted, and obscure, with erudition by the barrowful.

Anyhow, this is just to say to say that 1) I ate the plums in the icebox 2) they were delicious, sweet, and cold and 3) I'm looking forward to seeing this new documentary called "My Kid Could Paint That," about an alleged four year old abstract expressionist named Marla Olmstead whose work has been compared to Kandinsky and Pollock and who has sold $300,000 worth of paintings. It's like those Rothkos that make you nervous when you go to the museum with your mom and you want to perpetuate the idea that you are the ambadassador of the arts to your family and can explain why it's art to paint a canvas half blue and half a different blue. Could your kid paint it? Does it matter? Either way, I have a feeling that this is why they don't pay us grad students in the humanities any money. They're not totally sure we're not just fucking with them.

Inspiratory System: Ceci n'est pas un "relapse"

Inspire, v.

1. trans. To breathe or blow upon or into. Obs. or arch

Spirit

I. 1. a. The animating or vital principle in man (and animals); that which gives life to the physical organism, in contrast to its purely material elements; the breath of life.

[Oxford English Dictionary]

I can breathe a little easier now that I'm over one month quit. I am respirited. But I cheated. A lapse. At the party. Another. RE: Lapses - does a second lapse constitute a relapse?

Why, really, do we smoke? Why did you smoke? Why do they? Why don't you? Seriously.

I think, initially, i wanted to summon some minor demons. Sex up the image by cultivating some edges. Some mystique - the smoke-haze clouds vision - "is that a bona fide rocknroll rebel over there or just that kid from Honors English class? It's hard to tell." On his utilty belt, Batman had smoke capsules that, when, broken on the ground, would allow for an easy exit. They made him hard to locate. I wanted to be hard to locate. You know, like existentially.

And of course it's an accessory [to commit protracted suicide?]. Accoutrement. A weapon with which to lighten the piling weight of quotidiana. Gravity gets me down. Smoke is light. Levity. It goes into me, out, and up. And it's A light. If I'm mostly water, it makes me part fire.


"I'm not myself since I stopped smoking." -- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"

"... the painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity; the taste of infinity in a cigarette resides precisely in the 'bad' taste the smoker quickly learns to love. Being sublime, cigarettes, in principle, resist all arguments directed against them from the perspective of health and utility. " -- Richard Klein, from "Cigarettes are Sublime"

"The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?" ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"Sucks to your ass-mar!" Ralph to Piggy, "Lord of the Flies"

Post-Time

Post marks time. Nothing in your mailbox.

The beat drops out. Hold your breath.

Flatliners. Bacon at 0 degrees. "Some medical students take turns temporarily killing each other, then bringing each other back to life, with the intent of simply "visiting" the Afterlife. They keep increasing the length that they are dead for, and eventually some of their perceived sins start literally coming back with them until their need for atonement is realised" (wikipedia).

My blog is all cracks and no pavement. Your mother's back is in serious danger should you tread here. I'm all interstices.

Virtual spaces are easily abandoned.

Tick. [bracket]. Tick.

Titular Bazaar

I've been buying music to reward myself for not smoking. I have a question for you if you'll bear with me.

The other day I snatched up Josie Cotton's 1982 "Convertible Music" on vinyl,as I couldn't resist the bubblegum flavor of the images it brought to mind, of a certain toe-wiggling collegesoul mate of mine and the allure of its flagship single,
"Johnny, Are You Queer?" - a song as bouncily charming as it is politically suspect (featured now on my myspace if you want a quick listen). It has been covered by The Go-Go's and Screeching Weasel and Cotton performed for a minute in a scene in the Nic Cage vehicle "Valley Girl." The song is pretty straightforward and fairly innocuous - the speaker is kind of into Johnny but he doesn't seem to reciprocate and "dances" a little too much "with his friends." Naturally she has some questions. Apparently, she has remarkably little tact. Now this is potentially offensive stuff, but as evidenced by the song's inclusion on this year's "A Date With John Waters" compilation, it is absorbed into kitsch pretty easily (if it didn't live there already). After all, this is a cultural artifact from the age of jive subtitles on "Airplane," C. Thomas Howell's blackface ticket to Harvard in "Soul Man," and depictions of gays as well-rounded as Lamar Latrell from "Revenge of the Nerds."


Just days later, I received in the mail my copy of the Phil Spector box set "Back to Mono," which I was able to get from Amazon at a shockingly discounted price. Spector's shit from the his 60s heyday is unbeatable - "Be My Baby," "Then He Kissed Me," Da Doo Ron Ron," etc. But there's a song on here called "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)." Wow. Here's a sampling:

And when I told him I had been untrue /He hit me and it felt like a kiss / He hit me and I knew he loved me / 'Cause if he didn't care for me / I could have never made him mad /He hit me and I was glad

The song is performed by The Crystals (who do a number of amazing Spector songs) and co-written by Carole King. To listen, it doesn't sound as if there is any self-consciousness or dark social satire to it (like I argue there is in a song like Antony's Fistful of Love). But googling indicates that King and her partner wrote it to do some of that after hearing from Crystals frontwoman Little Eva that she had a boyfriend who hit her because he loved her. In any case, nobody liked the song in 1962. Now, with the specter of Spector's recently alleged violence against women, there's another layer of stickiness.

So my question for you is - can you think of other songs, not by marginal or cult bands, whose titles (and / or) lyrical content is equally bizaare or offensive?

White Knight at the Organ Harvest - On Football, Race, and the Many Forms Taken By Evil

monster, n.

1. a. Originally: a mythical creature which is part animal and part human, or combines elements of two or more animal forms ... (Oxford English Dictionary)

In the 19th century, evil was written all over your face - with the sickgreen and stitches of Frankenstein's monster to the phantom lumps of racist-eugenic phsyiognomy and pseudo scientific criminology, there was always an excuse not to get to know someone different from you. After all, the real fear is MIXING - the occult and alchemical composition of the doctor's creation on the one hand and the affront to purity that is miscegenation on the other.

One of the most startlingly evil beings in the history of worlds real or fictional has to be Serpentor, who was fashioned by Cobra's Dr. Mindbender out of DNA extracted from the exhumed bodies of historical badasses like Atila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Vlad the Impaler in order to rid the world of the G.I. Joe team, who had long frustrated Cobra with their ability to somersault unharmed through a constant barrage of LASER beams.

But perhaps an even more evil being was hypothetically conjured by (I can't remember which) network football jock-pundits who grafted parts tangible and intangible (but represented by organs through metaphor or synecdoche) belonging to actual NFL quarterbacks onto one ultimate quarterback who would likely lead a team of those FOX football robots who've been warming up and stretching their metal parts for long enough ... they're ready to play.

The anatomy of a quarterback looked something like this: HEAD - MANNING, HEART - BRADY, GUTS - FAVRE, ARM - McNABB, LEGS - VICK, BODY - CULPEPPER. We recognize this venerable monster: black guys = pretty on the outside, white guys = pretty on the inside. Manning as a leader is a barrage of signals and verbiage, from his commercial ubiquity to the effusive gestural language he deploys at the line, Peyton is football LITERATE - he has 'read' your defense. Brady is a 'winner,' eyeblacked eyes the tribal marker of the American tribe of winners, almost undrafted backup to Drew Bledsoe who willed himself to SuperBowl victory. Favre, with his Mississippi stubble-and-drawl, well, he'd never give up. Ever. And if he throws into triple coverage and gets picked off, it's because he's a 'gunslinger,' a glorybound outlaw among sniveling statisticians.

But Culpepper is a headcase. A headcase who rides 'sexboats.' Vick doesn't think on his feet but with his feet, if he keeps running, it'll cut down on his propensity to make poor decisions.
McNabb can throw the deep ball AND work the press conference, but during the conference championship he's vomiting chunky soup.

This is all a prelude to two events in the world of the NFL - one exhaustively discussed and one thus far mostly ignored: 1) The controversy sparked by McNabb's suggestion that the media are tougher on black quarterbacks and 2) The likely Sunday start at RB for Rams rookie Brian Leonard, who will fill in for ailing Stephen Jackson and will be white while doing it.

The reaction to McNabb seems to me tantamount to what we might call "the banality of racism," following Hannah Arendt's tract on "The Banality of Evil," in which she suggests that after the Nazis, "evil" can be bureaucratic, boring, and just following orders. Now this isn't to equate the kneejerk eyerolls of sports radio hosts with the horrors of war criminals, but rather to suggest that racism works systemically and most perniciously undercover at the water cooler. The mainstream media's frustration with McNabb finds them holding fast to a facile (and imaginary) colorblindness that gives any whiff of inequity the uncomfortable pungency of a fart in an elevator. And inevitably elicits the baffling claim that the deck is stacked the other way and loaded with "race cards." This is not to say that Manning isn't, in fact, impressively whipsmart and poised. Or that Michael Vick doesn't execute dogwarriors. But rather to suggest that neither quarterback can throw a ball all the way to a meritocratic raceless decontextualized utopia in a vacuum.

And this is why no one is discussing what to me seems to be a kind of earthshattering occurrence, the start of former Rutgers Scarlet Knight standout Leonard for the Rams on Sunday. Now sure, there are white fullbacks - Mike Alstott, Brad Hoover, Heath Evans, etc. But there has not been a white 1,000 yard rusher since Craig James for the 1985 Patriots. And I don't even know that there has been a starting featureback since then regardless of yardage totals. SO what are the implications? I have no idea whatsoever. But let's not pretend it isn't noteworthy. For the record, scary essentialist arguments are not entirely the province of the sons of hegemony. Witness this post on Leonard on something called "The Nation of Islam Sports Blog":

"Gradually, as time went on, the Negro proved to be a more qualified fit for the demands of the position of running back; vision, quickness, speed, durability, stength, power, explosiveness. All traditional athletic attributes common to the Negro. And lacking in most white athletes.Similarly, as time has gone on, the Negro is gradually assuming control of the QB position. Quick decision making, running ability, superior arm strength and unmatched determination have become the requisites to excel. Again, the position has gradually shifted to being tailor made for the Negro ... Clearly, the extinction of the white running back is a sign of evolution in the NFL. Natural selection. The absence of Negro QB's in the NFL was completely unnatural, and completely manufactured.In comparing the two, it becomes clear. If you are someone who appreciates the positive evolution of the game and understands that weakness selects itself out of the league; well, then you should anxiously be awaiting the extinction of the white QB."
http://nationofislamsportsblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/brian-leonard-who-knew.html

I don't know, I'm thinking.

Out of Thin Hair, An Inverted Samson

Anthropologists speculate that the functional significance of long headhair may be adornment, a by-product of secondary natural selection onceother somatic hair had been lost. Another possibility is that long headhair is a result of Fisherian runaway sexual selection, where long lustroushair is a visible marker for a healthy individual.

I have shaved off my hair. Not to sap my strength but to rally it. Not toremove myself from the buffet line of natural selection but to enticechicks to rub my head.

As a symbol, the peach fuzz is larval, caterpillular. I have come UN-LOCKED.

Aesthetically, a disguise.

Like a swimmer's shorn aerodynamism it should promote freedom of movement.The hippies would grow their hair to flaunt a sort of freedom of social movement, but history has consistently shown that hippies are dumb.

Tonsure is the religious practice of head-shaving among Hindus, Buddhists,and some sects of Christianity. Turning from the ephemoral fashions of the material to the immutable spirit realm. For Christians, the bald head reflects the light of the Son.

In the military, headshaving is a symbol of discipline that veers moretoward an evacuation of spirit that facilitates the Foucauldian docile body, a killing machine, a unit of meat to be arranged tactically, bent like a plastic action figure.

A shaved head can indicate a racist ideology, as in skinheads. A shaved head can also indicate a pointedly antiracist ideology, as in (other)skinheads.

After WWII, in France, women who had associated with Nazi occupiers had their hair shaved in order to punish and humiliate them.

Hair is shaven to prepare for surgery, actual or virtual (a rewiring of one's hardwiring).

BLOG!

BLOG! is the sound of virtual vomit, as our collective insides lurch out orangeyellow with chunks of our day from the openmouths of our fingertips, the public-ation of our private thoughts, the outer of our innermost, a culture on the expression express. Our hearts on our sleeves, only mustard stains and snot where they used to beat in our chests. We are the sons and daughters of Samuel Pepys, as Uncle Walt dipped his balls in ink and sang hisself and Taylor Hix, one nation under us.

Let us be naked and shiver, an end to leatherbound with sash, death to black-and-white mottled composition books! The keyboard is a threshold, the space of first contact, the "screening" of thought.

BLOG! is an alien. MYSPACE - the prosthetic frontier ... as the 80s (Minneapolitan?) new-wave band Information Society warbled with precious prescience in "Pure Energy," "I want to know what you're thinking, there are some things you can't hide / I want to know what you're feeling, Tell me what's on your mind."