Ghost of Paper

Bastard Images, Adopted Words

2008-07-17T15:56:00.003-05:00

So last night on Charlie Rose - David Remnick (ed. of The New Yorker) and David Simon (creator of the Wire).

First of all, this whole cartoon cover business, briefly. You know, as a subscriber, I would not have thought twice about that cover ... maybe given it the faintest of chuckles (they still haven't sent it to me yet, btw). But the popmedia uproar raises tougher questions than it asks. A thought experiment courtesy of CNN's Campbell Brown:

Editor of the conservative Weekly Standard: We should put [blah blah blah, something about Madonna and A-Rod] on the cover.
CAMPBELL BROWN: You should put the New Yorker cover on the cover.

I don't watch Anderson Cooper 360 (or the Situation Room or whatever pundit-infested show that is set-designed to look like it takes place IN the internet) expecting to get my mind blown, but there it is. "You should put the New Yorker cover on the cover." And that's what this is really about. Context - the promiscuity and malleability of images let loose. Circulating. Questions of intent, mediation, and reception that are particularly volatile with satire.

I tend to think that suggesting the cover is tasteless and offensive (per the Obama campaign itself) is tantamount to someone quoting this very sentence you are reading in this way: "the cover is tasteless and offensive." (We brings it metatextually, son, what?)

It's the duck AND the rabbit, of course. The beautiful young woman AND the old maid.

The saddest thing, ultimately, about watching people talk about this is the sinking feeling that NONE OF THEM (Blitzer, Bennett, Carville, Obama) are saying anything they really think about it, but rather just positioning themselves with regard to their individual (or party) ends. Even Remnick on Rose was very political about the thing, saying first that what angers him most is the suggestion that "I get it, but these people OUT THERE won't get it" and then going on to make what seemed to be arguements that hinged on that very same point in earnest for much of the remainder of the interview.

As for David Simon - our cantankerous, cynical, arrogant hero - well, he's got this new series on HBO about the Iraq war called "Generation Kill." So he's on Rose preaching about the virtues of verisimilitude in much the same way he spoke about the Wire. But I don't really want to talk too much about Generation Kill. I really want to talk about an interview I heard on the podcast The Sound of Young America with Wire actors Wendell Pierce (Bunk) and Andre Royo (Bubbles). In the interview, Jesse Thorn brought up a quote from Charles S. Dutton in a New York Times Article entitled "Who Gets To Tell a Black Story" about the making of the HBO miniseries "The Corner" that preceded The Wire and is, like the Wire, about life in inner city Baltimore. You might remember Dutton from his starring role as "Roc" on Fox in the early nineties. Dutton is from Baltimore and honed his acting craft during a decade-long prison stint. He worked as a director on The Corner. He and Simon has a rocky relationship:

'I know that David Simon can visit and sit with as many black folks in this city as he wants to,'' Mr. Dutton said one day in late September, standing on a crumbling stretch of sidewalk in the rain. ''They can pay the families to get the stories. They can listen and walk around with dope fiends. They can write about murders, and they still won't know a damn thing about black people. Not this, you know. Not this. I know the pulse of this. I know what people think the minute they walk out them doors. I know what mothers feel when their sons and daughters walk out of the house to go to school. I know what it feels like to kill somebody. I know what it feels like to get shot. I know what it feels like that people be looking to kill me. I don't have to show up as a crime journalist after the fact.''

In the interview, Wendell Pierce, who is as smooth as the detective he plays on the Wire, handled the question of writing and race with aplomb, saying that people need to preserve their ability to be offended so as to keep the debate moving. This is something I've thought about, we've talked about. It's a bucket of syrup for sure. And it certainly does matter who is writing the stories. But one thing I do know is that Simon writes exceptionally sophisticated and human stories and the good has got to outweigh the bad when narrative makes connections across race like that.

Anthropomorbid - The Charcoal Murders

2008-07-14T11:32:00.012-05:00

Did you hear about this? It happened last year in Virunga National Park in the Congo - six mountain gorillas (seven if you count the pregnant one) were murdered execution style in the Congo, to make a political point. One year later now, the reasons for the killings are being explored on a special for the National Geographic Channel, NPR's Fresh Air, and PBS Charlie Rose. [Incidentally, the photojournalist who took the initial pictures and has become the face of the story here, is a sexy, swashbuckling South African guy named Brent Stirton].
[NOTE: Please do not take my word for this. Facts probably not exactly right and this is an infinitely complicated story of power and politics in a region I don't have any pretense of understanding]

Part of the trouble begins with the Rwandan genocide, as Hutu militia groups fled Rwanda for Congo and the Virunga park. Now, apparently, some of these Hutu guys run an illegal charcoal operation, in league with certain corrupt members of the Congolese army and the guy who runs Virunga National Park. Charcoal is a crucial to cooking and heating in the region. When certain Park Rangers caught wind of the goings on and objected, the gorilla executions were a message sent to prospective do-gooders.

The silverback here is Senkwekwe.
Now these are some truly arresting images. I certainly don't want to make light of them - animal cruelty is offensive to us all, but isn't the anthropomorphic quality of these another turn of the screw? You may know that the one true love of my life to this point is Koko, the gorilla who knows sign language (pictured in my gallery right and also here, with pet kitten Smokey): The PBS documentary about Koko is available from the Criterion collection and her paintings, along with buddy Michael's are available here:http://www.koko.org/friends/kokomart_art.koko.html#

Koko facts:
- Attempts were made for Koko to select a mate via videos of potential suitors. She declined Michael because they grew up together.
- Some of Koko's female handlers filed sexual harassment suits due to Koko's constant requests to see people's nipples
- Koko was a fan of Mr. Rogers and when she met him in person, she immediately tried to take off his shoes, as she'd seen him do so many times.

Last Blog on Earth - Us as Detritus

2008-07-07T12:13:00.004-05:00

Last night I saw Pixar's new Wall-E. This week I write the entry for Kevin Brockmeier's Brief History of the Dead for the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Fiction. Roughly four years ago I delivered a presentation on David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress to my Introduction to Theory class. Today I revive my blog in earnest. These things are connected; let me tell you how.

You probably have seen or heard about Wall-E, but you may not be familiar with the two novels. Briefly: Brief History of the Dead is split in two - one part set in "The City," an afterlife limbo where people go and 'live' normal lives as long as there are people alive on earth who remember them. When the last person who remembers you dies, you go on to you-don't-know-where. The other part is set in Antartica, where we follow the struggles of Laura Byrd, stranded on a mission for the Coca-Cola Co. and cut off from any other living soul because, it turns out, she is the last living soul (everyone else has bought it via pandemic). Thus, interestingly, everyone in The City knows Laura Byrd one way or another. Wittgenstein's Mistress is about the supposed Last Woman on Earth, who wanders through the Colosseum and the Louvre and WRITES a memoir for no one to read.

Wall-E is the last robot on earth. He collects, compacts, and stacks trash (keeping some trinkets for himself). He knows nothing but this work, but he pines for company, inspired by his prized VHS copy of Hello Dolly! The junkaesthetic is rendered beautifully by the animators. I'll get back to the film, which is great, in a minute, BUT FIRST: What of this LAST ON EARTH thing - it's long been a space for working out the hypotheticals generated by both serious and pop philosophy (from Hobbes to Mad Max) - by subtracting civilization, we can see INTO nature. Wall-E and Brockmeier's Laura and Markson's Kate inhabit an inverted/perverted Eden (a palindrome Eden - Madam I'm Adam - and naturally Wall-E's eventual love interest is EVE) - the myth of what it means to come last. They are also the stranded - like Cruesoe, like Simon and Piggy, Tom Hanks' volleyball, those people on Lost (a show I've never seen but I've read uses "John Locke" and "Rousseau" as character names).

So this post has two folds, outward: 1) What of this LAST ON EARTH thing? What does it mean? What are some other versions (I know I am Legend)?

2). Wall-E is a remarkable 'kids' film. As is much-remarked upon, the majority of it contains no dialogue but the robot is so endearing that you don't miss it at all. Wall-E is postapocalyptic Chaplin and Keaton - a well meaning bumbler pratfalling through life. Speechless, Chaplin's body often ticked and sputtered like a haywire robot ... but it's not just the physicality - like Keaton, Wall-E is heartsick and smitten - wide-eyed, well-intentioned, sexless ... an underdog in love. He is also out of place and outdated. When EVE arrives and later when we see the digidystopia aboard the spaceship AXIOM, where fat humans live in a megastore planet of ubiquitous screens and instant gratification, we see that WALL-E is an analog anamoly, tracking dirt into the grimly pristine future.

The are many nods here to the history of cinema past the silents. We have 2001 present in the red-eyed HAL called AUTO and in the signature tune Thus Spake Zarathustra (that other one as well). One of the more interesting bits, to me, was that there is a contingent of psych ward misfit malfunctioning robots that join WALL-E and EVE's mini-insurgency against the fascist forces of order. The echoes here are of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Cool Hand Luke. And this is the embrace of difference that seems to thread through the best of kid films. A goodhearted liberalism that promises (white lie or not) that we can remake the world. The credit sequence of WALL-E tracks the recivilization of Earth through a history of art from hieroglyph to Van Gogh.

SO I WANT TO KNOW: check the dustbin of your own history. We are made of these narrative artifacts. What are the kids films that meant the most to you then, or now? I go to the Henson hippie mysticism of The Dark Crystal or the folksy musicality of Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas (those muppets EMOTE), the tender critique of The Secret of NIMH (in which humans are mere voices and body parts, the forces of ignorance). What about the sad center of NEMO, or the you-can-be-anything of BABE. And I was with SHREK's allegory of interspecies romance until she had to be an ogre, too. From when I was a kid there are bits of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, dander from the Aristocats. What else?

Who I Think You Should Vote For For President

2008-06-29T13:12:00.007-05:00

I've given it some thought and I've narrowed it down to two options.

1) Barack Obama

2)When I was 19 or 20 I wrote a poem called "I Wanna Go Outside." It was a poem about a girl. The first line went something like this:

"Image in all the people" sang the blind John Lenin [sic(k)?] as he picked up his hammer and sickle and saw ... that his eyes were mirrors"

This was my solliptical proseurism uncooked and marinating in Colt .45, beguiled by the presto!digitation of the mannered lexical dexterity which echoes here. Autophonetic asphyxiation. Encrypted.

But the code begs the cracking. Like the blah-blah-blog, the insides-out of 21st century journaling. I think I hoped that you could draw a (squiggly) line from Prufrock to Cusack, from peachphobia to letting the box boom ... somehow her eyes would be mirrors but at the same time "the doorway to a thousand churches."

The wineblood sentimentality of THE ONES and TWOS v. the villain math of the ONES and ZEROES. Whether wholes are greater than sums, alls greater than somes.

Wasn't it one of the Greeks who said that sexual union is an attempt at cum union? to die a little death to the TWOS and BE ONE?

Wasn't it more than one of the Greeks who found other passageways, tighter fits, but other fits nonetheless?

So I guess it WOULD be nice if I could touch your body, but do we HAVE to have faith?

William James tells me that Scientific Positivism is the flipside of Positive Thinking ... Heads, your world is an object, and progress will brighten all the corners. The world is out there. Tails, your world is a subject, and you draw the contours. The world is in here.

And this makes me think of recent conversations about THERAPY and ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS and, of course, religious faith generally. This is what James calls "mental hygiene," that living needs a grammar, a mold, a shape, an anchor. He says "Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! Help!" This is the project: order. Projected Order.

Thus shaken up even before the quantum leap into indeterminacy - Particles and Waves. When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead. Nobody knows.

I just heard an interview with George Carlin in which he said two things - one wise, one a little too mystical for me - but I'm wondering if they're reconcilable. He said he liked people individually, but when they get into groups, they spoil. Put on uniforms and get uniform. But he also said he believes that we're all made of the same stuff, descended from Atom ... so I am You and You are Me and Stop Sign is Me and Raccoon is Me and so I'm not afraid to die. Can he have both one and the other?

While my high school baseball team made its Cinderella run all the way to the State Championship my senior year, I secretly wished hard that we would lose every time out and the season would be over. Because the coach had demoted me from starter to reserve and because he resented that I missed practice to visit colleges and because most of the other guys were assholes anyway. There was an I in TEAM.

Lou Dobbs says America needs Independents. That the hegemony of reds and blues eats the purple people. And I saw Luke Russert say much the same thing. And how can we not listen to him after all he's been through? And in HBO's (really enjoyable so far) series John Adams, our hero grimaces and coughs standing firm against the streams of loyalist and radicals. Think for yourself indeed, but the glare from those stars seems to blur the stripes.

And I know you can listen without talking, but you shouldn't talk without listening. Though that's both complicated and difficult.

Message in a Bottle

2008-04-01T22:31:00.010-05:00

PLUNK! The mellifluid sound of the bottle-born message subsurfaced to resurface and drift into the e-theric ocean. What seamonster there useless as a Eugene Levy-a-thon.[ Teaching Nabokov to glazed pupils redoubles my parapro-pensity toward lexically dextrous solliptical proseurism]. It's notsobad here on ghostofpaper island, but my beard itches and I'm weary of coconut milk. I smoke for signals.

SOOOOOOOO ... the last three posts were not driven well enough into the earthy foundations of e-community. There were no comments. Color me as insecure as a swimsuited tweenager at the public pool, but I'm a puppy who needs scruffscratchin'. Thereby I hereby openly solicit and humbly beg for harmony. Roll call and response like this was black church. The pathetic appeal. All for nought and nought for all.

QUESTIONNAIRE:

1). How are you? You look really good, did you lose weight? I don't see you often enough. Stayin' outta trouble? Oh, I was going to ask you about that show you really like / that local sports team / that sports team from where you grew up / that thing that you're really interested in. Tell me about that. You are very interesting to listen to on that subject.

2). Have you ever seen that guy who hangs out in the basement of Lind Hall pretty much every evening ... he kind of looks like he'd be into playing Magic the Gathering and he has a ponytail and black hightops and he just stands at the computer terminal outside 26 and does stuff online for like hours on end ... what's that guys' deal?

3). Do you remember that episode of the Cosby show where they meet Stevie Wonder and he records each Huxtable saying one thing and mixes it into a stupidfresh jam (e.g. Cliff: "Baby," Denise: "I don't know what to say," Theo: "Jam it on the one")? Do you think you could live a properly communicative life if by some hocuspocus you could only speak those very particular phrases?

4). Is Tom Cruise really gay? Travolta, too? Are all Scientologists gay? Did you know Beck and Giovanni Ribisi are Scientologists? Did you ever confuse Scientology with Christian Science? I sure did.

5). Don't you think it would be really stressful to be an airtraffic controller? What's more stressful than that? What about an airtraffic controller, like on the Jetsons, except not at all cartoony so there would be lots of midair crashes and grisly floating corpses? I never realized until some guy on NPR said it but spaceships have no need for our earthly aerodynamism, they might as well be shaped like balls or cubes or anything else.

6). If you could be one of these United States, which one would you be? Or if you could be one of the Ten Commandments?

7). Which could you live without - pizza or justice?

8). Do you think Zeno's paradoxes are mere sophistry or do they reveal something valuable to us about the nature of time?

9). I think it would be really hard to own a mogwai and obey all the rules so there were no gremlins. You can't feed them "after midnight." When, exactly, does "after midnight" turn into the next day? What if I have to drive someone to the airport real early and I want to give Gizmo a muffin crumb or a corn flake?

10). Did you ever stop and think about the circus - like what the circus is if you were free from the contextual situation of growing up knowing about the circus. The circus is fucked up.

11). I feel like I've been talking a lot ... what do you want to talk about?

12). Do you know how you know animals are dumb - 'cause like if they run out into the street and you're driving toward them, they'll run all the way back to the side they came from rather than take the much shorter trip to the other side. One time (for real) there was a bunny in the road in front of me and it ran straight ahead, like trying to outrun my car. Or was it a turtle? Why would there be a turtle in the road?

13). Gorillas are not dumb. Not at all.

14). Did you know that the only guy in ZZ Top who didn't have a huge beard was named Frank Beard? Totally true. Oh, I told you that already? Damn.

15). Who would win in a fight: Optimus Prime or the sinking feeling that you're getting older with every passing second?

16). Did Indians really ever say "How"? But seriously, isn't "Native Americans" just as stupid or even stupider than "Indians" because it just substitutes one Italian explorers cartographical blunder with another Italian explorer's name? Have you ever seen an Indian eat spaghetti? You're lying.

17). I know nobody really asks you "what's your sign?" but if they every ask me I'm going to say "stop" because I like jokes that aren't funny. It's hard to write jokes. Here's the one joke I wrote: "When I was kid, maybe about 8 or 9, me and this neighborhood girl were playing doctor and then, like, my mom walked in so I had to put her spleen back." It's hard to write jokes. If Dave Chapelle hired me to write jokes, I know where I would start ... I just have the concept: Six Degrees of Segregation. Edgy.

18). Did you know the guy who invented the toilet was really named Krapper? And the guy who invented the upper midwest bar peetrough was really named Peripheraldick?
I realize now that that sounds a lot like "Perry Farrell dick," which hasn't been spotted since Lollapalooza '91. Spotted Dick, of course, is a traditional English steamed suet pudding containing dried fruit (usually currants) and chlamydia. Is Perry Farrell like Adam Ant? Is Faye Dunaway like Adam Ant? Is Adamantium what Wolverine's claws are made out of? Don't answer that, it totally is.

19). Did you know there's a kind of electric fish called "Black Ghost Knife"? I challenge you to come up with a cooler name for anything. Anything. When I was a kid I had three fish named Ovenmitt, Roadblock, and Syphilis. Those were cool names. And once in the Bronx in college, we found a teddybear in the road and took it in and named it Sniphilis, the Earl of Rochester (the Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot, was a "bawdy poet" of the 17th century.)

20). Where are you going?

Around the Back and Between the Legs

2008-03-23T20:59:00.009-05:00

The Harlem Globetrotters began as a serious basketball team on the South Side of Chicago in the 1920s. They were called the Harlem Globetrotters (by their "creator," Abe Saperstein) because of Harlem's status as the capital of African-American culture, but did not play their first home game in New York until 1968. In 1948 - a year after Jackie Robinson spike-cleated his way through the color barrier in professional sports - the all-black Globetrotters beat the NBA's premiere franchise, the all-white Minneapolis Lakers. They beat them again in 1949. When black players were drafted into the NBA in the 1950s, the Globetrotters went a new route - around the back and between the legs, sideshowboating to the whistled tune of "Sweet Georgia Brown."

Bloggers and academics alike suggest that the lighter fare of the Globetrotter exhibition is weighted with minstrelsy's complex legacy. Uncle Toms in their Uncle Sam starsandbars uniform.

Wilt Chamberlain played for the Globetrotters. So did baseball Hall of Famer Bob Gibson.

The Globetrotters played for Pope Pius XII in 1951.

They have starred in two feature films, a Saturday morning cartoon, a variety show, and have guested on Gilligan's Island and Scooby Doo.

Honary members of the Globetrotters include: Henry Kissinger, Bob Hope, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul, and Jesse Jackson.

From 1962 until the approximate present, the Globetrotters have a win-loss record of 12,594-5.

The term for losing-on-purpose or staging the outcome of a contest is "kayfabe," which apparently is carny slang of undetermined derivation. Professional Wrestling is the most prominent example of kayfabe. The team that is paid to lose to the Globetrotters is the Washington Generals. Louis "Red" Klotz is the founder of the Washington Generals. Klotz is the third shortest player ever to play in the NBA (5'7). He averaged 1.4 PPG for the Baltimore Bullets. After his stint in the NBA, Klotz starred with the ABL's Philadelphia SPHAs (an acronym for South Philadelphia Hebrew Association). In addition to running the Generals, Klotz was the team's pointguard until he was 62 years old and in 1971, at age 50, he hit a jumper at the buzzer to beat the Globetrotters in overtime. Klotz claims the Generals try to win every game.

Apparently, in the 30s and 40s, Jews were charged with the same backdoor praise as African-Americans - that they were intrinsically better ballers than their double-dribbling Gentile neighbors. The writer Paul Gallico said Jews excelled at basketball because "the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness." Newly emigrated Jews poured off boats and into the ghettos of eastern cities. Then, as now, basketball was an inner-city game. This certainly sounds familiar: "It was absolutely a way out of the ghetto," said Dave Dabrow, a guard with the original Philadelphia Hebrews. "It was where the young Jewish boy would never have been able to go to college if it wasn't for the amount of basketball playing and for the scholarship." (jewishmag.com)

In the halcyon days of barnstorming basketball, there were all-Jewish teams in addition to all-African-American teams. There was a team called the Cleveland Rosenblums. The Philadelphia SPHAs often matched up with the all-black New York Renaissance. And from the inside, the view was no less skewed. A former SPHA claims the Jewish teams played "a quick-passing running game, as opposed to the bullying and fighting way which was popular other places," while a former member of the NY Rens tells us the SPHAs were a "thinking" team while the Rens relied on "quickness."

This is the ghost of a research paper without the thesis. Certainly vaudeville, sports, and race are all knotted up here. Just gander again at that Washington Generals logo. Initially, I wanted to write on the phenomena of the Generals as a metaphor for somethingimnotsurewhat. Losing perpetually, purposefully, artfully, heroically. A team of straight men. Straw men. Patsies. Dumbstruck, breezed by, dunked on. For a living. And once I found out that the Generals' genesis, Red Klotz seemed an aptly named figurehead for my hasty constellation of ideas. But digging deeper, the history took over and it's too big for me here. The history of American popular culture never fails to be denser and more convoluted than you'd imagine. The. Ball. Is. In. Your. Court.

Flipped! by Alan Smithee

2008-03-17T20:14:00.007-05:00

So last night I watched a two and a half hour documentary about abortion. It's called Lake of Fire. And it was good. But first a note about director Tony Kaye.

Tony Kaye directed the video for Soul Asylum's Runaway Train.

Tony Kaye also directed American History X, which was released a decade ago, but I can assure you its rabble still rouses American college students, as more than a couple of mine provided it as a suggestion for the film we watch during our open final week of class. But Kaye wasn't happy with the film in finished form, claiming that Ed Norton had re-edited it to give himself more screen time ... the director wanted his name removed from the film and replaced with "Alan Smithee." The Director's Guild wouldn't let him.

["Alan Smithee" is the go-to-pseudonym of disgruntled auteurs and it has a rich 40 year history. Among other things, Smithee directed the pilot of MacGyver and "The OJ Simpson Story" and wrote "The Tony Blair Witch Project."]

Lake of Fire steers admirably toward objectivity (you don't need an eerie score or unequal time to make the crazies sound like crazies) and gains a lot from its scope. The pundits range from the deranged to the incomparably erudite (Noam Chomsky) and the footage spans over a decade, so it is extra chilling, for instance, to see interviews with both a doctor and the radical "pro-lifer" who would kill him soon after.

HERE ARE TWO THINGS THAT I LEARNED:

1). The brother of Eric Rudolph - the infamous Olympic bomber and lam-survivor (sort of a Neo-Nazi Christopher McCandless) - sent a videotape of himself severing his own hand with an electric saw to the FBI in order to protest the media coverage of the manhunt for his brother. Eric Rudolph's webpage is kept up and on it, you can read such tracts as "Feminism, by Eric Rudolph" (which sounds funny at first but isn't at all ... ideologically diseased as he is, he isn't stupid ... he's an exhaustive reader and an exhausting writer.)

2). [sadder, more important] Who put the Roe in Roe v. Wade? 'Twas one Norma McCorvey (named in court proceedings as "Jane Roe" for anonymity). Where is she now? Well at a 1994 booksigning for her book "I am Roe," the out-lesbian McCorvey was confronted by born-again pro-life activist Flip Benham. Benham worked his necromancy and now Roe herself works for his anti-abortion coalition Operation Rescue. Her baptism by Benham (pictured above) was televised. She is, of course, no longer gay. She got Flipped.

The Internet Part I: It's A Sticky Web, And Worldwide

2008-03-03T22:05:00.006-06:00

This post is about the internet. It begins with an anecdote about me and a stripper named Pandora. You may have heard this one before:

When we were seniors in college, we drove from New York to New Orleans by way of Graceland and the Waffle House. We spat in the Mississippi. Anyway one night we sat in the back of our first strip club and laughed nervously away from the men who stared hard out of their faces. Then Pandora came on. She came on to "Go! Speed Racer." She looked right at me as she licked her armpit and I kind of made a face like that was a funny thing to do to lick your armpit and then she smiled like yeah I guess it is. I thought that somehow that exchange gave the two of us the color and shape of real 3D humans in a room full of sad bodies sick for disconnection. Naive maybe, but a strip club is a good place not to be used to. I went up to give her the best tip I could afford on the condition that she give me a high five. Which she did.

NOW: On the internet there is a site for hipsters called VBS TV (of which Spike Jonze is "creative director"). And on that site there is a series called "Shot By Kern" which features short videos of former underground filmmaker and current erotic photographer Richard Kern (whose resume includes a Sonic Youth video) shooting naked ladies intercut with interviews of the models. There is a three part interview with porn star Sasha Grey (I won't link to it as I'm not too sure about what Google allows content-wise, but do go if you're interested and don't mind the nudity).

Sasha, who will turn 20 (!) in a couple weeks, is smart, articulate, and ostensibly not horribly damaged by abuse or abandonment. She talks about her love for Godard and Herzog, of forming a union for pornworkers, and clarifies the question of whether she is a "self-proclaimed existentialist." She considers porn work to be a combination of performance art and athletics. On her blog (also on VBS), she signs off with "Lotta Continua," which I had to google to learn means "the struggle continues" and is the name of an Italian radical leftist group. Intrigued, I went to see if she had a wikipedia page which she does. There I learned that she had a 3.8 GPA in high school. On her myspace page, her "top friends" include avant-garde filmmakers Harmony Korine, John Cassavetes, and RW Fassbinder ... as well as the Criterion Collection and Joy Division. Under "Who I'd like to meet" she includes NPR's Terry Gross.

There's a lot of porn on the internet and maybe just maybe I've stumbled across some of it once or twice when I was innocently searching for a recipe on how to cook chicken breast. But it occurs to me that this same crazy massive instrument can be just as much an instrument of subjectification as it is of objectification. Certainly the ratio of body parts to fun facts is skewed to the seedy side, but if I had (hypothetically) looked at Sasha Grey before, I will (hypothetically) never look at her in quite the same way. This is no justification. I understand that being curious about the personalities of naked women doesn't license my own or anyone's contribution to the Male Gaze that X-Rays its way through the outerwear of gender equity. Nothing is undone with high fives or cursory websearching. But soaked as surfers are in images of oppression ... not so bad if expression washes up in a bottle with a message in it.

Best Actor

2008-02-21T11:51:00.003-06:00

How do you know if somebody is good at acting like somebody else who isn't real? That's why actors who play people that were real are constantly being given awards (witness the last three best actors in a row - Forrest Whitaker as Idi Amin, Phil Hoffman as Truman Capote, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles ... and with the ladies SIX out of the last EIGHT - Helen Mirren as the Queen, Reese Witherspoon as June Carter, Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos, Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Julia Roberts as Erin Brockavich, Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena). NOW I know the fact that these were real people doesn't mean that the traits brought to the surface by the actor aren't new to us (I bet you had never seen an Aileen Wuornos impression), but still there's something going on here. [Honorable mention for Cate Blanchett's killer Dylan in I'm Not There and Johnny Depp's Hunter Thompson]

What's more, you know the performance that people often cheer for the loudest are those portrayals of disability, craziness, etc. "Hey, Sean Penn isn't really mentally retarded! That's acting!" (I've never seen that movie, but you know what I mean).

The occasion for this post is a salon.com article about Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. The article quotes a professional actor puzzled by all the lauding of Day-Lewis: "Weird how so many people confuse 'acting that you can see' with great acting," he says. NOW I'm pulling for DDL on Sunday ... that performance was one of the most stunning, memorable, most enormous things I've ever seen in a film. Perhaps rivaled only by DDL in Gangs of New York. But I think the article might be on to something.

But really, the problem is that I don't truly understand acting. This is something that I've thought about for a while. I mean I have actors and performances that I love and they often coincide with the actors and performances that critics think are great too. And while I'll go in for the BIG performance like the next guy, I can think of a number of counterpoints in smaller movies that blow me away just as much (for example Laura Linney in You Can Count On Me or Ryan Gosling in Half-Nelson). But I've never been sure how to spot bad acting. Anyone can see that Keanu Reeves is programmed to robot through every role with the same monotone and squint. So I solicit not only your opinion on the BIG performances, but what are some BAD ones (preferably bad ones that come from decent movies ... too easy to say Paris Hilton wasn't all that good in "The Hottie and the Nottie.")

Dolor Bin

2008-02-16T14:19:00.002-06:00

Consider these two places: the VFW Hall and the itunes store. One is creaky, brownandyellow, smells like freedom's sweat. The other is virtual. But if it were a real place the itunes store would be spaceage designed. Whitelit.

Maybe some of those veterans from the VFW grew up crewcutted and wanting to be astronauts. Wanting to be spaceage people.

I went to a record show at the VFW. A record show is clutter, collector's clutter in crates and boxes, sheathed, marked, priced. Eyes and hands run over the goods, years of fingerprints get in the grooves, help make the sound you hear on needle contact. To shop for records you have to flip through fast with your index finger. Among the special pressings and the dollar bins, I got some good things but it was taxing. All those old vinylphiles, the vanguards of taste. Looking at what you're looking at.

Last night late I went to the itunes store. It was open and nobody was looking. I could dragnclick research, dragnclick download. I made myself a mix called "Dolor Bin." Garage pop punk soul. Some of my finest work. And gotten with pajamas and beer.

I have one foot in the dollar bin and one foot in the digital ether. I'm a convert to the brave new i-world. All my songs on a pod (how spaceage sounding is that ... a pod?) indexed and organized. Virtually spread out and mobile. When I used to make mix tapes, I'd write the songs on paper and then arrange them. When I do that now on itunes, the work is 90% done already. And you can SHUFFLE. Which is reinvigorating to your catalog ... that song from the back of your head. You didn't know that's what you wanted to hear.

But I won't be hocking the record collection for a googlephone anytime soon. I still want to live in a world made of things. The record is what holds the soul, lest we download those too. I'm like Derek Zoolander in that way (and a few other ways) ... I'm not sure how my songs are "IN" the computer and I might tear it apart looking for them one day.

The Devil and Brian P.

2008-02-16T13:18:00.002-06:00

When we were in high school, there was this kid Brian P. and he had something. Not "had something" like a talent scout says you have something, not an x factor or a je ne sais quoi. He had something like he walked a bit funny, talked a bit funny, was in some kind of way differently abled. But bright enough to be in the "regular" classes and, I suppose, bright enough to be made frequent sport of without guilt pangs too acute. And when he was teased and tousled he would grin crooked and say things like "Alright, that's enough."

When we were seniors someone thought it would be funny to nominate him for class president. But Brian P. didn't think it was funny, he took it serious. He gave a speech in the cafeteria. He won and he revelled in the job, giving over-the-top morning anouncements over the intercom. Everyone seemed to be having a swell time - laughing with, laughing at ... who cares? But it always made me a bit uneasy.

I brought something like that feeling to First Avenue the other week to see Daniel Johnston - the autistic, bipolar singer/songwriter whose already formidable cult following was bolstered by a 2005 documentary. [and a good one ... I recommend The Devil and Daniel Johnston if you haven't seen it. But not some of the crazy / tragic talent docs it spawned like the ones on Roky Erickson and Townes Van Zandt.]
Johnston has a tremendous gift for melody, which is evidenced by how many amazing artists have covered his songs (one recent covers album features Tom Waits, Clem Snide, M. Ward, Flaming Lips, Sparklehorse, Bright Eyes). And his songs can be powerful because of (or sometimes in spite of) what one Onion AV Club writer called Johnson's "crushingly naive" lyrics. So he's not like Wesley Willis (the late schizophrenic cultstar singer) - his songs feel more like songs than like crazy.

But I wonder at what we hear when we listen to DJ, what we consume when we buy his records. And the show didn't really help me with those questions. He came out with a tshirt tucked into sweatpants and joked (I think) about being in "Indianapolis." His hands shook when he wasn't holding a guitar and he played a pretty short set. Moments of it were funny, moments of it were gorgeous. But when an anonymous hipster yells "I love you Daniel" from out of the dark, why do I hear the cheers at Brian P's campaign speech? Of course he loves playing music, but I hope he loves playing shows ... he might not. He might even need the money. Or just want to get out of his parents' house (he's 47).

I'm not saying anyone should feel bad about listening to or going to see DJ. And I'm not saying DJ has anything substantive in common with Brian P. (who I hope is doing well). I'm just saying there can be a rather complicated transaction when you look at stuff, depending on what you're looking at.

You Can't Kill a Ghost

2008-02-16T13:10:00.002-06:00

[It's been a while. Smoke: clear. Dust: settled. Here is a haiku to mark my return]

You can't kill a ghost
(I can hear the chains rattlin')
It's already dead

Metaphoria #2: The Metaphor Store

2008-01-26T18:18:00.000-06:00

So I just got back from the metaphor store, where I purchased a lot of "cleaning products," so I can "clean up" my "living space."

Last summer I "shaved my head," so I'd have a "new" "look."

I'm trying to implement some bigpicture changes in my lifestyle. But so far I'm a lot better at symbolism than actual change. Better at rites than passage.

Fingers crossed.

Just in case take two doesn't take, I'm going to need some more metaphors. Let me know if you got any or I might wind up getting a tattoo or baptized.

13 Ways of Looking at a Frozen Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich on Your Windshield

2008-01-23T14:33:00.000-06:00

The other day, I found a frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwich, once-bitten, on the windshield of my car, parked outside of my building. I have questions.

1). Was this some kind of silly "tween" hooliganism? [There is some serious grownup sketchiness that happens on my block, but sandwich-throwing could be the sort of spontaneous chicanery that lowercase g's get into before their eyes go dark.]

2). Let's assume that no one would make a sandwich for the sole purpose of throwing it or resting it on someone's windshield (I think we are safe assuming that). SO THEN: Who eats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich outside on the street in Minnesota during the coldest week of the winter?

3). Maybe someone somehow was dumb/weird enough to do so - is it possible that they then commenced their preposterous picnic with a hopeful bite into their PB + J, only then being forced to face the (literally) cold, hard facts about winter and sandwiches ... and then, frustrated by their incredible lack of sense, tossed the sandwich blindly over their shoulder?

4). CONFESSION - there is an elementary school right across from my building, so kids do go there and they likely bring lunches with them. SO it is possible that some kid walked out of a bad Nickelodeon sitcom and inspected his lunch on the way to school and said "Peanut Butter and Jelly AGAIN?," made a funny face and then tossed it skyward, accompanied by that cartoon sound effect for tossing things.

5). What is the onomatopoeic equivalent of that sound effect?

6). If we go with the disgruntled schoolkid scenario, we still haven't accounted for the bite ... could someone, vagrant or just curious, have come along, noticed the peanut butter and jelly sandwich on my windshield and put aside all of their questions for a taste, taken a bite, been sated or unimpressed, and then put it right back where they found it?

7). Perhaps the sandwich contained some sort of GPS device slathered over and constituting THE LEAST well thought out way of tracking me possible. How stupid can these spies be - what, do they think I wouldn't notice a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on my windshield? Or that I would notice but just shrug and leave it there, assuming there's no way it could conceal a tracking device? You'll have to wake up a bit earlier in the morning to outwit me, gumshoe.

8). Or maybe I'm thinking a little bit too locally here ... maybe the sandwich fell from above and came from afar - some winter bird that had toted it beakwise a long ways, ever so carefully, and then lost it to a lapse in concentration.

9). Or maybe it presages an imminent event of biblical proportions (biblical contortions?), like the frogs in Magnolia and this is some kind of cosmic false start or a test run ... maybe it will rain peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Minneapolis with the kind of screwball wrath that I've always thought the bible was missing. You laugh? Well, the book says "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us." Think about it. Think about it and watch your head.

10). Or what if, WHAT IF ... I put it there? What if I've been taking that Ambien sleeping drug, the one that makes people sleepwalk, sleepeat, and sleepdrive. And I got up and made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my sleep. And then went out to the car, but I had to put the sandwich down on the windshield in order to de-ice it and then I just forgot because, hell, I'm asleep anyway. And then I drove somewhere.

11). Where? Maybe I have some secret second life that I conduct in the early morning hours while being entirely asleep. Maybe I have a torrid affair with a woman whose husband was recently rendered quadriplegic after crashing his car (distracted by a peanut butter and jelly sandwich hitting his windshield). Maybe she loves him still and cries when she makes loves to me and the fact that I'm asleep the whole time gives me a silent, passionless demeanor and a surprisingly precise motor ability both of which help us conduct the affair with ruthless efficiency. Oh, hold on, wait ... I don't take Ambien.

12). I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
Are one.

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is involved
In what I know.

[apologies to Wallace Stevens, the insurance salesman poet, Connecticut-born]

13). You're reading this laughing at me, aren't you? Here I am, spending time, spending effort thinking about how the peanut butter and jelly sandwich got on my windshield and all the while, YOU put it there. You put it there as a test, as a puzzle. It's a symbol. I totally get it. It means everything, but it means everything by virture of its utter meaninglessness. I'm with you. Heavy stuff. Have you been reading Chinese philosophy or listening to adult contemporary alternative music? You know what we should do? We should make a bunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bite them and go around the city putting them on people's windshields in the middle of the night. It's like concept art - like a "happening" or something. Then they'd all wake up and find the sandwiches on their cars and sort of doubletake and think for a minute and then eventually that enlightenment thing, that "a-ha" would happen to them. And things would all be totally different.

Epitomize Yourself - A Long Ride On The Precious Limited

2008-01-14T22:05:00.000-06:00

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multitudes." -- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

(Do I predict myself...)

Bear with me. I'm going to glue some things together.

FIRST: Concerning the Eminent Directors Anderson

It was a banner year for those of us softcore cinephiles (and I don't mean fans of "Emmanuelle in Rio") who prefer Contemporary American Indie/Auteur films to the French New Wave, which laps quietly at the southern shore of our Netflix queue: there were new films by young stalwarts Wes and P.T. Anderson (Darjeeling Limited and There Will Be Blood, respectively).

Both films are good. But PTA's TWBB is better. You can prefer apples to oranges.

And I wonder whether it's because Wes is building model ships inside of bottles, if his career isn't shaping up to be a Russian Nesting Doll with less and less room to move, so that he is relegated to constructing curios in miniature.

precious, adj.
1. a. Of great moral, spiritual, or other non-material value; beloved, held in high esteem ...
3. Aiming at or affecting refinement in manners, language, etc.; fastidious, particular. Now usu. depreciative: over-delicate, over-fastidious; affectedly refined in matters of taste, language, etc. (Oxford English Dictionary)

I propose that Wes Anderson Phase One ends after the first three films (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) and that those of us who were so shook by those have to come to grips with Phase Two, in which some of the merits of those earlier works - elaborate set design, exhaustive soundtracking, and oceans of whimsy - are inflated at the cost of ... something. WA was always bothways precious, cool, at some distance from us. But there seemed to be blood pumping through those stories. And I'm beginning to surmise that there won't be blood anymore. Darjeeling was, well, limited. A train in vain.

Now PT Anderson's films up to this point had all been very similar (the non-essential Hard 8, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch Drunk Love, where he admittedly took a couple of big swings, cutting his usual 3hr runtime in half and casting Adam Sandler). But TWBB is really nothing like them. And what it leaves behind is this sort of meta-ironic gimmickiness - which I loved but was very "of its moment" in the sense that Dave Eggers is of his ... the kind of thing you'd expect to be surprised by. But this new one, love it or like it, has a full head of steam. It's epic without frogs, without Aimee Mann, without ensemble, without prosthetic dongs.

Though each director / film deserves much more time, I'll train my untrained eye elsewhere, because this isn't a review from a hill, it's a question: what do we make of artists of all stripes trapped in their own style? AND SUBQUESTION: what does stylization do to what we'll call (for lack of better phrase) substance - the flesh, the bone, the hangnail, the teeming viscera of recognizability?

ADVOCATING FOR THE DEVIL, I'll proffer that the deservedly lauded No Country For Old Men is not very human. Before you hit me, let me say that I loved it and I think it might be the Coens' "best" film, but (and I can't testify whether this follows from McCarthy) it felt like allegory to me ... all about forces (pitchdark ones), violence in the abstract. Yes, Brolin and Jones seemed to be lit from within despite their heroic stoicism, but still.

(And it's a good and related question that's been asked about where the women are in these muscley works of art - TWBB and NCFOM. Even the new Apatovian regime, which I think has done a service to mainstream comedy, is blatant homosociality. The women are straight man to the male patter. Heigl said so herself.)

((Yes I realize that I have populated this post with pictures of men. Men I have straight crushes on. Certainly not part of the solution. Very well then ... ))

OFFSCREEN, this links to other conversations.

LISTEN: we played a game at the bar where you have to name the album that "epitomizes" the band's sound. For instance, despite your (and everyone else's) affection for The Bends, the answer for Radiohead is OK Computer. But is it a valid question? A good one? Do we resent bands extending themselves?

TANGENTIALLY:

lyric, adj.
1. Of or pertaining to the lyre; adapted to the lyre, meant to be sung; pertaining to or characteristic of song. Now used as the name for short poems (whether or not intended to be sung), usually divided into stanzas or strophes, and directly expressing the poet's own thoughts and sentiments (OED, my emphasis)

What of lyrical obscurity? What in the hell is Stephen Malkmus ever talking about?Shaggy locks and crooked smile, we hardly knew ye. Dylan is the ur-sphinx here. But still there are claims that some of his albums are v. personal. Is it braver to strum with heart put to sleeve? Or the narrative songwriter, like The Decemberists' Colin Meloy ... can we find him amidst the wags and swains of his erudite period pieces? Do we prefer our indie rock lyrics so far underground, populated by erstwhile pomo poets? Then again, what's the alternative ... emo?

(FOOTNOTE - BEYOND EMODOME ((Emodome is a palindrome)) the most "emo" song I've ever heard might be the Bee Gees' "I Started A Joke")

ENDING THE JOKE: A really ready model for this question of access / stylization is the stand-up comedian. I have said that Patton Oswalt is better than Galifianakis or Mitch Hedberg because he comes across in his monologues, they work from a sort of very familiar racounteurism. I don't know if he would agree, but he seems to be him. The other guys tell jokes, often one-liners. Funny things they thought of, not stories. To me, the analogy is that the Simpsons will always be a better show than Family Guy though Family Guy is funnier. On FG the stories are a place to hang the gags. And this divide plays out both ways with the titans of standup. Both Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor made material of their real lives and problems. Then again, Andy Kaufman made a kind of performance art out of never being there, all guises.

Who do we want them to be?

Metaphoria #1

2008-01-04T11:11:00.000-06:00

Today's Metaphor Challenge:

QUOTATION MARKS

" "

MY ENTRY: Surgical Gloves - To carry something hazardous or potentially infectious from a foreign textual corpus, picking it up carefully at both ends and incorporating it in a sanitary manner. Conversely, to handle something precious and fragile with due care and to avoid infecting it in the handling.

Yours?

Do Good-Looking People Have Souls?

2007-12-29T10:55:00.000-06:00

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

2007-12-26T11:31:00.000-06:00

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

2007-12-21T14:29:00.000-06:00

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)

2007-12-17T16:10:00.000-06:00

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

2007-12-07T23:22:00.000-06:00

[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

2007-12-07T22:12:00.000-06:00

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 ...

2007-12-03T00:46:00.000-06:00

... 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

2007-11-25T16:46:00.000-06:00

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

2007-11-15T00:10:00.000-06:00

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

2007-11-14T16:06:00.000-06:00

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

2007-11-07T19:12:00.000-06:00

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

2007-11-04T01:39:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-02T22:57:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-31T09:38:00.000-05:00

(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

2007-10-29T17:54:00.001-05:00

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

2007-10-25T21:40:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-23T23:18:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-15T22:18:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-06T21:42:00.000-05:00

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"

2007-10-06T20:49:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-06T20:33:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-26T14:57:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-25T18:20:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-21T09:53:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-09-21T09:50:00.000-05:00

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."