Second Thoughts

2007 Albums

2007-12-18T11:30:00.000-05:00

Are over at Make-Believe Gospel. I'm mostly just posting this so that Blogger doesn't delete my blog due to total inactivity.

2006 albums

2006-12-13T00:45:00.000-05:00

My albums for the year are over at a new blog, Make-Believe Gospel.

On Buying Books

2006-11-14T13:14:00.000-05:00

The thought just popped into my head that my impulsive desire to buy book after book, to have them in my posession, without the ability or time or temperment to read them all, is a kind of capitalist-driven commodification of the worst kind. I like to imagine that owning and buying these books is a literary comfort, a high-minded form of participation in the materialist cycle which is uncriticizable--hey look at me, I spend my money on knowlege instead of big screen TVs. But it's still, I think, a form of materialism, however (thinly) disguised in intellectualism or academia or all those thing which are supposed to be exempt and pure. Beyond the fact that the the whole thing smacks of being a poseur, I dislike the way I'm possibly more interested in owning the things than reading them. The commodification of knowledge.

From a Style Manual Directed at Freshman Year Writing Introduction Courses

2006-11-10T13:20:00.002-05:00

I'm working on a custom edition for an English textbook for a college writing course, and the instructors at this particular school want this, among other grandiose texts, inserted as a new introduction (emphases mine):

Since the late sixties and early seventies, writing as a process has emerged as the most recognized and most respected way to teach composition. Unfortunately, popularity frequently alters good intentions, so much so that process has in some cases become just another formula devoid of meaning and purpose. To the novice writer, prewriting, brainstorming, and the like can seem far removed from the finished product, the text. Furthermore, the revolutionary attack and eventual victory by process forces against the forces that focused on writing as finished product have, in some cases, entirely removed the text from consideration. The product vs. process wars have left the text itself undervalued and often neglected. Because the process revolution began as an antidote to the unimaginative, insipid, and downright awful texts produced by students all over the country, the current neglect of text, coupled with the development of process-as-rigid-formula pedagogy, constitutes serious breaks in the chain that links processes to texts.

"Who are these forces? Where do we sign up for the revolution? Where is the cafeteria?"

Umberto Eco on the Holy War of Mac vs. PC

2006-06-27T12:22:00.000-04:00

"I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach -- if not the kingdom of Heaven -- the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation."

He wrote this in 1994, back when Windows (which resembles Mac-style graphical "cheerful" interface) was just an overlay to the free-for-all, text-based, highly customizable DOS structure. Now, DOS is done and gone, and you can't dig deep into the code to make bizarre, unchristened customizations (cults? sects?) to your interface, as it were. You're stuck with a priest interpreting scriptures for you.

Link

What was happening in your hotel room the day before you got there?

2006-06-01T11:30:00.000-04:00

Looks like a fun room. Not completely safe for work.

A Pretentious Dialogue on Borges and Judas and a Philosophy of Fiction (Part 1 of ?)

2006-05-15T22:38:00.000-04:00

NOTE: If you haven’t read Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Three Versions of Judas", you can find it here. You should read it before you read this, and it's only a few pages anyway.

When the gospel of Judas hullabaloo started up, I immediately thought of the mind-blowing, theologically subversive Borges story, “Three Versions of Judas.” In the story, Borges suggests (via the fictional scholar Nils Runeberg) that Judas’s role as necessary catalyst in Christ’s sacrifice for humanity leaves us with deep-seated problems of interpretation: should the man who was an agent in saving of humanity be an outcast? From a very realistic standpoint, we know that the officials would have no problem locating Jesus, who spoke publicly on a daily basis in the synagogue. Therefore, we conclude, Judas plays some important literary or theological role that is integral.

The following discussion is in regards to various conundrums the story presents, and how we are to bring them to bear on both an understanding of Christian theology, of Borges as a writer, and on literature in general.

Blake: So here's the idea: Judas was a necessary agent of Christ's crucifixion, and therefore in saving humanity. I started thinking about causality, and the differences between causality in real life, and causality in literature. There's the idea that the story of Christ's betrayal is both a human one, i.e. one man betraying another for money (clearly immoral), and that I define as “real life”; on the other hand there is a theological story, i.e. Christ knew that Judas would betray him and, according to the gospel of Judas, assures him that though “you will be cursed by the other generations . . . you will come to rule over them.” So in that second sense, the betrayal was not immoral.

Austin: Can you explain further what you mean about causality in reality versus literature?

Blake: Much of this comes from an essay on Borges called “Borges and the Plain Sense of Things” published at ReadySteadyBook. The article outlines the ideas of causality in reality vs. fiction like this: in reality, one thing leads to another, we see things very directly, i.e. man lights cigarette, man falls asleep, house burns down, whatever, it's A to B to C. But in literature, the causality is false: certainly, the same burning cigarette chain can exist, but it’s a pretense, there's a preconceived idea that we know how it ends. We know that the characters end up a certain way, even if we're reading it for the first time. We may not know what that end is, but that end has already been determined. Borges prefers detective stories, “for detective stories go to the heart of the nature of literature and raise questions about the difference between causality in real life and causality in the imagination […]For the detective story, unlike the novel, accepts from the start that the logic of fiction is not the logic of life and that as a fictional construct its prime duty is to be interesting, not realistic.” In other words, A to B to C in real life doesn’t make a good detective story, so it’s made interesting; this is an accepted mode of the genre. In the classic novel, however, there is the pretense that real life is being represented in its dailiness and banality as well as its inspiration, and there’s the idea that that whole project is false: it propagates a false view of life itself. Literature has a need to make things into a narrative, to make them interesting. A straight-fact account of reality wouldn't be very compelling. It’s by nature deceitful in some sense.

Austin: You say that a factual account of "real life" isn't interesting and literature, in its attempt to create an interesting story, is deceitful in some sense. But this is my question: is real life not interesting? If it is, does not literature serve a crucial purpose in revealing the captivating and intriguing nature of life, albeit by a maybe deceitful, yet interesting tale? Isn't there some sort of "truth" in these lies?

Blake: I wouldn’t say that real life isn’t interesting; just the opposite. What I mean is that reality directly transposed into literature’s narrative is not interesting according to the constructs of literature. Reality itself is so interesting that it’s necessary to point out literature’s falling-short—pointing out the importance that a certain thing is a manipulative fiction comes out of a sense of wonder with the real world.

But I think you’re asking whether literature can be useful in illuminating some kind of “truth.” We’ve had something of a similar discussion before: how do you define truth? Is a better word “meaning”? It’s a rabbit hole and before we slide into that quagmire, suffice it to say that literature and life are separate, and that they obey their own laws, and, most importantly, that the nature of literature is manipulative, moreover that is its power.

I want to get back to the idea of causality because it might help illuminate Borges. For the sake of this discussion we have to agree that the story of Christ’s betrayal functions as literature in this context, albeit literature with pressing theological ramifications (believed or not). The essay I’ve referenced centers on two ideas that stem out of the ideas of real-life vs. literature causality; they are actuality and possibility respectively. The idea is that only the single moment we live in, in the most immediate, present tense, is actuality. This is one school of pragmatism’s “truth in experience” or rather “meaning in experience.” This means a suspicion of generalizations and living under ideologies, or of thinking of ideas as ever-present realities; ideas are tools.
The opposite of actuality is possibility, and this represents basically everything outside of the single moment we live in; it even represents what-has-already-happened, as history can only be recalled by thinking of it, which robs one of pure actuality. Actuality itself cannot be conceived, as Kierkagaard argued; it is false to use the term in any other sense than in reference to real life. And actuality itself can only be suggested, because the moment it is conceived it becomes possibility.

Austin: "And actuality itself can only be suggested, because the moment it is conceived it becomes possibility…."
But what about language that demands actuality? For example, Greek has four moods, the indicative, the subjunctive, the optative and the imperative. Here I’m mainly concerned with the subjunctive and the imperative, though it’s important to note that the indicative is termed “a simple, direct assertion of fact,” so it terms of what you’ve been saying this mood destroys actuality, right? Anyways, Greek breaks the subjunctive up into three distinct labels: the hortatory, the potential and the prohibitive. The word looks exactly the same though based on context (and the preference of the translator) you translate it differently. The hortatory subjunctive, my main concern here, is used to express a request or proposal of action, often in the first person plural and translated with “let us.” Thus, “let us spend exorbitant amounts on wine!”

Similar grammatical concepts exist in all languages, I’m just talking what I know. So my question is this: does not the expression of something with the subjunctive not just suggest but demand actuality? Like create a space, with words, in which actuality will bloom so to speak.

And then we also have the imperative, which is like what it sounds: an order. “Spend your paycheck on wine, now!” Does this not also demand and subsequently create actuality? It gets into the linguistic term of a speech action (and here I begin to overstep the limits of my knowledge but who cares?). The basic idea of speech action is that the saying something creates the action, like when one says “I do” during a wedding ceremony, it creates the actuality of marriage.

I know I’m talking about spoken word here but is not the grammar employed in literature an attempt to capture the nuances of spoken language?

[End Part 1. Please feel free to comment with new ideas and directions.]

Literal meaning = death

2006-05-03T12:35:00.000-04:00

I’m recently interested by the idea that putting something into language—an idea, a person’s personality quirks, description of the streetscape—is a way to attack it, in the sense that it cuts the thing off, cuts it short. It provides reasonable, definable limits around a thing, limits that are universal and no longer personal, even if the language is a poetic stretch; it is nonetheless language, which is limited. There’s a violence in putting something into words, a kind of forced-fit struggle to make it literal, and therefore to kill it. The idea that defining something by language is the death of that thing; there can only be suggestion, evocation, or a mysterious puzzle or riddle whose key is the idea. See Joel's post about literal meaning, which includes this quote: "To define an expression is, paradoxically speaking, to explain how to get along without it." -W.V. Quine, Quiddities, p. 43-44.

Somewhat related, I’ve also been thinking about language as a thing itself, specifically as a tool to express things, as a medium like painting. I find that I’m more interested, for example, in the way a sentence is made and the voice of a writer than what is being said. Like words are paint and can be made abstract. I find I’ll read something and afterwards, not recall any of it. But the experience of reading it was engaging and interesting. Language toes an interesting line, since it’s by nature conceptually representational (these symbols in a row mean this object, thing, concept), but not physically representation (the word tree does not look like an actual tree). It can be made into something abstract, not in the physical sense of lines on a paper (that would simply be drawing abstractly), but by the associations and evocations that can be made mixing and contrasting the concepts behind the actual words/language. “Abstract Writing” must always tied to literal reality. It will always operate through reference, never able to become the referent. And once the referent becomes language, it is dead.

This probably makes no sense.

A conversation about art between Austin and I, drunk on three margaritas and 7 hours of low-oxygen office air, respectively

2006-05-01T22:47:00.000-04:00

via Googlechat, May 1st, 2006. We were discussing the advantages of film vs. digital photography, in response to this image. More of these remarkable artworks can be seen here, more cumbersome official site here. Drunk mispellings have been edited, except for comedic purposes.

Blake: the reality is film's life is limited. there will always be artists using it, but it really is an outmoded medium
Austin: so you think digital has reached the level of film? I think my photography friend would strangle you. do you think digital software can imitate the printing process of photos?
Blake: it's not about imitating it--it's just different. if somebody wants to reach a certain effect using the developing process (i.e. an artist) that's fine--but digital allows you instant and more flexible manipulation of the image. maybe your friend who is a film purist likes the integrity of the process, the working-with-your-hands immediacy of it. that's something i can understand
Austin: yeah
i think you've got something there, digitial and film photography will be almost different disciplines
Blake: but i wouldn't entertain any argument that film has better quality, not anymore
Austin: hmmmm...I need to just read both sides...i guess most photoblogs are working with digital now
everyone wants the pictures on the web as soon as possible
much easier to do with digital
Blake: i love thinking about how the digital world and the internet is changing our perception of things. like the idea that a film camera creates an actual artifact of the image, whereas the digitial one is all data that can be reproduced anywhere in the world with just a combination of 1s and 0s. this idea of the art object disappearing
Austin: do you think that's good or bad for art?
i mean because I think the art object adds to the allure of the art
seeing the original is quite different than seeing the reproduction
of course then there's the question of what is the original of a digital photo
does it have an original?
Blake: definitely. i agree, and i think most would, so that's why people will always paint and make sculptures, and why having a print-out of even something that began as a digital image is important. but i wouldn't say it's bad for art. nothing is ever bad for art if one adopts a certain perspective. wouldn't you say art is impossible to destroy, that it's too universally human? so the only available option is for art to become larger, to reach more people
it doesn't have an original except as a concept, I guess
Austin: I guess the only thing I would say that is bad for art is bad art?
Blake: yes exactly
that's very true
Austin: I love the idea of art being impossible to destroy
Blake: things that are lesser arts, or merely competent, are the threat to good art.
Austin: well I am drunk...still
that last margarita kicked in about twenty minutes agoe
Blake: your mind seems clear enough. you're probably at the point where you're able to think more abstractly, and soon enough that alcohol will overcome that and it'll just get muddy. but there is that small window...
Austin: indeed
if we could only keep the small window
Blake: that's why fitzgerald and hemingway drunk and wrote
Austin: and became alcoholics...it's a balance of sorts I guess...but i'm really dwelling on this idea that art is such a part of existence it can't be destroyed
or is that why it can't be destroyed?
Blake: it can't be destroyed because it is constantly being created, and even efforts at destroying inevitably result in new thinking and more creating. but there's the idea that average art can captivate an audience so that they're too easily satisfied. the question is how to bypass that
Austin: it's just a matter of getting people to realize that there is something better
but you always run into a sticky situation with that
Saramago has this part in Baltasar and Blimunda where this musician says "they can't truly appreciate what I play because they're not educated to understand"
which sounds snobbish but it's true maybe?
someone can really enjoy something like 'crash" because it looks good and sounds good and makes them think...they're not open to the things, say, Kubrick does in his films
Blake: as much as i resist thinking it, you're right--education is necessary to appreciate the arts. that's actually an idea that depresses me. shouldn't good art be immediate? but i suppose the way our minds are, so media-conditioned and saturated, that you have to work hard against it. maybe it's not so much educating as unlearning certain tendencies and re-learning how to think deeply
Austin: or, filtering what is put out, I mean certain people should not be allowed to create things for public consumption but some how or the other they are allowed to put their "art" out for the public at large
I'd be the first to say people are smarter than we give them credit for but they've got to be given the right "test"
and education comes a lot with experience no?
Blake: did you read the TMN article about Paris Hilton? ["Paris Hilton and the American Cannibal"]
Austin: yep
i've actually read that boorstin book
Blake: i don't know how it quite relates, but i think it's certainly true that as a culture, our experience with a higher reality has gone away from religion, and away from art, and into this weirdo postmodern circus of voyeurism and pseudo-reality
Austin: well there's the idea that religion kept too many things hidden, and that art only hinted at dark, vulgar things
everything was innuendo
or in religion's case not mentioned
now we can see people being nasty and up front about their problems and networks are calling it "art!" and maybe it makes people more comfortable with "art"?
i don't know if that made sense
but like maybe people felt a separation between their actual like and art that they don't feel with pseudo-reality
Blake: not quite
Austin: or just that we, as a society, don't want to contemplate a higher plane? which would really depress me
slap me when I don't make sense
(btw: you should write something for that Opal Menthal contest for TMN)
Blake: I can't slap you until you come to visit.
by the way i might post this on the blog, titled "a conversation about art between Austin and I, drunk on three margaritas and 7 hours of low-oxygen office air, respectively"
Austin: i love it

Why fundamentalism often sounds the same regardless of ideological underpinnings

2006-03-27T16:16:00.000-05:00

In a recent issue of Granta Magazine, which is published in the UK, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, a New York playwright, writes about growing up with two parents who were members of the Socialist Workers Party. These are the people you see handing out The Militant in front of grocery stores in poorer neighborhoods.

It's a great story, very well written and sensitive. The guy has a right be be angry at his upbringing, but he approaches the subject with admirable restraint and care, perhaps in itself as a larger act of rebellion against his otherwise without-restraint parents.

One passage struck me as profoundly interesting, where he expounds on how his father approaches and understands the ideology beneath his socialism.

‘Have you read The History of the Russian Revolution?’ my father asks me.

‘I haven’t read that, Pop.’

‘Trotsky write about how the revolution began with the seamstresses. Do you have a copy? Next time I’ll bring you a copy. Don’t start with chapter one. Start with chapter six.’ And as if reciting poetry, he says, ‘The struggles of the seamstress are like rising suns for the world to see.’

My father knows nothing about the history of seamstresses, of course. He’s never read a book about them, or seen a film, or gone to the library to look up an article. He just knows implicitly. Lack of knowledge, however, is not a deterrent for him. My father will often hold forth on the largest of subjects: the social evolution of human beings since Homo habilis, the materialist underpinnings of ancient civilization, the French Revolution. The subjects he chooses are so vast, so breathtaking, that you could fail to realize how hollow the information is that he imparts. Try mentioning, for instance, the artificial divisions imposed on the Arab world after the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and he will stare at you blankly. But he can speak about imperialist oppression of the Middle East in general terms with great verve and for many hours. It’s his job. He is a socialist missionary among proletariat savages and every discussion presents itself as a possible opportunity for conversion. It doesn’t matter if he himself knows the intimate details of the topics he expounds upon, his concern is with truth. He has heard things said by comrades about the seamstresses who have heard things said by other comrades, and he can understand that they are more than likely correct, that they do now demand a major reordering of the world as he perceives it. Beyond this hearsay, though, he has never ventured independently. Such exploration would be redundant and a waste of time.

My mother’s bookcase did indeed contain a copy of The History of the Russian Revolution. I never read it though. There were also books by Lenin, Marx and Engels, as well as by leading members of the Socialist Workers Party, Farrell Dobbs, James P. Cannon, Jack Barnes. Those I never read either […] I would, however, look at the titles when I played with my toys on the floor and wonder what they meant and what was inside. When I opened them to see if there might be pictures to entertain me, I discovered that the covers, the spines, the pages were still stiff and fresh. The books had never been opened by my mother. The titles were all you needed to know.

I love this idea of breathtaking subjects, astonishing and wide-scoped, full of so much breadth that you don't realize how little depth they posess. I think it's what characterizes fundamentalism in various forms. It's the allure of sweeping generalizations, how comforting they are, the comfort of the quasi-religious pursuit that is so singular in purpose, it need not be concerned with "intimate details" and complex realities that slow it down. This is always reckless. It's a pursuit of Truth that isn't much concerned with truth.

Dylanesque or Enoid?

2006-03-16T11:49:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody and The Mountain Goats (John Darnielle) talk about the intersection of pop music and literature.

To get things started, we posed a kind of theological question: Does your taste in music mark you as a Dylanist or an Enoid? To translate from music geek into English: a Dylanist (after Bob Dylan) would be a hot-blooded, essentially literary explorer, while an Enoid (after producer and Roxy Music keyboardist Brian Eno) would be more concerned with the sonic challenges of texture, form and space.

Also discussed: the difference between influence and inspiration; why music may be “somehow both further up in the sky and deeper down in our bodies than the other arts”; the burden that surrounds the writing of literature i.e. a writer is bound to be tied to the canon, while music can be irresponsible and free. It's a little unfocused but there are some really interesting ideas.

Why Crash Won Best Picture

2006-03-10T10:11:00.000-05:00

The L.A. Times’ Oscar Site, The Envelope, has a pitch-perfect assessment.

I do not for one minute question the sincerity and integrity of the people who made "Crash," and I do not question their commitment to wanting a more equal society. But I do question the film they've made...it is, at its core, a standard Hollywood movie, as manipulative and unrealistic as the day is long. And something more. For "Crash's" biggest asset is its ability to give people a carload of those standard Hollywood satisfactions but make them think they are seeing something groundbreaking and daring.

Let’s be honest: it was made by wealthy white people for wealthy white people, and they wanted to feel like they could address racism. When I originally reacted to “Crash," I really, really disliked it. My thought was that it was very manipulative of racial tensions, that it exploited them (though I’m not cynical enough to say it was for entertainment, I’m sure the intentions were noble) into unrealistic dramatic structures, and that felt wrong to me. I argued that we should be looking past these tensions, or even allowing them to exist in our stories, but using them? The movie’s overdramatic thrust was far too clumsy to possess the delicacy needed. In the end it still felt like a Big Hollywood Film, a high-profile star-driven drama that was trying to" think", and this rarely works. No matter the high-minded moral intentions, it still was supposed to be entertaining. And for that reason it actually seemed immoral to me. It just rang hollow.

Last year the New York Times published a cynical and insightful article called “The Trouble With Films That Try To Think":

The studios (and their artier specialty divisions) back these films for the same reason celebrities double as political pundits: producers and studio heads like to be taken seriously, too. What's whispered, yet rarely said out loud, is that Hollywood producers know that most of what they churn out is junk, and they are happy to seize an opportunity - especially if it's cost-efficient and Oscar-ready - to prove they are people who think. Because these movies are Hollywood products, though, they need to navigate between inoffensively pleasing a mainstream audience and actually saying something. What results is a genre of timid films with portentous-sounding themes, works that offer prepackaged schoolroom lessons or canned debates. Hollywood may be drawn to Big Ideas, but it is always more comfortable with sound-bite-size thoughts.

I never saw Brokeback Mountain, so I can’t blame that for not being good enough. But somehow I don’t think that’s really why Crash won.

Against the tyranny of the montage!

Addendum

2006-03-04T18:50:00.000-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell's perspective wasn't always in criticism of universal health care; in the year 2000 he and Adam Gopnik (who has lived in Canada) had a public debate where he argued, as a Canadian let down by his country's health care system, against it. The transcript for that debate can be read here, and it is very intelligent. Gopnik makes the point, for example, that when he was living in France and his son was extremely ill with food poisoning, "The overriding fact was that when we arrived--and I have arrived in emergency wards in America with sick children, and you spend half an hour figuring out who is going to pay and how this sick child will be paid for--when we arrived at the emergency ward in Paris with a sick child, who would pay for this sick child's illness was simply not a question that anyone raised.. In other words, money is secondary to the simple idea that somebody needs medical attention." This idea seems less true in our system.

Universal Health Care?

2006-03-03T20:19:00.000-05:00

After excitedly exiting my apartment on the way to hear James Murphy DJ at the Hiro Ballroom last night, I slipped down the stairs and really jammed my ankle badly. Determined as I was to shrug it off, we made it two blocks before turning back, which was much more excruciating, hopping back, than the two blocks out. I iced it and figured the morning would reveal it to be a minor or serious injury. I woke up and, after cursing the fact that my bed is at the top of a ladder, realized it was serious. I called in sick to work and set about trying to figure out if I needed to get treated.

I haven't studied much in regard to how and why universal health care can work (to the contrary, my father who lives in Canada often makes a point of saying it is a bad system resulting in long waits and inferior care). But I was really angry this morning when I had to spend two hours sorting out this insurance company from that, this plan from that, this doctor is not in the plan, this doctor is but the insurance won't cover it unless i have a written referal from a general practicioner doctor, this expense is covered but only if x is true, this situation isn't covered if you go into the emergency room because x and y need to be present for z to be true, which deems it an actual "emergency." The result of all this crap is I'm afraid and reluctant to do anything about an injury because I may end up with a big hospital bill on some loophole technicality in the insurance coverage. I had a friend at my old job who went into an emergency room because her retina had become detached. Inside that hospital, they referred her to an eye specialist who immediatly performed surgery. Afterwards, the insurance company wouldn't pay it because her eye thing "wasn't an emerency" and, even if she did go into the emergency room, she should have checked if the eye specialist was "in the plan." Since he wasn't, they washed their hands and said "sorry."

When I came to New York I worked without insurance for awhile, and I kept worrying and waiting for when I got to the promised land of benefits and salary, thinking all health problems would be solved. I don't feel that way, at all. Malcolm Gladwell, who started a blog recently, made this analogy about the strange situation we are in, that you are insured once you have a job:

...the idea of employer-based health care is just plain stupid--and only our familiarity with it and sheer inertia prevent us from rising up in rebellion. I always try to think of a suitable analogy and fail. The closest I can come is to imagine if we had employer-based subways in New York. You could ride the subway if you had a job. But if you lost your job, you would either have to walk or pay a prohibitively expensive subway surcharge. Of course, if you lost your job you would need the subway more than ever, because you couldn't afford taxis and you would need to travel around looking for work. Right? In any case, what logical connection is there between employment and transporation? If you can answer that question, you can solve the riddle of the U.S. health care system.

Interesting to consider. Gladwell also wrote an article for the New Yorker on this topic. For today, I spent (well, my roomate Max spent, though I promise to pay him back soon) $70 on an air cast and crutches. Why is it again that $50 of my paycheck every month goes toward my health insurance?

Man Man + Derrida

2006-02-23T21:54:00.000-05:00

Man Man’s album Six Demon Bag is one of the more engaging things I’ve listened to in awhile. The kind of complete gimmickry and insanity that makes it impossible to just put on in the background. It veers toward being eclipsed by its own tricks and stunts, but it’s a good album nonetheless. Sounds kind of like Animal Collective if they suddenly underwent a moodswing from nostalgic to angry, switched from LSD to cocaine, and joined the circus.

And, this is mostly unrelated: How bad is Derrida for our intellectual climate and institutions? Postmodernism, specifically deconstructionist ideas, is touted as a big bad wolf, the kind of catch-all representative for all that's-wrong-with-our-culture, especially in regard to religion. This article argues it differently and insightfully. At the extremes of postmodernism there is total relativism which ends up with conclusions that are hostile towards religion. Here many bring up the question "What is true, then?" or suggest that "If nothing is right or wrong, and everyone is right, we have indifference or even chaos." What the article points out is that all this deconstruction, this pointing out of gaps and inconsistencies and problems with truth and meaning, ends up with what Derrida later termed the “undeconstructible,” a concept that's hard to describe. Derrida said that justice, for example, is indeconstuctible--it is, of course, still a word, but Derrida explains it this way, in the midst of a discussion involving the story of Babel: "the place that gives rise and place to Babel would be indeconstructible, not as a construction whose foundations would be sure, sheltered from every internal or external deconstruction, but as the very spacing of de-construction." Meaning it isn't that justice is out of bounds of deconstruction, but that it has in its definition a structure which don't create the usual loop of oppressive self-referential signifiers.

Essentially it is some thing that is pure affirmation, something that is beyond the reach of decontructionism and therefore beyond our abilities to reason and even imagine. Kind of a desire beyond desire itself. In this sense Derrida's entire project was making an affirmation rather than a negation—an important point. From Sauf le Nom:

Here the invisible limit would pass less between the Babelian project and its deconstruction than between the Babelian place (event, Ereignis, history, revelation, eschato-teleology, messianism, address, destination, response and responsibility, construction and deconstruction) and 'something' without thing, like an indeconstructible Khora, the one that precedes itself in the test, as if they were two, the one and its double...

The "Khora" can be defined as something it is not--it is something that defies the logic of noncontradiction, the either/or dichotomy. The article suggests that Derrida's deconstruction really is a kind of extremely high standard, an idea that is akin to, for example, the Jewish rejection of idols as inadequate and inappropriate. Maybe postmodernism can be friendlier to religion than we think. Actually, there are some fascinating parallels. Certainly, by definition it doesn't have to be, and we would do well to understand it more fully before seeing the whole thing as one big hostile empire.

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Hunger

2006-02-11T21:36:00.000-05:00

"He fasts. But not in the way a Christian would fast. He is not denying earthly life in anticipation of heavenly life; he is simply refusing to live the life he has been given...hunger, which opens the void, does not have the power to seal it up." --Paul Auster, from The Art of Hunger.

This book is a flat-out masterpiece, a novel of inwardness, narrated by a character who has found himself, on purpose or by chance, at the outskirts of society. He has come to the city to write, but cannot write. He starves because he cannot write, and cannot write because he is starving. In this edge there is solitude, the shadow of potential insanity, and the limits of physical hardships: coldness, hunger. There is also serenity and artistic clairvoyance.

The novel was written in 1890 and is drawn from ten years of Hamsun’s hardships living as a struggling writer, condensed and rearranged. It is an empty novel, empty in the sense that its plot, action, scenes, and characters are never materialized outside of the narrator’s head.

Most compelling is what Robert Bly calls in the afterword a calmness (really: indifference) towards both the social or moral ramifications of a man going hungry with no one to help him, and towards the hysterical impulses a body will have for physical needs. Further, the narrator has no interest in judging those “demonic impulses” right or wrong: what fundamentalists and disciples of de Sade have in common is an obsession with natural human (fleshly) impulses. The narrator sees them come and go and does something akin to befriending them, to observing them pass and refusing hysteria. He watches himself deteriorate and approach insanity with a sanguine affection. For this reason, Bly suggests that “the book then is morally at odds with a great deal of Western literature”. The narrator is nonetheless honest, and randomly gives away a sum of money which he comes upon by a clerk giving him too much change from a transaction. Yet other times he lies for no reason, creates fictions to separate himself from the world, usually to convince others that might help him that nothing is wrong. There is a conscious separation of these other impulses, impulses for sex or food, into some separate category, objectifying them and turning them (their denial) into art. Morality can have no place there.

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books

DUMBO

2006-02-05T23:09:00.000-05:00

Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass

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Fiction and Beauty: More on James Frey

2006-01-17T22:56:00.000-05:00

I was talking to a wise friend today, and this quote from Keats came up:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"--that is all
ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

We were talking about James Frey and an article written in the Times today by Michiko Kakutani, which suggests that the furor over Frey’s book has introduced questions about the value of truth at all in contemporary society. The issue is put into further relief by Oprah’s newest choice for her book club, Elie Wiesel’s Night, a book whose author takes the value of truth and memory very gravely (he has devoted his life to ensuring the Holocaust will not be forgotten). Instead of necessarily praising veracity, objectivity, and fact, contemporary thought is interested in being (merely) imaginative or creative. As the minimalist artist Donald Judd declared in the early 60s, at the end of modernism, in his manifesto towards establishing a new art and cultural climate, “A work need only be interesting.” Or, as Kakutani quotes the critic Stanley Fish saying, the death of objectivity “relieves me of the obligation to be right”; it “demands only that I be interesting.”

The more I think about it, resistant as I am to proclamations that sweep judgment across our entire cultural landscape, Kakutani is on to something. There really is a lack of concern about what’s actually true. A comment on my last Frey post is something that I can sympathize with--the idea that it doesn’t matter if it isn’t true story as long as it’s a good story--but deep down I think that’s a damn lazy way of looking at it. It really should matter.

Bringing up Keats, for me, brings it closer to home. The idea of losing Beauty if we lose truth wakes me up. While it’s easy to philosophize these things, Beauty is bold and unruly, and won’t be wrapped up in rhetoric.

A memoir that takes its small liberties is one thing. Memory is subjective and personal and I am willing to believe that one cannot help losing a strict sense of the truth in the process or narrativizing memories--it is our human tendency. What Frey did is manipulate his past in order for the “message of redemption” to be greater. He abused the power of fiction, its tonic gift for washing us in a sense of truth.

The critic and novelist Julian Barnes wrote a fictional book of “essays” (imagine that) in which he discusses, via a widowed doctor in search of the truth about “Flaubert’s Parrot”, things like postmodernism, story, and the power of fiction. “Flaubert teaches you to gaze on the truth and not blink from its consequences,” the doctor writes. “He teaches you not to approach a book in search of moral or social pills...Do you want art to tell the truth? Send for AMBULANCE FLAUBERT: though don’t be surprised, when it arrives, if it runs over your leg.”

In Conrad’s 1902 novel Heart of Darkness, Marlowe must tell Kurtz’s wife the man’s last words. In recounting the story of his journey into the jungle, he makes clear that "I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do." However, when he sees her innocent beauty and her love for Kurtz, he cannot bring himself to tell her the truth. As Kurtz’s final whisper lingers in his head--“The horror! The horror!”--he tells her instead that his last words were her name. “I knew it--I was sure!” she cries, weeping. “I couldn’t tell her,” Marlow laments. “It would have been too dark--too dark altogether....” In this hollow gong note of silence, the book ends, with a man’s ultimate failing as his lack of courage to tell the truth.

It seems clear that we have lost the gravity of this view. Do we need to go back this far in fiction to find it?

Kakutani writes that postmodernism does not only make note of the obstacles to objective reality--it celebrates them, elevating relativism into “a kind of end in itself.” She's right, and somehow this seems lazy to me--just as lazy as the sweeping narratives that postmodernism is suspicious of. Certainly the questions postmodernism raises about the nature of reality and the inescapable way the world is experienced subjectively as individuals are valid--they need to be asked. What we can’t allow is for the tangling questions to serve as answers, and thereby to allow a kind of non-accountability for the ways we think and behave. It matters whether it's true or not.

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Sufjan Stevens at The Allen Room

2006-01-16T11:31:00.000-05:00

Above, you can see Central Park South, a strip of yellow light down the center of the stage. Across the top is the Manhattan skyline. To the left is Central Park. On the stage is seating for three vocalists (who also tried their hand at Glockenspiels, guitars, and a banjo), a percussionist, a bassist, four violins, two violoas, two cellos, two trumpets, and one trombone.

Below, you can see this audacious arrangement in action as the players go at a rendition of "Jacksonville". Sufjan, their conductor, sways modestly as he runs up and down the repeating riff at the end of each line of the verse. He's not an incendiary guitar player, but he blends it well into the arrangements. What look likes 30 or 40 microphones pick up each quiver of violin bow, flick of tamborine wrist, and Sufjan's frail, hushed voice.

It is the combination of his unpretentious, personal songs, a dream-tour through American stories and sensibilities , with the triumphant ambition of his arrangments, that make this music like nothing else. They are both scaled-down and monumental, and they deserve this kind of setting. Sufjan is the modest, understated conductor of symphonies.

This is the way music ought to be seen. I understand the importance of dark venues where you have general admission and you stand smashed in with lots of other fans--it doesn't apply here.

For an encore he played "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.", accompanied with one vocalist, the song for which he has probably become most well-known. The simple falsetto cry of those three words, "oh my God", stretched out and allowed to float and fade in the song's eerie space, left the venue silent. As the program notes suggest, written by the senior editor of The New York Times Book Review, this is "the moment the song falls of a cliff, into the utter unknown." A simple bow and Sufjan made his exit, leaving us with the raining evening and the orange glow of city lights in its midst.

Photos courtesty of Jeeperstseepers.

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music
nyc

Shiny and New

2006-01-15T03:24:00.000-05:00

If this isn't your first visit, you'll notice that the blog is a good bit different. Yes, you've come to the right place. I wanted something that didn't look like your average blogger blog, something a little cleaner. There are still a number of bugs, I imagine, but I am proud of my first foray into stylesheets and html code. My neck hurts and it's 3:26 in the morning, but hey. I began with a template from "Blogger Templates" and went from there.

I'll be doing a lot of tweaking with the code and also, along with my fellow chef Nick, working on releasing our cooking blog by Monday. For this reason it might be a little longer until I post again.

In the meantime, here are some pictures from last night's sally from Billsburg to the Lower East Side, with a 4 hour stopover at silly place in the East Village called Sin Sin, or something. Nick and Kyle met a woman who lived in London, and I somehow took 96 pictures of them during a twenty-minute conversation. Nick mentioned casually to her at the end that I was their photographer. "Oh, of course," she said.

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Truth and Fiction

2006-01-13T10:41:00.000-05:00

“I'm going to try to write the best book of my generation. And I'm going to try to be the best writer... They're all these guys who have fucking master's degrees and are so 'sophisticated' and 'educated' and ... well, I'm not a guy with a master's degree ... I can write big fat books, but I'm not an effete little guy. "
-James Frey

He has sold 3.5 million copies, so that’s something. A Million Little Pieces is a harrowing, sacrilege and brutal memoir about the extremes of addiction, and, to put it mildly, Frey is a machismo, eyes-on-me, coarse, upfront, affecting, center-of-the-controversy sort of character. And, along with his book being chosen as an Oprah selection, he has garnered a lot of attention.

Unfortunately for Frey, his memoir is made up. It seems obvious at this point, after an extensive investigation by The Smoking Gun, a collector of mug-shots and upholder of muck-raker journalism website, that while there are two or three incidents that bear a slight resemblance to the harrowing accounts in the book, the majority of it is absolutely fabricated. The Times has picked it up, and there’s no turning back.

People are pretty up-in-arms, and rightly so. But I can’t help ask what difference it makes. What is it about thinking that something is “a true story” that changes things? Either Truth or Fiction, memoir or novel, the thing has to work as a story: it has to be arranged into a sequence that makes it told in a familiar way. Nobody’s life occurs in a narrative arc. No matter how closely a writer may try to be true to reality, the human tendency is to see the world in stories. Sometimes we don’t even know it: our very memories are often arranged into a succession that makes sense; we dream in fragments but remember linear happenings. On a most basic level we experience the world via sensory details, but our brain immediately identifies and places them in a framework with which we are already familiar. It’s how we arrange the world.

The Times published a fascinating article on this process, something called mirror neurons, little things that fire in response to chains of actions linked to intentions. In other words, we see visual information of somebody reaching for a glass of water, and these neurons know that, in general, that person will probably bring it to their lips and drink. That’s how the story goes. The sum total of all our mirror neurons mean that we are biologically geared towards narrativizing everything we experience. It is the unconscious step directly after pure sensory perception; we cannot get away from it. Fascinating that this tendency can be traced beyond psychology.

James Frey is an easy guy to hate since his personality is annoying and it looks like the major incident of the book, in which he claimed to get busted for crack and hit a policeman with his car, spending three years in prison, was really just him being a drunk buffoon frat-guy, quietly getting a DUI, and being released on bail 5 hours later. It’s just sort of sad that somebody would make up stories about being more of a “bad boy” than they really were: it’s one thing to brag about accomplishments that aren’t really true, another to claim one was worse than is true. He has since changed it from “bad guy” to “flawed person,” but he maintains that the essential nature of the story, its underlying message of redemption, holds true.

His publisher, for one, doesn’t seem to care. They published this statement recently: "Memoir is a personal history whose aim is to illuminate, by way of example, events and issues of broader social consequence. By definition, it is highly personal. In the case of Mr. Frey, we decided 'A Million Little Pieces' was his story, told in his own way, and he represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections. Recent accusations against him notwithstanding, the power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers."

As it turns out, A Million Little Pieces was originally submitted as a novel to many, many publishers, and was rejected 17 times (not that publishers have had a recent reputation for spotting talented writers recently). Then he recast it as a memoir, apparently changed a few things, and off the book went. It became inspiring and heartbreaking, empowering and touching. The inside flap of the book calls it "an uncommonly genuine account."

It’s true: who would want to read a novel about some drug addict wandering around three states puking on himself and getting his teeth ripped out without anesthetics? It might be riveting for awhile, but it would be gratuitous and probably banal and a bad book. Oprah said when she recommended the book that, while reading it, she kept turning to the book jacket and telling herself “Phew! He really does make it through. I know that he turns out all right.” The idea that it’s a real life really means something.

I haven’t read the book, so I can’t say if it’s good. The excerpts I’ve read are well-written in a certain kind of one-off, unscripted, Hemingway-esque sort of style. I don’t know if it would be a good novel all by itself, without the crutch of it being a “true story.” I remember finding out that the opening titles of Fargo, which claim it to be a story based on true events, were false, and I remember being very surprised, but when I think about it, it doesn’t matter. Fargo is masterful film which doesn’t depend on the audience’s perception of its being a true story to be good. James Frey’s memoir, I fear, does depend on that idea. That’s why people are so pissed off.

Is there a moral code to this? Is Frey morally bound to tell the truth, insofar as he can’t help the human biological/psychological tendency to narrativize?

Last spring the writer Pam Houston came to DePauw to give a reading, and she was talking about an essay she had written about looking for wolves or foxes or something, for a nature magazine. In real life, they only saw the animals one time, in the mid-morning, kind of a non-event, and the rest of the way was a disappointment. In the story she wrote, however, they searched all day to no avail, until the last hour of daylight, when, off in the distance, they spotted a wolf in the gloaming. And it watched them, lifting up on its hind legs for a few seconds before running off to disappear.

Some people were troubled by her purposeful recasting of the day’s events in service of making a better narrative: she was supposed to be writing a nonfiction essay. But she simply shrugged, and said “What I wrote is a better story.”

In effect, her point is that it doesn’t really matter what time the wolves came out, and whether or not one stood on its hind legs: the aesthetics of the story are greater than the morality of telling the truth. A moral question is trumped by the possibility of making better art.

In Frey’s case, though, the power of the book’s success depends on its truth. As a novel, it’s not very good, using stock characters and cliché-ridden portraits. For that reason he’s kind of up a creek. The issue here is that it can’t rest on its laurels as a novel. Its power rested on the idea that it was a true story. And some have called him the worst kind of fraud, since the book's message is of rejecting victimhood and the humble philosophy of AA in favor of macho, self-making, heroic escapes from addiction. If his claims to life-threatening addiction and self-destruction are false, they are also misleading and fatal to real addicts trying to recover. In this sense his fraud is grievous: he exploits inspirational, genuine ideas for literary success. And those ideas are the reason we read books in the first place. He has not only fuzzed the line between novel and memoir--he has manipulated the bedrock gift of inspiration that is shared by both. This is at the root of any book, Truth or Fiction.

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Drop the cellphone. Drop it!

2005-12-31T01:03:00.000-05:00

Today I was in one of four Borders in New York City (compared to the twenty or so Barnes and Noble locations) to spend a gift card. I approached the counter to pay, and a woman wearing a sequined shirt stood at a cashier talking on her cell phone: it was loud, obnoxious and, as conversations by people with cellphones glued to their ears usually go, inane. So the clerk, who was an annoyed-looking early-20s hipster, tells her the total due, which she does not hear because she is fishing in a two gallon purse and has the phone pinned between ear and shoulder. He sighs, reaches under the counter and begins pushing some things around, and, unbelievably, comes out with a cardboard tube. He purses his lips at one end and announces in radio-announcer’s sarcastic enthusiasm, “YOUR TOTAL IS TWENTY-THREE DOLLARS AND EIGHTEEN CENTS.” Everyone stops and looks, and the woman looks up, flushed. She doesn't know what to say.

“I--I can’t believe you’re being rude to me,” she spurts. “I’m talking to my mother.”

The clerk fails to remove the tube from his mouth. “YOU ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF A TRANSACTION. YOU SHOULD NOT BE ON YOUR CELL PHONE.”

“Are you kidding me?” the woman says indignantly.

“NO.”

A few people sort of clapped. Even the clerks laughed a bit nervously. She paid and left. Bravo.

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On a few unrelated notes

2005-12-28T14:22:00.000-05:00

I. Franzen and Frazier

Since picking up Jonathan Franzen’s essay collection How to Be Alone at St. Mark’s book shop last week, I’ve been cultivating solitude. He is a joy to read: careful but insightful, the sort of writer that brings clarity to a subject and abhors pretension, who invites you along to discover, rather than speaking from an established position. He is very frank. He writes about the erosion of individuality and privacy, of dignity and civil life while at the same time bravely facing a technologically advanced mass culture which has begun, for example, to read less and less novels.

His writing suggests the loneliness that characterizes modern life while refusing to retreat from it; one of his well-known essays written in 1996, which has become known not by its title, but as “The Harper’s essay,” discusses the importance of the “social novel” which engages the public on a large scale. Perhaps this ability for the novel to impact a wider culture is lost, since we now have other ways, faster ways, of apprehending culture-wide information. I’ve heard it theorized that films are the new storytellers, and sometime in the 70s Philip Roth declared that American culture was too stupefying and/or disturbing to sustain a readable “social novel” that could be accurate and aesthetically coherent in any way.

I like the way Franzen ends the essay, with a quote by Don DeLillo, who declares that novelists are simply writing one way at a certain time, and that is our definition of what a novel is. “Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write…mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.” Back to individuality, and perhaps, to loneliness.

In an unimaginative but logical mix-up, my mind had collapsed the writers Jonathan Franzen and Ian Frazier into one generally similar last name, though I’d read neither writer. Out of the blue I also received a collection of Frazier’s essays for Christmas, titled Gone to New York. Through various New Yorker “Talk of the Town” pieces from Frazier’s early career in the 70s, as well as full-length essays, a disparate portrait of New York is painted, written with a kind of straight-faced, serious whimsy--that's kind of a nice larger metaphor for New York. Since Frazier moved here out of the Midwest (Ohio) in his 20s, I feel akin. Except for the part about landing a job writing for the New Yorker, after he turned down an offer to be a fact-checker. I suppose I never did apply.

II. What to read next

This fun website is worth spending 10 minutes at: you enter in a list of your favorite books, as long as you’d like or have time for, and through a simple algorithm your list is compared to others’ and suggestions for what to read next are produced. It’s a simple and effective idea, an unbiased, pretty obvious, and surprisingly helpful formula of recommendation. All of the books are linked to Amazon.com and there you can find out more. You can also select only a portion of your list to base recommendations on—perhaps post-punk British writers, or beat poets. So now you can’t ever wonder what to read next (as if that were some problem—as my bookshelf fills up with books I haven’t had time to read, do I really need to keep looking for more? Yes, of course.)

III. Intelligent Hip-Hop

If, like me, you were a little disappointed by the hip-hop selections from Pitchfork’s Year-end Singles and Albums list (and sort of the list in general—where is Broken Social Scene, Stephen Malkmus, Bright Eyes, Andrew Bird?) then you should see this post by an excellent friend-of-a-friend music blogger with some suggestions. I’ve heard the Cyne album, and it’s refreshingly good. Also, I think that the top 50 list by Stylus Magazine is more interesting and well-argued than Pitchfork’s, and does a better job of both confirming personal choices while suggesting new music. They seem to have a larger scope, and don’t suffer much for it.

IV. One-track mind

I have been abusing the Junior Senior song “Take My Time” incessantly since I downloaded it twelve days ago; it has already reached my top 25 most-played. How did I miss this album? It began as a guilty pleasure, but I don’t feel so guilty anymore. I can’t stop.

V. Periodical Insanity

With both roommates home for the holiday, the apartment is empty, and I am savoring that fact. I think I’ve gotten past the loneliness so that it has turned into solitude, two different things. I am also catching up on weeks of the New Yorker. It is a relentless magazine. This is exactly how I feel. And, in case you're interested, I've never seen it cheaper than 90% off the cover price.

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books
music

Transit Strikes

2005-12-21T13:19:00.000-05:00

Photo courtesy of the NYTimes

After the second morning of a three-and-a-half mile walk to work, I am slightly perturbed at the transit strike. This morning there was no longer the collective “let’s be New Yorkers and tough it out together” attitude, and it just felt like a long, cold walk. The problem is that I can’t zone out, because the New York numbered streets tell me, every block, exactly how far I’ve come on the schlep from 73^rd to 14^th st. Usually, I think I’ve walked further than I really have. Sixty blocks is a long way.

I know that, falling left of center politically, supporting better health insurance and retirement ages is, in principle, something I’m in support of. But I’m not buying it, and here’s why: this is a selfish publicity stunt, a case when the idealism of better worker’s rights has lost hold of the reality of the situation. While these transit workers (who make, on average, more than twice my own yearly salary, I pause to point out) are striking, those who make far less than they do—20-30k per year, perhaps, in service jobs and otherwise—are stuck without the ability to make it to work. In many cases, these people are paid by the hour, so when they can’t make it to the job, they forfeit that day’s wages.

White collar workers have the ability, usually, to work from home via computer, and therefore their business can go on (and isn’t this the group that the transit union is trying to make a statement to?), plus they are likely paid by salary and aren’t going to lose their money. But the union’s demonstration to fight for workers’ rights has left a sizable majority of those very workers--who are far less better off than they are--without the ability to work, who can’t “telecommute” and who are bearing the brunt of this obstacle.

The point I’m making is that striking is not going to help the workers who the union claims it fights for. Considering the final offer the MTA made to the union at the last minute—which made concessions far past the midway point between the original positions of both organizations—it seems clear that the union would get exactly what it wanted or strike.

I completely respect the union’s ideological goals and desire to see better pay, working conditions, retirement pensions, etc. Roger Toussaint, the president of the union, had this to say about it:

This is a fight over whether hard work will be rewarded with a decent retirement and over the erosion or eventual elimination of health benefits for working people. And it is a fight over dignity and respect on the job; a concept that is alien to the MTA. Transit workers are tired of being under appreciated and disrespected. [...] We call on the good will of New Yorkers, the labor community, and all working people, to recognize that our fight is their fight, and to rally in our support -- to show the MTA that the TWU does not stand alone.

These are words that evoke principles one can't really argue with--who would ask for the "erosion and eventual elimination of health benefits"? While he asks the labor community to stand with the union, the strike is simultaneously robbing those workers of the ability to support themselves.

I guess I would be pissed if I spent most of my life underground, too. The subways are pretty depressing, and I was reading a comment on the transit union’s blog (which have since been deleted) by a worker, who railed against people that spit on the workers, piss on the platforms, have no respect, etc.. I don’t really know what to say about that, but stranding 7 million people is obviously not going to make them nicer to you.

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2005 Albums (1-5)

2005-12-15T23:53:00.000-05:00

Just under the midnight wire.

5. Stephen Malkmus - Face the Truth
This may be the surprising album on my top ten; it surprises me. I heard this album once or twice and it didn’t affect me very much--it didn’t have enough hooks to make a huge impression, and the songs were just strange enough to be a bit offsetting. The first song was such an odd combination of weirdo guitar work and falsetto repetitions that I kept skipping it. I put it away for awhile and started playing the album in the background when I was reading or cleaning my room. It wasn’t compelling enough for sitting down and concentrating on intensely, but it wasn’t easily swallowed as a categorizable, middle-of-the-road sort of pop record. But it was in this liminal space that the album began working on my psyche. Lyrics I couldn’t consciously remember hearing would end up in my thinking; parts of the album that frustrated me would end up as melodies I would strain to remember and be unable to place. Then, all at once, the whole thing made sense. The tiny guitar riff at the end of “I’ve Hardly Been” was suddenly immensely interesting; “Freeze the Saints” was suddenly a comforting song about feeling feeble towards a desire to love; all the electronic experimentation became a wonderful respite from the thickness of the melodies; the lyric “You’re a maker of minor modern masterpieces for the untrained eye” made sense. I will concede that Malkmus gives in to his indulgences more than once: the waa-waa guitar stuff at the beginning of “Kindling for the Master” can get annoying--but it turns into such a great song. And the 8-minute long guitar jammy thing in the middle is probably a bit much. But I am one who really hates jam-band luxuriating, and I am willing to give it to him. It could be that I have only a cursory interaction with Pavement and so this style was all new to me, but this album went from vaguely interesting to something which I intensely loved and understood overnight.

4. Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary
It didn’t take long for this album to floor me--actually, it was the first measure, when the drummer lays down a beat which claims for itself an expansive landscape the size of Montana, and never concedes an inch back. Instantly I was in a frozen tundra of ghosts and howling wolfs and open spaces, a place away from civilization, where I had to reach the end of myself by running, away, “farther than guns will go.” Away from the modern world and all of its complexities, where I am a hero in the daylight and a villain at night. What I’m trying to say is that this is an album of metaphors, harsh and potent ones, and it works marvelously, it transcends the world of metaphors, it feels intensely real. This album reminds me that society and the individual is not completely reconcilable, that in the end, it’s impossible to avoid rejecting it. It reminds me that God is distant. At the same time, the album forced me to examine what it is to love someone, to know that loving them means a desire to escape away into a lonely place, and that loving them means colliding with them in ways that seem strange and awful, going into ones darkest places and believing that there is a light to be found in the center of it, a light which comes from putting oneself aside long enough to care deeply for another person, as Tennessee Williams said it. And beyond all of it, my God, the music is incredible and anthemic and emotional. There’s nothing more to say.

3. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
At first, this album came across as really silly and a lot of fun (see the first song, which sounds nothing like the rest of the album, though I don’t think it’s as bad as Pitchfork implied). I started playing the album every time I felt like being in an indie-pop sort of good mood, which was often since it was my first month in New York and I had no responsible plans for my life. Obviously, nobody has any idea what the lead singer is saying in any remote way, and that was perfect. So I started playing it in my empty apartment (no time and/or money for furniture) every morning and singing along in non-descript strings of vaguely english-sounding words. I picked out a few things “You look a bit like coffee, and you taste a bit like me” or “You look like David Bowie, have you nothing new to show me?”, which was basically fun nonsense. Oh, and “Who--Will get me to party? Who--do I have yet to meet?”--that, for me, was the essence of summer in New York: ending up at parties full of Spanish people and finding that I speak it fluently, wandering into apartments in Brooklyn which were hollowed-out storefronts and seeing a gentlemen in a bee costume sing pop melodies over homemade electronic beats..and finding out that there was a free Clap Your Hands Say Yeah show on a pier with $3 beer and $1 hot dogs with the sunset and the Brooklyn bridge in the background. I still don’t know what he sings about, but I really don’t want to know, and of what I’ve read it’s all pretty strange and oblique--it’s not the point. All of the songs on this album are so carefully put together, so subtly designed to grow with age, not immensely astounding at any particular point, but on the whole way above the fray, and so irresistibly sing-alongable despite the impossibility of discerning the lyrics. For me, it was all about the mood they set, and the importance of it being a nonsense-lyrics soundtrack to my life.

2. Andrew Bird - Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs
This is an album that, for some reason, made a whole hell of a lot of sense to me. It must be one of those cases when idiosyncrasies align, or something like that. Most people like it and obviously it’s a masterful album, but I literally could not stop listening to the songs on this album since I first listened to it in February, and I don’t understand why nobody else has the same problem. Every season of the year, this album has made immense sense. The whole thing pulses with this magnetic precision, these masterful arrangements, impeccable songwriting, and abstruse lyrics that make sense on a subconscious level. I have tried to dismantle all of these songs and I can’t “figure them out”, which is when, I think, a song can begin to lose its appeal. Every time I try I get turned around and sent in a different direction. The album has a whimsy, a humor, a wisdom, a poetic genius. I love the mathematical aspects of this album, both in the scientific way the music sounds to the lyrics taking about ones and zeros and GPS. At the same time, the entire project seems effortless, like it’s just the result of a set of formulas that Andrew Bird dreamed up. In fact, that’s the sense his live show gave: all the songs sounded different, way different, so they were sometimes only recognizable by the actual words of the lyrics. All the arrangements were changed and they kept changing, the melodies interacting and harmonizing on the fly. It was absolutely amazing, and I think that these songs are really just complicated formulas that are worked out, and so he just plugs in some different ideas and the thing comes out differently every time. Andrew Bird operates in a mathematical world of music, on a different plane. I am completely convinced that he is a genius.

1. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
This album came out of nowhere and everywhere. I mean, I liked Seven Swans and Michigan was a pretty great album. I liked the literary nature of his approach, his subtle quietness, the way he possessed a disarming honesty in his approach to music. And the first time I went through this one, it sounded about the same. And also the second and third time, despite the many times that Austin would get serious and happy in such alarming proximities while playing this album all spring. It just didn’t click, and I don’t know why. And I don’t know when it began to click, either. I know it had something to do with leaving Chicago and treking across the country. It might have been the chill I started to feel when the opening chords of the album would play, the way they felt like a desert at night. Or, when I listened to “John Wayne Gacy” in the dark and Sufjan’s frail voice cried “Oh my God.” Or the way “Casimir Pulaski Day” became a perfect evocation of growing up in the magical, disquieting contradiction of church youth groups. Or the way “Chicago” conjured up my own trip across the country, when “I drove to New York / in a van with my friend.” Or the moment the female vocalist begins harmonizing in “The Seers Tower,” and the persistence of a gentle symbol builds into a some kind of quiet frenzy. This album’s gift is the way it builds and builds into a collective experience, as each member of the cast joins in, infusing stories and myths, spirituality and religion, death and celebration. Listening to this album, for once I feel some pride in that abstract idea of Americana. This is the kind of album that speaks in many voices, and Sufjan’s gift is his ability to conduct and orchestrate and channel all of that. This is not an album that would have made any sense to me at a younger age. At 74 minutes long, it is sprawling and indulgent, but each moment of sprawl doesn’t feel superfluous, it feels real and correct and a metaphor for the intersections of ethnicity, assimilation, guilt, democracy, ideals, religion, urbanity, imagination, and fear that is the American contradiction. Music just doesn't ever do this sort of thing. An album like this causes America to make sense. I think that’s what he’s trying to do. That’s meant a lot to me.

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2005 Albums (6-10)

2005-12-14T22:05:00.000-05:00

Keep up here, here, and here

10. Bright Eyes - I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
Despite Austin’s insistence, I still can’t get into most of Bright Eyes’ material. I’m not attracted to the sort of adolescent rawness that characterizes it; in combination with Conor Oberst’s voice, it comes across as whiny. But this album exists in a place more interesting than the riotous country of teenage years: it’s an album of transition to adulthood. Many of the songs deal with New York City and it means a great deal to me to find the familiarity in these songs. It’s a folk album that I actually feel apart of, rather than my usual impression of folk coming from some long-ago, bygone era which I can observe but never quite understand. It reminds me a lot of Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker, actually--songs about travelling, Emmylou Harris harmony spot, and, most importantly, songs about being young, sad, depressed, and ambitious. There’s a sense in this album of movement and standing still, and wondering which to do--to voice everything or internalize it, to run or sit, to cry or swallow the tears. It’s all very melodramatic, but such has been my post-college life. This album has helped it to make sense.

9. Antony and the Johnsons - I Am a Bird Now
This album made sense when I saw Antony live at Carnegie Hall, and he made a comment during the show about his intention in making his music: to nurture a sense of joy. As I began listening to this album at first, I remember the siren quality of his voice, the melancholy notes, the rending sadness of his lyrics. It was an utterly beautiful album to play over and over again and become enveloped in, especially “Hope There’s Someone,” the opening track. That alone made this album important to me. But seeing an artist live will always add another layer to their artistry, however unfair that may be to use as in influence in making this list. But I was amazed how lighthearted and funny Antony was, how much he joked around and the general happiness of his persona when he wasn’t singing. It provided the contrast, of course, to the songs themselves, and that’s why his comment about joy makes sense: joy exists as something apart from, and even opposite of, happiness. Not to get all philosophical, but this balance of elements is the kind of revelation that I’m amazed a piece of music can provide. When it comes to the album itself, I can only say that it’s achingly, achingly beautiful.

8. M.I.A. - Arular
Once again, seeing M.I.A. live made a difference, though I loved this album before I saw her at Summer Stage in 90 degree heat in Central Park with Salman Rushdie. Nevertheless, the anthemic power of the songs came alive when i saw her perform them. But playing it in the car while driving around in the summer is something close: blending elements of hip-hop and world music and dance and electronic into a contradictory, politically-charged, really fun dance party. To be honest, I’m mostly ignorant to her politics beyond a general desire for pulling up the poor and embracing some sort of anti-capitalist globalism sing-along--and I’m sure if I sat down and thought it through, I wouldn’t agree with her on more than one point--but I think that’s somewhat alright. The essence of her message is infused into the music, which is a feat that doesn’t happen easily. Pop music that is infused with politics is usually bad, just as is pop music that is infused with religion and any other system of thought--in most cases, it detracts from the artistry. But she pulls it off impeccably, intrinsically, naturally. For that reason, this album is, in my opinion, an immense success.

7. Art Brut - Bang Bang Rock and Roll
No, I didn’t get this album at first: I kept looking to the music for something interesting going on. It’s great music, better-than-average song writing, but nothing groundbreaking. But as the ironic pose of the lead singer began to develop (appreciating British human is part of it), the whole thing came into focus. The best moment of any song this year is halfway through “Good Weekend,” when the lead singer declares that he’s seen his new girlfriend naked....TWICE! The combination of self-seriousness and parody is what makes this album one of the funniest and smartest albums of the year. The pose they have going is good for hours of laughs, and this album delivers line after line of the sort of humor that still gets funnier each time you hear it. “Modern Art” might be my favorite song on the album, wherein the lead singer declares that Modern Art makes him want to rock out. Perhaps it’s the Art history major in me, but that has to be among the cleverest songs I’ve ever heard. Somehow all of this never gets cloying, and only gets funnier. It’s really impossible to describe or translate the note of irony that these guys strike; you really just have to listen to it. Really, that’s why it’s good.

6. Spoon - Gimme Fiction
When Kyle downloaded this album and eagerly played it in the living room, it was just a month or two after I began listening to Spoon, again thanks to the Pitchfork Media best albums of 2000-2004. So I was in the midst of having what was basically a nervous breakdown--for a healthy amount of time, they were the perfect band to me. Accessible but complicated, catchy but possessing staying power, stripped down and simple, rough-edged, pop and rock. I was totally enamored. This album is unbelievably good, and though it may not be a leap forward from Kill the Moonlight, that didn’t really matter to me because I was taking all the albums in at once. I used to play the overture-esque first track every time I wanted to feel like I was embarking on a journey (to the library or the bathroom, oftentimes) and it still makes my stomach churn. “I Turn My Camera On” has to the most perfect track of the year: no matter how many times you listen to it, it is impeccable and interesting. I love the way this album makes me feel, its leanness and machine-like endurance combined with melodious songwriting. Each instrument is placed with what seems like mathematical precision, as if it could be no other way. It sounds exactly the same as the first time I heard it, and I have never been able to say that about any other band.

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2005 Albums (11-15)

2005-12-13T22:11:00.000-05:00

Keep up here, here, and here

15. Architecture in Helsinki - In Case We Die

It took me a long time to unpack Architecture in Helsinki, but the coolness of their name kept me on. Being unfamiliar with them before this album, I first went through Fingers Crossed in order to establish some kind of trajectory. But eventually the repeated playing of “Do the Whirlwind” by people I was living with drew me inexorably towards this childish, frenetic, quick-witted knot of an album. That song will never cease to amaze me with its ability to contain sadness and happiness together in one place, to a rhythm and melody you can dance to. I still like Fingers Crossed a bit better, but it wasn’t released this year, was it? In Case We Die remains unparalleled in pure imagination--an exciting, strange, experimental ride.

14. Caribou - The Milk of Human Kindness
This album exists, start to finish, without a reference point. It is a world unto itself, untethered and also unconcerned with what is expected of a normal album. A good balance between electronic and organic, it balances samples with the occasional vocal piece by the man behind the curtain. To put it simply, this is the album I often put on when I needed to think and was tired of listening to The Books. When Brian Eno first began to make “ambient” music, his goal was to create a space in which to think, or something along those lines. This isn’t an ambient album, but it manages to introduce somewhat more traditional song structures and pop elements without them infringing on the holy emptiness of your usual ambient stuff. That’s the best way I can explain it. It’s immensely creative.

13. The Decemberists - Picaresque
I listened to this album probably ten times before I began to learn the stories of the characters in the songs. Musically, it’s adventurous and macabre, very folky, and, compared with lots of bands on this list, mostly straightforward. Lyrically, this is an outstanding, fascinating album. The Decemberists, certainly, are very literary and the creative writing major in me responds to that. In spite of the fact that all the lyrics are impersonal in that they aren’t about the lead singer’s emotional life, I feel remarkably akin to the members of this band, more so probably than most on this list. Even though telling stories isn’t straightforwardly personal, there’s an honesty that can’t be sidestepped in doing it: it’s easy to write ambiguous lyrics, but stories have to be honest to work well. They have their own rules. So I think that the this album resonates with me because of that.

12. Animal Collective - Feels
Sung Tongs absolutely blew me out of the water and I have consistently listened to it since I found it via Pitchfork’s best of 2000-2004. Every song was intricate and subconscious and fascinating, a symphony and a cacophony all at once, calm and busy at the same time, full of unsettling abstractness and highly reminiscent of being a child. At the time it was their closest venture at obeying typical song structures and an aesthetic that had any relation to pop music. This their latest goes even further towards the traditional idea of a rock song, rather than their tendency to escape into landscapes of sound. To be honest, I’m still trying to appreciate it, and I don’t like it as much as Sung Tongs. I read a review somewhere that said that, though it wasn’t as formally interesting as Sung Tongs, it was nonetheless a great album. And that’s exactly right. Sung Tongs was all over the place, using pop structures only enough to blow their tops off into something more fascinating, using instruments and gorgeous vocal harmonies. This is more straightforward, though in the context of Animal Collective that doesn’t hold its usual meaning. I really like this album. It feels apart of a collective unconscious. “In a house so cozy, word are spoken. Let’s take our shoes off and unwind.”

11. Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene
This album is a pitchperfect mess that I keep trying to put back together, but can’t. Every hook is hidden under confusion and off-beatness and insensible production, as if the band is doing its best to be frustratingly non-commercial. Sure, they’re an art rock band, I guess. So it’s their job. Well it’s become my job to lie down inside this album and hope in vain to relive their creative process. The problem is that half their creativity lies in covering up their creative process, making them some kind of postmodern. In one sense they’ve covered their tracks and done their best to give the sense that this album just got spat out; in another they have made clear that this is a shambling mess and they make no apologies. This album doesn’t have the wow moments that You Forgot it in People had, but I am amazed by it as a whole nonetheless. It’s wonderful that albums are out there that sound like this, that are impossible to digest at once, that are so crisscrossed and yet together that they take months to understand. Even if there’s nothing to understand at the end. It’s the process of it.

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2005 Albums (20-16)

2005-12-12T21:54:00.000-05:00

This list continued from yesterday.

addendum: see Mike Robert's blog, which he created to display a top 25 album list.

20. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
I understand that putting Bloc Party on an album list is to sacrifice “indie cred,” but I think that’s sort of stupid. Maybe the new-wave/dance-punk movement resurgence has gotten old, and maybe it’s gotten really mainstream, and yes NME is overrun with similar sounding ripoffs--but this album runs a lot deeper. It’s an explicitly political album that you can dance to, the drumming is masterful, there’s a lot of emotion. Sometimes Bloc Party tries too hard, and sometimes Kele’s voice is too full of earnestness, but for the most part I think they put out an impenetrably tight, honest album, and that’s something.

19. Broadcast - Tender Buttons
This is a really weird album, and it’s only beginning to make sense. I’m still on what may be a lifetime search for something that’s as subconsciously interesting as The Books’ first two albums, especially The Lemon of Pink. This comes close, and I think that I haven’t gotten there because it’s so unmelodious. The lead singer’s icy voice hovers over choppy, lo-fi sampled electronica, but it also feels organic. Every time I listen to this album I understand one small part of it. It’s on my list because it took one listen to know that it would continue to come back until I understand.

18. LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem
James Murphy is an abnormal, well-dressed genius at making singles. Probably it’s safe to say that this is the least cohesive album on my list, and also to say that it has the largest concentration of unbelievably good singles. Having missed the Losing My Edge single, the bonus disc with this album was my introduction, along with Beat Connection, to a song which, despite all odds, is soooo good. Even the actual album has such instantly likeable and enduring songs as “On Repeat,” Tribulations,” “Too Much Love,” Daft Punk is Playing at My House,” etc. If it weren’t for the two or three missteps, this would be a fair bit higher.

17. Iron and Wine - Woman King EP
It was a hard decision whether or not to include EPs in this list of albums, but it was inconceivable to leave this off of any year-end list. I was vaguely interested in Iron and Wine before hearing this, thinking that Our Endless Numbered Days was a bit too homogenous. But I think I listened to “Jezebel” about 60 times this year (if my Itunes playcount hadn’t been lost when I got a new computer in May, I could tell you). This album bared the teeth that Sam Beam’s previous efforts didn’t, and when they came out I really started listening. Nobody sounds anything like this guy. The collaboration with Calexico is also excellent and worth checking out.

16. The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema
I was really excited for this album to come out after Carl Newman’s solo effort as “A.C. Newman” and realizing his trenchant gift for pulling perfect pop songs out of the sky. I loved Mass Romantic, New Pornographers earlier album, and this one I liked better. The support of Neko Case’s airy-while-earthy voice and the other members from various bands have always garnered labels like “super group” for the New Pornographers; in that sense they risk sounding contrived. This is not the case. There’s a darker edge to this album, something slightly less cheeky, but in the end Carl Newman and co. simply write impeccable, tight, compulsively singable songs. That it doesn’t sound like the Gin Blossoms is the magic trick.

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2005 Albums (21-25)

2005-12-11T22:53:00.000-05:00

I’m not sure whether to call this “The Best 25 Albums of 2005”, or “My Favorite Albums of 2005”, or just “Top 25 Albums of 2005.” Really, it’s just a list of the albums that I found the time to get into this year, since there were too many good ones to listen to. Music is exploding along with the rest of the internet, and it’s impossible to keep up. So these albums were the ones that were too good to stop listening to, or were too highly recommended to avoid, or hit me in the right mood at the right time, and I so I went back to them repeatedly.

There are other albums that I’ve heard once or twice which I know I would love and potentially rank higher on this list, but it wouldn’t be fair to put them on. So this is a list of albums that I’ve found the time to obsess over, dance to, talk about, sing along with, and incorporate into my life.

They will be posted in installments of five, simultaneously with two friends Austin and Nick, one each day this week.

25. Vitalic - OK Cowboy
The first time I heard this album I had just woken up from a nap, a state in which I feel more able to inhabit a song’s space. The first track is a careful, impeccable balance of rhythm and melody, organic and electronic, consistency and off-kilter rhythm. It stops and starts, speeds up and slows down. The album proceeds to maintain this all-overness along with a sense of cohesiveness. It’s punctuated with exemplary, tight singles, such as “My friend Dario,” yet landscape around those tracks doesn’t ever feel cavernous or Eno-ambient--just consistently interesting.

24. Danger Doom - The Mouse and the Mask
My friend Nick listened to this album for a few days before I picked it up myself, and there was a noticeable increase in his level of happiness. Building with snippets of 70s-sounding melodies, quick, smiley beats, and characters from Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, the whole thing sets out to blend cartoons, hip-hop, tongue-in-cheekness, and a dose of childhood nostalgia. The collaboration of Danger Mouse and MF Doom is a marriage of the technicolor happy with imaginative silliness--and it works marvelously. Plus, you get to hear Aqua Teen Hunger Force characters rapping.

23. The Boy Least Likely To - The Best Party Ever
I usually don’t have that much patience for the unapologetic cuteness of some indie rock outfits, and The Boy Least Likely To is exactly that--the album starts with the tinkering high notes of a xylophone, and the then a twee banjo comes in and leads the song to the end. But it’s one of my favorite songs of the year, bar-none. The lyric goes “Just be gentle with me, and I’ll be gentle with you,” a plea of self-deprecation whose bravery really stands in relief to a lot of ironic standoffishness that one normally finds in songs these days. The album’s cuteness is balanced by a lot of vulnerability and honesty, and for that reason it’s meant a lot to me. And the songwriting is masterful.

22. Franz Ferdinand - You Could Have Had It So Much Better...With Franz Ferdinand
Speaking of ironic standoffishness. That’s basically what this album is. And it’s so awesome. “Do You Want To,” once you get past the first tinny refrain, opens into the sexiest combination of drums, bass, and guitar that you could ever hope to listen to. Though I really like the tries at more heartfelt moments--”Fade Together”--those times feel like posturing, too . I really, really like two thirds of this album, and I liked it all immediately. Even if the scope seems at times limited, who said rock stars need to be good people?

21. Fiery Furnaces - EP
Maybe this isn’t a real album (it’s a collection of b-sides and re-recorded tracks and things, I think), but anyway, it’s ridiculously good. This was my first introduction to the Furnaces (I managed to miss Blueberry Boat, but I’ve since gone back and scraped my jaw off of the floor), and it took some time to digest. My friend Nick hates them because they’re deliberately difficult, and he’s right, but he’s also wrong. They’re a frenetic, confusing, cacaphonic band, but that’s what makes them so refreshing, since underneath all of it there’s a complete pop genius. Their work doesn’t offer up its secrets easily. They make demands. And the fact that they can do that to me without the benefit of an album’s cohesive setting makes it that much better.

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Ten Songs

2005-12-06T00:52:00.000-05:00

Austin started a fantastic trend of writing a list and description of the ten songs that got one into music, followedby Nick and Ty. The idea is talking about the songs that got you started into loving music.

We've all taken different approaches to it. In making this list, I have realized that what I first loved about music was the chance it provided to live somebody else's life and to have my own emotions make sense in somebody else's terms. I found the joy of recognition. When I hear these songs I remember lots of firsts, lots of times when I felt something completely new. These ten songs are the songs which, though not necessarily the best, are the ones that meant the most to me at the time. They didn't all lead to other music genres; I didn't really love them for their musical qualities necessarily. I loved them insanely and obsesively because of how they made me feel.

10) Michael Jackson - Dangerous

For what must have been my tenth birthday, a friend of mine gave me Michael Jackson’s Dangerous because his cousin had told him to. It was the first CD that I owned. The title track, Dangerous, was the first song I had heard with the word “damn” in it, as in “Take Away My Money / Throw Away My Time / You Can Call Me Honey / But You're No Damn Good For Me!” At first I listened to the song from “Free Willy” constantly, and I reveled in the scene at the beginning of “Black and White” where the kid is playing music and his dad is pounding on the wall to tell him to turn it off, but this song just opened up new worlds to me. I didn’t understand why she was so dangerous, but jeez did I believe it. And I kept coming back for more.

9) Bush - Little Things

Bush’s Sixteen Stone meant a lot to me, this song the most. It painted this bleak picture of a relationship in which they were poor and hungry and crude and hated each other, and the whole thing seemed so vivid. It was way over my head but I felt the emotion of it. I was attracted to this glimpse of highly sexualized anger and violence, and I couldn’t place it, but I couldn’t stop listening to it. Machinehead was a great song, and Comedown was heartfelt, and Glycerine was airy and emotional. But Little Things was just really pissed off and scared, and these were emotions I wasn't used to hearing or feeling.

8) Goldfinger - Here in Your Bedroom

Goldfinger wasn’t a band that I listened to much, and this song I had just recorded off of the radio. But there was this girl named Celia that I had watched for so long at youth group, and she had started to really show interest and she led me on and then dumped me. Everything was going grand until this winter retreat when she completely blew me off and I was left in the snow of Wisconsin with cheeky youth pastors as comfort. Every time we would meet for the large-group coed gatherings, my heart would beat faster and I would wait for her and her two friends to show up. I volunteered for the comedy skit just so I could get up on stage and hope that she might be impressed.

I came home defeated, and then heard this song. It only took the one line: “You have changed ‘cos I still feel the same.” And I really did feel the same, but she had moved on. This was somehow the most cathartic line, and cathartic song, of my entire pre-highschool life. Every time I listened to it, I fantasized myself singing at youth group in a band, and each time that line would approach, I would stop moving and stare at her while I delivered it. And she would feel ashamed. And then she would love me back.

7) Nirvana - Smells like Teen Spirit

Smells Like Teen Spirit was the song that we would beg the DJ at school dances to play all night, and the teachers would try to stop him. Invariably, the song would start playing and we would begin to “mosh” like mad, and it would stop. But once I remember that the DJ played it the whole way through, and we made a tight circle and pushed each other around for the entire five minutes and three seconds. I lost a shoe and we knocked over a light stand, and the teachers turned on the overhead lights in the gym and the DJ was yelled at, but we had our mosh pit, and it was beautiful.

This song was so explosive and incredible, we all wanted to live inside of it. It was the most collectively exciting song of that entire era. I remember searching the paragraph of lyrics on the liner notes, which has bits and pieces of lines from this song, trying to figure out what it all meant. Meanwhile the picture of Cobain flicking off the camera watched me from the other page. After I bought this album, my father convinced me that it was evil and he burned it on a piece of tin foil on the porch while I watched.

6) Tripping Daisy - I Got a Girl

I heard this song on a Q101 cagematch, which was a thing they did every night, pitting two songs against each other and you could vote. This song reigned for a long time, and I used to tune in every time until I figured out you could record off of the radio. The portrait he painted of this girl was so exciting and sexy and weird: "I got a girl who wears cool shoes" (this part I could relate to) "I got a girl who wears them in the nude." (This part I could pretend to).

5) Smashing Pumpkins - 1979

I am placing this well away from number one so as not to incur the wrath of Nick, but also because it meant more to me later than it did then. It's clearly the best song out of all of these, and Austin is right, it should play everywhere in the world on every set of speakers for all of time. Seriously.

The first Smashing Pumpkins song that I loved was Bullet With Butterfly Wings, because the angst was irresistable and the battle was epic. Billy Corgan knew that Jesus was his only son, but he was pissed about it instead of being happy. And the finale of the song is Corgan yelling that he still believes he cannot be saved.

4) Oasis - Don't Look Back in Anger

Wonderwall is the obvious choice, and man did I love that song, but I liked the one that came after it on the album better. This song was the essence of my continual fascination with seeing relationships as past things. I was all about the nostalgia of telling a girl it was over, and feeling sad about it but remaining strong. I had this mental image of a girl sauntering by in slow motion, an image which was updated as time when on with the various objects of my crush-affection. I would shrug at her, turn to my good friend and smile wistfully, and she would be unable to look back in anger because of my mood. Then I would stop and watch her walk away, and feel sad myself. I have no idea if that has anything to do with what this song is actually about, but that’s how it was for me. But it's the epitome of how I saw my relationships to girls then: from a distance, past-looking, laced with sadness.

3) Offspring - Self Esteem

I heard this song in the back of my best friend’s car the morning after 9 of us stayed up all night in an Embassy Suites for a hotel birthday party. On the floor below us was a group of girls who were having a sleep-over, too, and we spent the night playing elevator tag, stealing do-not-disturb signs from doors, and creating rubber band balls to drop 8 stories in the open courtyard which filled the interior of the hotel. In the morning we had breakfast, and I sat next to the cute girl, feeling elated, who was wearing a fitted baseball cap backwards. She poured my orange juice. On the way home, I was falling asleep as his father drove us home at 9 in the morning, and the song came on the radio. We rolled down the windows and yelled about girls and dessert and self-esteem. That night was also the first time I saw the playboy channel. The next morning, I walked to the music shop and bought my first album.

2) Green Day - Longview

I bought this album, my second real album, after hearing Basket Case. I loved every single song on the album and every instance of youthful disenchantment. On a car trip to Colorado the same year, my mom took the liner notes out of the sleeve and started reading the lyrics. “I declare I don’t care no more” is the first line, and my stomach dropped as I watched her glance through the black and white photographs of Billy Joe and Tre Cool blowing cigarette smoke into each other’s faces, images that I had studied with a mixture of attraction and hesitation, and dreamed of living in.

I loved Longview the most because I could yell “fucking” at the start of three out of four choruses (inside of my head, of course). I wanted to care as little about morals and personal hygiene as Billy Joe did, to be unaffected, to have masturbated enough to have actually gotten bored of it.

Serendipitously, Billy Joe had a strikingly similar name to the singer of River of Dreams, a song which was a centerpiece of my parents musical bequeathing to me. So I threw that crap out immediately.

1) Weezer - Only In Dreams

Perhaps a controversial first pick, but I'm quite confident of it. Weezer’s “Blue Album” was my favorite album in Jr. High. My best friend and I had crushes on two girls who were also best friends, Tori and Kristen, respectively. We spent a great deal of our time singing Rivers Cuomo’s songs and making up our own lyrics to suit our own forlorn, unrequited love situations.

Only in Dreams, however, was my favorite song on the album. It’s epic--just under 8 minutes long--and it starts with simply a bass, to which is added a symbol, to which is added a strumming guitar, to which is added an electric lead guitar, to which is added vocals. It builds to a climax slowly, and then they take apart each element of the song, one at a time, until only the bass is left again with a lingering, exploring lead electric guitar. Then then the symbols get gradually faster, and the snare returns, and guitars get epic again, and the song opens up the sky. It existed between reality and dreams for me. I imagined myself slowly leaving the ground. “You say, 'It's a good thing / That you float in the air (in the air) / That way there's no way / I will crush your pretty / Toenails into a thousand pieces.' “ This song was the essence of my dream girl, the one who I would come to answer all questions and lead me to salvation in the world of dreams. "She's in the air (in the air) / in between molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide." I would put my discman on “repeat 1” and fall asleep to this song. Every night for a two and a half years.

"But when we wake / it's all been erased. And so it seems / Only in Dreams."

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music

Wikipedia

2005-12-04T12:21:00.000-05:00

Maybe Wikipedia isn't the god we all should worship, after all. This guy certainly thinks so, and man is he pissed. Watch out, because "It could be your story", too. Beware of "toxic sentences" and "poison pen intellects." Because in the end, Wikipedia is really just a fluffy feather pillow full of gossip.

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technology

Jean Baudrillard, Lit Crit, Metanarratives

2005-12-04T11:52:00.000-05:00

“The illusion of desire has been lost in the ambient pornography, and contemporary art has lost the desire for illusion...After the orgies and the liberation of all desires, we have moved into the transsexual, the transparency of sex, with signs and images erasing all its secrets and ambiguities.”

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard is best known for his theory of the “simulacram”, which is based in the idea that contemporary society has its roots in images and illusions which give the appearance of freedom, but which are actually a deceitful web of bondage. Bondage like slavery, not bondage like sex. But I'm getting there.

One common example to demonstrate his idea is the United States dollar bill: when dollar bills were first printed, each was meant to represent a piece of of silver or gold in the U.S. treasury’s vaults. As time went on, however, dollar bills came to be an end in themselves. Dollar bills have value since we believe that they have value; they are, in effect, a simulacrum of their original existence. So, Baudrillard theorizes, is the rest of contemporary society. We have learned to see the world in packaged, “hyperreal” images. The media has become more convincing than reality; in turn those media images are how we view the world.

In his usual impenetrable, aphoristic manner, Baudrillard recently answered a few questions in a Times interview based on his reaction to the riots in Paris. He evades most of the questions and pronounces that all our values simulated, from the War in Iraq to the riots in Paris, from the choice of buying one car or another to whether there any more real intellectuals.

JB: When Jacques Chirac says, "No!" to Bush about the Iraq war, it's a delusion. It's to insist on the French as an exception, but there is no French exception.

NYT: Hardly. France chose not to send soldiers to Iraq, which has real meaning for countless individual soldiers, for their families and for the state.

JB: Ah, yes. We are "against" the war because it is not our war. But in Algeria, it was the same. America didn't send soldiers when we fought the Algerian war. France and America are on the same side. There is only one side.

NYT: Isn't that kind of simplistic reasoning why people get so tired of French intellectuals?

There are no more French intellectuals. What you call French intellectuals have been destroyed by the media. They talk on television, they talk to the press and they are no longer talking among themselves.

Baudrillard is championing Deconstruction, the theory that what we call the “real world” is really an oppressive social construct based on illusions which we have mutually agreed to stitch together and call reality. It is similar to Marxism in that society is an oppressive structure which traps us, which pressures us to think a certain way (or agree on the simulated reality), but it is not limited to economic systems (or leftist politics); it is post-Marxism, “cultural Marxism.” Deconstructionists, if they are hardcore enough, must deconstruct leftist politics and claim to be apolitical. They must also, in the end, deconstruct deconstructionism, as Baudrillard does faithfully at the end of the interview:

NYT: Some here feel that the study of the humanities at our universities has been damaged by the incursion of deconstruction and other French theories.
JB: That was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.

Nobody needs French theory, so this whole conversation is supposed to eat itself like a snake swallowing its tail. Maybe it does. But Baudrillard also made it into the New Yorker the same week, and he had some things to say in a recent public reading, covered by a “Talk of the Town.” which I found much more interesting.

He covers two things: sex and art. Both, he says, have lost their importance because they, too, have joined with reality in becoming, simply, an image. Sex has lost its ambiguities because it has become overwhelmed with pornography (images of sex), and contemporary art has moved away from the traditional idea of art as “form.” What that means is that art as a “painting”, or art as a “sculpture” is not longer viable. Until the 20th century, these were ways that we accepted art to be made. A painting was a canvas with paint, a sculpture was some kind of three-dimensional object.

The modernists examined this idea by creating works which explored the inherent qualities of the form. Modernist paintings, for example, sought to be flat (since a canvas is flat), meaning the canvas ought not to be a “window” into another world with three dimensions, like in a painting of a landscape, for example; it ought to instead exemplify the flatness of the canvas. So Jackson Pollock made impenetrable canvases that forced you to see a surface.

But back to sex. The implication is that pornography (in the largest definition, including, probably, sexualized advertising and such) has overwhelmed our conception of sex. “In the United States...sex is everywhere except in sexuality,” another French lit critic, Roland Barthes, writes.

That’s a really compelling idea, since if there is any possibility of escape from the simulacrum of a simulated reality, it is sex with another person (or, though it isn’t as racy, a transcendant experience with a piece of art). It's too visceral to be denied its intense reality. But Baudrillard believes that both of these things have been overrun by simulated images just like the rest of reality--he paints a pretty bleak picture. Since contemporary art is concerned with aesthetics but not form, it is no longer differentiated from the rest of the simulation, which is only aesthetic. Separating the two is the point.

“As art becomes aesthetics it joins with reality, with the banality of reality...it’s a total confusion between art and reality.” The separation of art’s aesthetics from its forms is a great idea--form is what used to save art from being a negative simulation, but that is no longer the case. We no longer believe in the ontological separation of art from reality: it is not something on a higher plane which hands us our morals and spirituality.

Iris Murdoch, the British novelist, critic, professor of philosophy at Oxford, and die-hard Platonist, writes this of art: “Art today is in a turmoil partly because we are all unprecedentedly self-conscious about the images and symbols which make our lives supportable. We know too much psychology. Technological changes which used to be slow and invisible are now fast and perceptible. Religion is not what it was.” Murdoch spent a significant part of her career as an essayist searching for a way to create a defensible moral philosophy out of art: her essays had titles like “The Novelist as Metaphysician” and “Salvation by Words.”

I agree with her on both counts, that Art today is in turmoil, and also that trying to find a defensible moral philosophy in it is a worthwhile quest. How does one extract morality from art? If it has become too self-conscious and collapsed into reality, to where do we otherwise look? Religion certainly is not what it was--postmodernism has not been kind to traditional religion. But the thicket that is literary theory is somehow an attractive replacement: even as postmodernism is highly suspicious of what it calls “metanarratives,” it becomes one--it is as all-encompassing and satisfying as a religious beginning-to-end-of-time way of seeing the world. It is a window by which to explain and examine everything.

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criticaltheory

A Few Links

2005-12-01T22:50:00.000-05:00

The Poetry Archive is an organization in the UK that has commissioned the recording of many contemporary poets reading their own poetry, and you can listen to many, many samples. Also collected are some historic readings which they have gathered in one place. Poems comes alive in the poet’s mouth. As the website tour notes--and it is a great place to begin exploring--”the pleasures and meanings of poetry depend as much on sound-sense as they do on page-sense.” If a poem is inaccessible via the written page, perhaps it is because the first poets--Homer, for example--depended on oral storytelling for the poem’s power.

Today’s Papers has become my favorite morning reading. A Slate Magazine writer--who presumably wakes up at 4 in the morning--gathers the lead stories of major newspapers and uses their similarities and differences to put together an intelligent, and usually witty, column. It’s a great way not only to get a sense of what’s happening in the world, but to see a larger picture which you can’t get by looking in just one place.

Literally, A Weblog is a blog which keeps track of misuses of the word "literally." Now I’m all nervous. In the same way that I’ve been unable to use the word “ironic” correctly after reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I imagine Dave Eggers shaking his head.

Adjusting

2005-12-01T14:15:00.000-05:00

While I am adjusting to my new life as a scantily-paid editorial assistant, I will have less time for blogging. That will change when I’m in a routine again, but for now I am transitioning; I find it difficult to do much writing until things are settled. Also, since I am no longer a temp, I don't feel justified spending half my day wading around on the Internet. So getting the posts up will be more difficult.

In the meantime, the job is great--I was amazed to arrive and find my own office with a window. I am paid to read books that teach English and proofread to make sure that the copyeditor’s changes were implemented. There are a lot of young people in the office and there are free provided snacks in the kitchen. Every morning there is a New York Times on the table in the eating nook. The walls are painted pastel green and blue (though they are currently remodeling, so that may change), they have pretty good art prints on the wall (a lot of Paul Klee), and I get a free book to pick out for Christmas--anything that anyone has ever published, even a first edition. They pay the first $100. I’ve decided on Larousse Gastronomique, which is just under 1400 pages—I’m taking advantage!

Spent the thanksgiving holiday in Dayton, OH with a couple of foodie aunts running the show. Highlight: a butternut squash with cream dish which, being orange-ish, was a suitable aesthetic replacement for the usual sticky sweet-potato-and-too-much-sugar casserole, and far tastier. Nice to see extended family, though my grandmother is in a rough spot health-wise, so I drove their car home to Wisconsin while they took an airplane. Actually, it was nice to drive through green space middle America, even if it was all interstate. The rest stops and fast food along the drive up I-65, which I completed probably twenty times during college, was comforting and familiar. Considering the fact that I went to Toronto to travel with my dad to Ohio, this was a five-state and two-country Thanksgiving. Phew.

I'm quite happy to be no longer working in Midtown--no overwhelmingly tall buildings and a general increase of laid-backness. And, most importantly, the lunch options are vastly improved and often cheaper. Case in point, Nick and I just met for lunch at La Taza de Oro and ate a huge bowl of Spanish beef soup for $3. I'm full. On the way up in the elevator, three people were complaining about spending enough money on nieces and nephews.
"There is no way I am spending $25 dollars each. I mean, if you had one nephew, maybe."
"I just want this holiday to be over."
"Yeah, I can't wait until January 1st."
"It makes me want to slit my throat."
Pause. So I piped in. "Don't you think that's a little drastic? You know, maybe you should cut your arm a little first, just to see how it feels." Chuckle, chuckle.
Serious expression. "Nope. I'm going right for the jugular."

Maybe because it's now December? Personally, I'm totally excited for the snow and the lights.

Thanksgiving; America

2005-11-24T10:19:00.000-05:00

Well, I have something ready to recite when it's my turn around the table--got a job offer this week. Magically, I am going to be gainfully, editorially employed helping to publish English academic titles--I can hardly believe it. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.

Here is a mash-up of Allen Ginsberg's poem "America" with a couple of songs by M83 and Broadcast. You have to click through a few pages to download it. Courtesy of this free audio editing program, and an audio glitch in my computer that gave me the idea. All works copyright of their owners. (If any license holders wish this file to removed, please contact me.)

The Times has released the 100 Notable Books of the Year.

And, here is my beautiful girlfriend on the left, winning first round of the Christ Church Regatta 2005, rowing for Magdalen College.

Tempus edax rerum

2005-11-21T08:27:00.000-05:00

I love the way my brother's mind works. These kinds of non sequiturs just fall out of him. He's ten.

Anyway...

2005-11-19T21:12:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the somewhat haranguing previous entry. Here is a terrifically funny piece to re-improve your mood. I was laughing out loud in the office, which results in confused stares then awkward summarizing and multi-directional, too-loud explanations (so everyone around me can hear). But I couldn't help it.

And here are some pictures from today from Central Park. I went to catch the last of the fall leaves, a la the final scene of Angels in America, which you should drop everything today to rent and watch. Seriously.

I'm not really that sorry.

Kansas Rewrites Science

2005-11-19T14:54:00.000-05:00

It seems that the Kansas Board of Education has decided to rewrite the definition of science in service of the opportunity to teach Intelligent Design. The brazen disregard of longstanding tradition is truly frightening, and betrays the very idea of conservatism. One unfavorable definition of conservatism dictates that conservatives are reactionary, are afraid of progress, are suspicious of the future. They want to remain in the past, to hold true to tradition. But what more verifiable tradition do we have than science? Priorities have gotten so out of balance that they are willing to rewrite some traditions (science) to uphold others (religion or religious explanations of the world). This is not conservatism, not really.

One could also call conservatism (more favorably) an allegiance to facts. William F. Buckley, the famous conservative who founded National Review, calls conservatism “the acknowledgment of realities.” One could stretch that to include the aim of science, to rely on verifiable ideas and a suspicion of too much ideology. In an excellent New Yorker article about Peter Viereck and the origins of modern conservatism (which, back then, was something that I could relate to), Buckley was asked about today’s Bush conservatives and conservatism’s current course. “I’m not happy about it. It’s probably true that in [support for the war in Iraq] you have a rediscovery of idealism. It’s not, in my judgment, conservatism. Because conservatism is, to a considerable extent, the acknowledgment of realities. And this is surreal.”

The war in Iraq and the ideal of spreading democracy is separate from the skewed moral mission of Republicans on social issues, but the strangely unbalanced emphasis on certain aspects of traditional values along with a disregard for others is shared by both. In the New Yorker article, Viereck speaks about why he reacted so strongly against Mcarthyism and the resulting conservatism: “What causes the greatest crimes in history? The greatest bloodshed? The most murders? I would say two things: sincere love and a sincere devotion to liberty.” Viereck was referring to the utopian aims of communism, that if one focuses too strongly on an abstract idea, one will end up sacrificing others: this is a good rough outline of fundamentalism. It is faith carried too far, when its worst qualities are emphasized. It is the infusion of religion and politics, which is central to the situation in Kansas.

As the NYTimes article mentions, the conservative movement is the one trying to redefine something longstanding, when that’s what, usually, the left has tried to do. The roles have been strangely reversed.

This is interesting:

When pressed for a definition of what they do, many scientists eventually fall back on the notion of falsifiability propounded by the philosopher Karl Popper. A scientific statement, he said, is one that can be proved wrong, like "the sun always rises in the east" or "light in a vacuum travels 186,000 miles a second." By Popper's rules, a law of science can never be proved; it can only be used to make a prediction that can be tested, with the possibility of being proved wrong.

Intelligent Design can never be proved wrong, even as it claims to prove Evolution wrong (or at least inadequate). It points to a vacuum in our understanding and fills it with something that does the aim of Science no good. It’s actually a kind of laziness.

Having grown up in an Evangelical household, I have been involved with this issue for a long time, and read a few books which promoted Intelligent Design when I was young, including Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box. I even wrote a research paper in 8th grade on why Evolution was inadequate. But when I look back, the whole thing rings false: I wasn’t concerned with science when I was reading the books or writing the paper--I wasn’t looking at Darwin’s writings or current scientific defenses, except as they were mentioned and quickly refuted in the anti-evolution books. What I was really writing about was religion, in a roundabout way, and the answer to the questions of origin were already in mind. Ideology remained deeper and more important than curiosity and, eventually, facts. I wasn't a scientist, but I felt comfortable making sweeping and obviously controversial scientific claims. (From an Amazon review for the book: "What I like so very much about this book is that very complicated ideas are simplified to my level. So, if you're not a scientist, don't worry...I can still quote his nine year old material to refute what evolutionists say. --Sean Horton, "the bibliophile").

The philosopher Jean Mercier writes that “Fundamentalists read their own books and none other; they consider knowledge from other sources useless and dangerous since it creates only doubt and confusion. It is enough to surrender unconditionally to the letter of ‘The word of God’” But the Bible and other religious texts are slippery things, easily appropriated and interpreted to satisfy the reader--whether it is to reinforce one’s own beliefs, or to condemn others'. “Bible readers...search the Bible for themselves,” Harold Bloom writes. One can find the evidence for any system of belief or doubt in too many places to count.

“I can think of nothing more gallant, even though again and again we fail, than attempting to get at the facts; attempting to tell things as they really are. For at least reality, though never fully attained, can be defined. Reality is that which, when you don’t believe in it, doesn’t go away.” Viereck’s resolve is inspiring and infectious; he is speaking, I think, about a kind of marriage of idealism and science. A relationship in which the former is tempered by the latter, yet the idealism continues to inspire the quest. There is a push and pull, a carefully orchestrated and sacred balance, a restraint and a desire to leap. Progress happens when both are kept in check.

On Birthdays

2005-11-19T12:03:00.000-05:00

I had a really fantastic birthday in which I felt loved and important: to all who sent an email, called, or posted to my Facebook wall--thanks. It's a wonderful thing when all these people come out of the woodwork and drop a line, tell you what you mean to them, and you realize that you're more loved than you thought. If that's all we did on birthdays, they would be worth celebrating. Three days later and I'm still glowing a little.

Adam Gopnik on Narnia

2005-11-16T11:08:00.000-05:00

This is a remarkable assesment of C.S. Lewis's balance of aesthetic and theological concerns, which divide his writings into two camps. The dialogue between aesthetics and morals has always interested me, since in many ways they lay claim to the same thing: the nature of spiritual reality. For this reason, they may be mutually exclusive. Just as religious art is often bad, artists are rarely religious; there has always been an antagonism between them. Gopnik, with his usual critical force and gentle wonder, suggests that Lewis's images are his lasting contribution.

For, throughout his own imaginative writing, Lewis is always trying to stuff the marvellous back into the allegorical—his conscience as a writer lets him see that the marvellous should be there for its own marvellous sake, just as imaginative myth, but his Christian duty insists that the marvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with belief. He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or, at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just what it’s supposed to say. [...]
“Everything began with images,” Lewis wrote, admitting that he saw his faun before he got his message. He came to Bethlehem by way of Narnia, not the other way around. Whatever we think of the allegories it contains, the imaginary world that Lewis created is what matters. We go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward. [...]
For poetry and fantasy aren’t stimulants to a deeper spiritual appetite; they are what we have to fill the appetite. The experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual, is . . . an experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual. To hope that the conveyance will turn out to bring another message, beyond itself, is the futile hope of the mystic. Fairy stories are not rich because they are true, and they lose none of their light because someone lit the candle. It is here that the atheist and the believer meet, exactly in the realm of made-up magic. Atheists need ghosts and kings and magical uncles and strange coincidences, living fairies and thriving Lilliputians, just as much as the believers do, to register their understanding that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience, much less to our hopes.
The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images—the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse—are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew.

Daily Dose of Imagery

2005-11-11T10:49:00.000-05:00

This Toronto-based photography runs a daily photoblog, and the photos are consistently interesting and strikingly beautiful. This one is not indicative of his usual style, which is often an interest in architecture: it's potential to be reappropriated, its relationship to nature. But they all have a great sense of unsentimental, non-clichéd whimsy, which is a rare thing. This was too funny to pass up. Read carefully. (click to enlarge)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

2005-11-08T10:13:00.000-05:00

There was a great exhibition on at the Modern Art Oxford museum, a woman named Angela Bulloch who works with sculpture that incorporates light, avant-garde music, and a rigorous conceptual element. The major installation involved about 30 of her “pixel boxes,” which are industrially constructed cubes with opaque sides and a translucent front, and a soundtrack of unstructured music infused with syncopated voice clips, reminiscent of The Books, an avant-garde group who make music which is pre-consciously accesible despite the lack of reference points. Inside the pixel boxes are three fluorescent tubes of the primary light colors, Red, Green and Blue, allowing the translucent face of the cube to glow whichever color is formed by the combinations. Stacking the cubes into a grid, she has them glow in groups of tones, working as a whole, illuminating the idea of calling them “pixel boxes”: they are the physical representation of the digital pixel, the building block of the digital image. Using obscure films as a source, she abstracts the material into a simplified form on the pixilated wall.

Strangely, one enters a space which is normally abstract, computerized, unhuman, digital--if you let yourself become absorbed and entranced by the play of color, you feel as if you are in some theoretical, pixelated world; there is a loss of the sense of the body. It’s a sort of virtual-reality space, but, importantly, it’s a low-tech one: the pixels are couple feet square, improbably large, as if the image is of bad resolution, antiquated.

I immediately associated this low-fi experience with grainy, blown-up photography, which has a negative connotation, one of dimly-lit, forbidden revelations: the photographs of prisoner tortures at Abu Ghraib, of underground porn, old mug shots, celebrities topless on a beach caught by the paparazzi. Strangely, I associated immorality with poor quality images; on the converse, then, fidelity is morality.

Bullock plays with this idea in another work, my favorite in the show, in which she projects a grainy, black and white off-putting photograph of a crowd of people who are either singing or screaming--both seem plausible--onto the gallery wall. It is clearly an old image, and it feels like something out of Schindler’s List. In a deft move, she places the projector around waist-level, so that one sees the grainy photograph and moves closer, but can’t help eclipsing the image’s projection, casting a shadow of ones body over the contorted faces. Importantly, ones images is sharp and defined, while at this close distance, the photograph is so pixelated as to border on abstraction. On a nearby wall is a printed version of the same photograph with someone’s shadow over it in the same way. That person is clearly a conductor with passionate, outraised hands--a classic image of a choir with the shadowed outline of a conductor in the foreground. I turned back to the projection, and hoped that the people in the grainy photograph were indeed singing. The way the viewer’s outline is so sharp and the photograph so grainy that the moral and immoral associations of each are compelling: as conductor, am I to feel pathos, fear, joy? Am I the cause of what seem like such abnormally emotional faces? Am I a dictator, or an inspiration? Are those blurred images, which have been abstracted and lack clean lines, still representations of humanity?

On a simpler and less interpretive scale, the art Bulloch makes is highly successful in altering and disrupting the viewer’s perception, with a focus on emphasizing or dissolving the body. She seems to confront the membrane which separates actual physical space and conceptual or digital reality, making the viewer aware of how each carries its set of principles, and the interactions between those worlds is inevitably moral. She says in the catalog interview that the work depends on the viewer, not to explicitly interact, but to be “inter-passive” (versus inter-active). There are no buttons to push or levers to pull, but the viewer’s engagement with the work “is discovered the moment the work is completed by the presence of the viewer.” What I like about this distinction is the way it gives high regard to this inhuman, otherworldly space: the way we often interact with the digital realm is to push buttons and pull levers; in her art, we need only confront it morally. Is it something that we created, but now exists on its own terms?

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The Answer is Blowing in the Wind

2005-11-07T09:59:00.000-05:00

I’m on the plane from London to New York, a friendly flight attendant made an espresso for me fresh, and I’ve decided to try to write something down.

It’s been a whirlwind trip, a weekend in Oxford, one in which the shock of jet lag (not to speak of adjusting) kept me confused about my thoughts and identity on a pretty consistent basis. Along with the fact that this confusion and missing identity was already the case all of last week (I'll say that without expanding), as time winds down on this Sunday evening/morning things are slowly coming into focus. Creamy espresso helps. So does The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

It was a brilliant blue sky on Friday there, which was surprising both because one expects clouds in England, and because every other time I’ve been to a famous university, it’s been gray. Saturday the clouds showed up for the afternoon, and today it rained.

I’m talking about the weather, which is boring. It was a needed weekend. I left New York and my own recently obsessive solipsism with it, and tagged along with E., getting a sense of her life there, her friends, and how much her life revolves around the newly-acquired sport of rowing. Met all the friends who are an extension of that sport, along with a few others. There’s a lively spirit there, not the reserved intellectualism that I somehow imagined. It felt enlivening to be back in Europe in the British Isles, back in Oxford after a short visit last time. There’s a smell to it, something, a cheekiness to conversation and lots of up-beat ways of saying words, placing the accent at the end. I find myself automatically adopting the way of speaking, which I noticed that I do even with foreign accents while I was traveling in Europe. We would be in Italy, and if I was trying to communicate with an Italian I would speak English with a sort of Italian accent, as if that would make it easier. I am trying to figure out if that approach is empathetic or imperialistic.

This new Virgin Atlantic plane feels really strange: all the lights are white halogen, quite cold, and the bathroom is spacious and lit with blue light. It feels like a nightclub.

This reads like an Onion article

2005-10-30T23:45:00.000-05:00

Good Smell Perplexes New Yorkers

Word of the Day

2005-10-28T11:56:00.000-04:00

meme n.
"A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another."

I came across this word and was thinking about its chance for a reemergence in our blog-growing world. The field of memetics studies cultural evolution as it relates to ideas, and they will eventually have a great deal to talk about once we get some distance from the present explosion of cultural exchange.

A 1976 book written by Richard Dawkins coined the word, though it appeared as “mneme” in a 1904 book by a German evolutionary biologist. Dawkins took the lead and married the word to the biological “gene,” as in a unit of many which constitutes a larger body—in genes, the biological code, in memes, the collected experience of culture.

In the mid 90s, right in the midst of our Internet explosion, two non-academics (a Microsoft executive and a mathematician/philosopher) started exploring the implications of the idea in light of our age of growing information. They arrived at an important question: is a meme a unit of information inside of a brain, or is it an external cultural artifact? Internal, or external?

Today, blogs allow an enlarged pipeline for cultural information to travel—the ability for word-of-mouth ideas to appear consistently enough to become cultural ideas. The evolution of a meme is like a biological gene: as it is passed from one place to another, ideas are included and left behind, and each transfer changes the spin, like a complex game of “telephone.”

Has the chance for any average citizen to host a blog increased the speed of our cultural evolution by increasing the speed of our cultural exchange? It used to be possible to argue that the Internet is full of institutionalized information, but now anybody can publish. And the cultural exchange, which used to be theorized because it was mostly unrecorded day-to-day exchanges, is happening now on the Internet, in a relatively concrete form.

In the blogosphere, a meme almost borders the line between being an internal unit in the brain, and an external cultural artifact. Richard Dawkins called them “units in the brain” because that’s where he hypothesized the evolution taking place: in a person’s mind, where it was then reintroduced into the cultural landscape. But with blogs, there is so little boundary between personal thinking and world-wide exposure via the internet that the internal is easily externalized. The distinction between these two ideas depended on the lengthy and difficult process of personal thinking making its way into the public, collective consciousness. In our day, this process is not so difficult at all, and the blog community has the potential to thrust personal ideas into external, culture-wide ideas. Into bonafide memes.

I'd like to thank Wikipedia for providing all information pertinent to this blog. It feels like everything is at one's fingertips.

Top 100 Novels

2005-10-25T13:16:00.000-04:00

Time magazine recently chose the top 100 novels written in English since 1923, the year the magazine started. There has been a fair bit of derision (and conspiracy theorizing) from bloggers about Time’s “authoritative” choices, which are of course quite subjective.

Richard Lacayo, one of the two critics who formed the list, noted that they had to disclude a few writers who they really liked, but who had written better short stories than novels (Flannery O’Connor, Donald Barthelme)—this sort of problem is addressed well in a Guardian article about stuffing literature into categories and then drawing up qualifications according to those categories, and why we shouldn’t do it.

This clever idea is the funniest way of responding that I’ve yet read. Who need professional critics? Go democratic opinion!

Tuesday, It's Raining

2005-10-25T12:01:00.000-04:00

I woke up this morning rather groggy, threw off the comforter to wake myself up, then promptly scrambled to re-cover myself as I remembered that our landlord has yet to turn on the heat. "It's okay," I thought to my half-awake self. "I'll scramble out of bed, grab my towel, and hop into the hot shower." So I ran into the bathroom, threw on the water, and shivered for awhile. I noticed that the bathroom window was open, so I kicked it closed. I felt the water. "Max, did you already take a shower?"
"Have a look at my face. Does it look like I've showered recently?"
"Why isn't the hot water working?"
"I don't know."
"I'll make coffee." I did, then I laid out my clothes, packed my lunch, did everything possible to expedite the post-shower routine. Ten minutes later, I dunked my head under the sink, shaved with cold water, and cursed the fact that our realty company is "devoted to providing low-cost housing to prevent homelessness." Oh, and it's raining, and I had to watch my bus pull away while I was trapped on the other side of the street with a no-walk signal.

The thing is, I'm actually in a good mood. We saw Wolf Parade last night, and somehow ended up in the second row. It was ecstatic and very affecting, and I found out they have two lead singers.

The weekend was fast, interesting: we saw Lou Reed play to a tiny crowd for the opening of Canal Park in Tribeca (thanks to a message from a visiting friend--that's happened more than once, when a friend who comes is the one that tells us about where we are supposed to be--see free Clap Your Hands Say Yeah show), I got a cheap, mod-looking haircut at a salon school, went to Brooklyn and bought a winter coat at Beacon's Closet, saw Godard's Band of Outsiders, which has the finest and cleverest ending that I've seen in a long time, went to an office party at a bar and had free drinking, where I met somebody who grew up three blocks away from my house.

I feel like we never had an autumn: where were the nice trees? It's gone from hot to cold, and humid all the way through: 94% humidity today, 53 degrees. And it never stops raining. I press on, use my free umbrella, and remind myself that it's really fantastic to be alive.

My 'Overheard in New York' contribution

2005-10-21T10:32:00.000-04:00

Overheard at: 57th and 6th, M31 Bus

Christian #1: "Did you hear about that new Hurricane? God's showing us something, I know it."
Christian #2: "And they're still gonna have Mardi Gras this year in New Orleans."
Christian #1: "Man! I should have known. Those sorts of things always go on, come Hell or high water."
Christian #2: "Yeah. I think it's gonna be both in this case."

The Shaman

2005-10-20T12:48:00.000-04:00

We got the second half of Scorsese's No Direction Home and watched it immediately. It was frustrating having a two day-gap between both halves (Netflix, while fantastic, does have the problem of turnaround between movies: even with the mail taking one day and Netflix sending something out immediately upon receipt of the movie, you're looking at getting something on the third day after you send the first one). I was left with Dylan's enigmatic persona hanging around in my mind in the interim, and while I thought the second part would allay my Dylan-infused psychological state, I was wrong. In fact, the gift Scorsese has given us is an honest, rare look at both the private and public personas of the singer, and how alike they were, and how infectious they are.

Dylan was always acting, and the footage of how he circumvents the asinine reporter's questions is priceless. When he's backstage with friends, though, you see that it's mostly the same; balancing the limelight with a private self, he was capable of existing in a highly public sphere while, somehow, remaining in complete, disarming control of his self. It's hard to describe, but the point is that he puts on this persona in which nobody can tell him how to act. It's all a sort of coy, shy act. He revels in ambiguity and contradicting himself, and nurtures awkward silences like he's tending to a garden. In it he is able to remain untouched by the stupidity of crowds who booed his electric music, by reporters who ask him how many other singers also "toil" in the musical vineyard of his art. "How many?" he asks. "Yes, how many would you say." "I'd say there are about 136." "136. Now, is that an estimate, or is that exact?" "Well. I think it's either 136, or 142." In his evasiveness he continually exposes those interviewers who don't know his music, and who aren't asking questions, but suggesting pre-conceived answers.

Just recently, a bunch of people got angry that Dylan chose to distribute Live at the Gaslight 1962 only at Starbucks, that corporate American giant who overruns poor coffee farmers around the world (and who really needs to quit overroasting its beans. My God, give us a medium-bodied coffee!) Speculation abounds, much of it that Dylan just wants to clash with peoples' viewpoints of him as a person. The man will do anything to avoid labels.

Allen Ginsberg had a great bit about describing Dylan's persona during that early 1960s time: he called him a Shaman, a man who had channeled his very breath as an output of his entire persona, his entire artistic goal, his whole consciousness--singular. And in the singular, if it is a whole personality, there is contradiction.

The Guardian has especially great articles about the show, as well as some republished stuff from 1966.

Pets We Have Known

2005-10-20T12:33:00.000-04:00

Sort of funny.

God gets a word in.

2005-10-19T14:48:00.000-04:00

Are they really this clever? No, but this is way too much fun.

On Joy

2005-10-15T15:45:00.000-04:00

I had a cliche moment today when I pulled up the curtains and was blinded by an open, smiling blue sky. Nevertheless, I am amazed at the power of weather to make one forget everything and remember that the world holds surprises. It has not stopped raining for 8 days, until this morning. I skipped down the stairs with bedhead and flip flops, into the French market to buy tomatoes. Families were smiling and yelling and buying pastries. There was a general poetic climax of happiness in the air. Not happiness, maybe. I think a better word is joy.

I’m interested in the difference between the two. On Thursday we saw Antony and the Johnsons at Carnegie Hall. His songs are not happy, they’re achingly sad and beautiful, emotional and honest. In between songs at the show he was delightful and forthcoming, telling jokes and inviting the audience to sing along to his cover of Shania Twain while he told of a vision in the clouds when he met her.

He mentioned more than once how the number of sad songs we could handle was slowly diminishing, so he’d better hurry it up so as not to indulge us too much. Clearly it’s the only kind of song he knows how to sing honestly. But then he said something interesting, that he does all he can to nurture a sense of joy. It was right before singing “For Today I am a Boy,” a song which expresses such a sense of impossible desire, of overcoming physical biology and time, that I feel like crying every time I hear it. Lots of people cry during his songs, but what I realized during the concert, which came alive through his personality, was that it’s not the sadness that makes one cry; amidst the melancholy and lost hopes there is a cultivated, gently nurtured sense of joy. In this nurturing is the artistic struggle, in this the songs are saved from self pity. Joy and happiness are not the same thing, and joy, perhaps, is best seen amidst sadness. Joy requires for its definition unsatisfied desire, which itself becomes a state which is desired more than any other satisfaction. It is a belief in Timbuktu, or Arcadia, or whatever one wants to name that place beyond us that would be a place of home and peace and understanding. One doesn’t even have to believe it actually exists, maybe, and joy is not the same thing as faith, but one must certainly hope for something. Antony’s album is called I am a Bird Now and he repeatedly sings about becoming a bird and taking flight; this is impossible and it’s why he can remain joyful. There is equal parts grief and hope, grief for the impossiblity of this place, but hope for it despite. The ways in which he incorporates this hope for impossibility into gender, how his voice and persona performs in an androgynous, otherworldly space, is enchanting.

For the encore Lou Reed came out and played the Velvet Underground song “Candy Says” while Antony sang. It was a treat and a perfect end.

Is Google the End of the Public Library?

2005-10-12T14:31:00.000-04:00

Somebody left an anonymous comment about the post regarding Google and copyright info, so I thought that I would respond. They brought up a few issues:

1) The end of the public library: since we can just “google it” to get any information we’d like, what’s the point?
2) Assuming the worst outcome for the first question, then there will be people who don’t have access to the Internet, and therefore cannot access important information.
3) How will we tell what is good information, and what is bad? Where is the quality control?
4) An artist might gain exposure from the wide audience that comes from the Internet, but what happens when that audience doesn’t want to pay for the art, making the assumption that it’s their “right” to access it?

So. I’d like to combine questions 1 and 2 into a single theme: with all this information, who says what’s good and bad? For example, I'm suspicious of self-publishing houses which allow anybody to publish and distribute a book (with very light editing help from the company), because there’s no quality control. On the one hand, it’s excellent for somebody to be able to ignore the "institution" of publishing which likely rejects a large number of talented writers because they aren’t commercially viable, or in alignment with what the publishing house believes, or whatever the case may be—in true utopian spirit, the idea bypasses bureaucracy (kind of) to allow free expression. But there’s a reason that I like a lot of the same books from certain publishing houses, or even certain editors: because they’re hand-picked. I know that if a book has gone so far as to be published, I can trust that it’s worth reading on some level. Editors provide an important service.

The public library comes out of this same quality control, since they simply stock the books that have already been approved for publishing. They also provide access to databases that are indexes of “approved” information, like encyclopedias, or an index of journal articles. And librarians curate their collections to make them as helpful as possible. In all these cases, the information has been hand-picked to some extent, or given a stamp of approval.

The same applies to sorting through the heaps of information in the Internet. I was talking about this with my father last week, and something he said was interesting and deceptively simple: while there is no longer a lack of access to information, there remains a premium on good thinking. To which I added, discernment. It may seem simple, but the ability to rapidly categorize information into helpful and unhelpful mental “piles” will be essential in a digital world of information. When something seems off about a website, one has to smell the rat and move on. There is a gray area that is emerging between institutionalized, “approved” content, and crap that anybody can make public: there is a lot to be had, understood, and gained from this gray area, and these qualities of good thinking and discernment have to be cultivated to make it useful: the ability to filter and predict and prioritize. All these things have always been qualities important to good research. And I do really believe that it’s useful, because there is a real possibility for free expression in this no-mans-land. Blogs, obviously, are a huge resource in this area as they begin to collect links and prioritize and make recommendations. The whole thing becomes a self-checking, better-by-democratic-opinion sort of web.

In response to the second question about people who can’t access the Internet, or can’t afford a computer: this is certainly valid. However, consider public libraries, which provide Internet access for free, and which I don’t think will ever be closed anyway: the important of print resources, beyond accessibility, is clear in the way that they provide checks and balances. One thing that’s scary about the Internet is the way that all information is abstract, can be untraceably altered, is not concrete and solid. Real books provide a check to that abstract information. With all information stored in one centralized place, as a professor of mine once noted when our university decided to destroy all Art Historical periodicals because they were available in an online database, one flirts with definitions of fascism. This is an extreme position, but it’s a point worth making. The opportunity for difference, I think, lies in the fact that all that centralized information is not controlled by one institution, but rather it is stored in widespread locations with lots of people checking and balancing. Consider Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia which anybody can edit: on the whole, it is full of true, useful, well organized information. It is democracy at its best. (It’s also very interesting to take a look at the deletion log, which tracks the rapid and innumerable ways in which the encyclopedia is being altered).

Finally, the original source for this debate, and the party who has valid reason to object to all of this: artists. Sure, it’s good for an artist to have exposure, but with free information, how are they to collect on the sort of information that is creative? How are we to distinguish the information which is merely factual from the information which is artistic, of a wholly different value? I’m using a loose definition of information, but in this arena, it works: if something can be digitized, it is reducible to its simplest combination of ones and zeros, of binary code. Purely information.

To answer this we have to be specific about what sort of art we are talking about. For musicians and filmmakers, the process of digitizing their work is quite simple, and has already been done to limitless extent with music in mp3 formats. So that kind of art is easily distributed. But I think it’s quite fair to say that, at least for the independent musician, the vast circulation provided by the Internet has been a benefit, as I mentioned in the first post. Film, I suppose we would have to see. Books? To me, having paper in front of me is never comparable to reading on a screen, and I disagree that the next step is creating an Ipod for print. Word on paper have been around far longer than film or recorded music, both of which are more recent inventions. I find it hard to envision a world without books. And as long as they are physical things, actual artifacts, then the people who wrote them can make a living from their sale.

When we think about the fine arts, it gets a little trickier. Surely painting and sculpture are necessarily perceived “in person” as actual objects, at least in their classical sense. But people have been making conceptual art for over three decades, which shed the usual belief that the hand of the artist is a gifted commodity, selling the idea of what they’re doing, almost like a patent. Warhol made mass-produced objects, and called his studio a factory. Today people have begun making explicitly “digital art” which is meant to be experienced at a computer screen, who are embracing the new technologies. Even if one thinks that’s not true art, we will always have painters and sculptures who make work that doesn’t make sense unless it’s seen in person. One cannot digitize a work of art's "presence" and distribute it around the world.

So to say that an artist will starve if nobody pays them for their art, while a compelling point, needs to be examined a bit more closely. We have to come right down to the specifics of an artwork and how it transfers to the digital realm. Music is the most easily transferable, and really, I think the benefits independent artists have gained from the Internet’s circulation outweighs the money lost by some recording artists to file sharing. It’s not like people aren’t willing to pay for the music, anyway: Itunes has been a massive success. And those recording artists who object so adamantly aren’t starving. Nowhere do we hear complaints about file-sharing from small bands, at least not that I’ve heard, or from independent musicians who are, in my opinion, making the music that matters. Embracing the abilities of technology is the best solution: in the end, those that object are fighting what is, of course, a losing battle.

A Weekend in Obstructions and Evaporations

2005-10-10T23:52:00.000-04:00

The air never turned dry this weekend, carrying a misty overhang that made it feel as if the clouds were a low ceiling. Didn't really leave the apartment except to venture out and attempt to watch a performance of avant-garde music beneath abstract film, but it sold out on us. The trek to Chelsea is frustrating enough. But then Nick noticed that Lou Reed was waiting with us in the lobby. The mist turned into a mysterious aura, and we walked home in half-silence through Flatiron, up 5th Ave., which is when we wished we had flip-flops and had been drinking.

Saturday I had another go at "The Five Obstructions," a film which deconstructs the concept of cinema by documenting Lars von Trier's various "obstructions" of remakes of a 1967 short film by Danish director Jorgen Leth, entitled "The Perfect Human." Along the way it unravels normal modes of thinking, psychology, the concept of humanity, and the personality of Jorgen Leth. I would really recommend renting it, with a friend who you could talk with afterwards, preferably. Upon second viewing I found that, as whole film, it lost a good bit of meaning after the shock-value of the first viewing was lost. Nevertheless, the quality of the individual short films was more apparent, once I could let the conceit of the whole thing be secondary. It's still a really mind-blowing film altogether. What emerged for me was the complete superiority of Jorgen Leth over Lars Von Trier, insofar as they are defined by their characteristics in the film: Lars is strangely self-satisfied in his psychological gamesmanship and vaguely annoying, while Jorgen has this aura of artistic integrity, of authentic humanity and its triumph, and responds to the overly-cerebral challenge with plain old good art.

Saturday brought a trek through the pouring rain in shirt and tie to the West Village, where we hid in a dive jazz bar and saw an overweight man who called himself the Reverend play piano. He was a bit like a religious Tom Waits, minus the outsider-wanderer aesthetic, plus a heap of sentimentality and earnestness. He had us all holding hands by the third set, metphorically picking out our "burdens" out of the muscles in the backs of our necks, throwing them on the ground, and stomping on them. It was great fun.

Sunday I payed bills and got depressed, but then we made this Asian soup with udon noodles and pot stickers. Yum. After a visit from Dad last week which included a spree at Food Emporium, we've found ourselves with strange amounts of food and ingredients which we normally can't afford. Here is a picture of the filet-mignon dinner we made Saturday night, with a merlot reduction sauce with shallots on top. (Ed. Note, 10/11: See here for a full review)

It's getting ridiculous how much effort we put into cooking (and, apparently, taking pictures of it. See facebook). But it's something to throw oneself into. I want to get a book on the science behind technique, start to academicize it.

It's Monday night and everything is finally beginning to become dry. I feel like I passed over today without noticing. The days are getting physically shorter, but I also wonder how long I can deal with coming home and realizing it's midnight before I can begin to think. I sit in a chair all day and sit mostly idle--I read as much as possible to keep my mind alive, but there's something about the pallor of an office that itself feels like a low, heavy ceiling. Mostly it's because I don't have a real job with real resonsiblities, so I'm only as occupied as are the people who supervise me need help. But I can't write while I'm there, not really, and I can only read so many publications so thoroughly--The Times, The New Yorker, the Voice, NYMetro, Pitchfork, everybody's blog twice (hey all of you--post!). There is always 20 questions, which is still astounding (am I the last person to hear about this thing? My first one was muffler, and it nailed me in 17).

I imagine that this is what it feels like to evaporate. It's a feeling of weightlessness, of being unsure of one's present state and losing hold of it, to feel inconsequential yet lofty, changing forms, living a life in the mind. It's a transition. I sound dramatic. It's true, though.

Wonder Boys

2005-10-06T00:38:00.000-04:00

I recently read Michael Chabon’s book Wonder Boys, on which one of my favorite, most cherished films was based. As a movie it’s a slyly uplifting story about a failing writing professor who comes to realize one of his students is a strikingly talented writer, however much he may succumb to petty thievery, excessive brooding, and compulsive storytelling (what the less romantic of us might call lying). Amidst a failing life, which culminates in a series of genuinely hilarious strokes of bad luck and whimsical coincidences, Grady Tripp is able to lose everything he thought worthwhile while gaining what he never knew to be important. It’s a collegiate film set in a town of professors with nostalgic cars, who use typewriters, relive old movies, and generally live in a universe in which aesthetic consequence is far weightier than actual consequence. In fact, the reckless main character never quite pays for his actions, not really, and it’s mostly solved because he concludes at the end that he “knows where he wants to go” as a writer.

The book is quite different in tone, if only because of its lack of a happy, pat ending. It’s more satirical, sharper, less warm. James Leer, the student, is not a genius writer, and actually writes rather complicated, screwed-up, lacerated prose that’s nearly impossible to read because of its excessive and ill-placed punctuation. The various farcical instances of the novel have a different sort of humor which isn’t laced with lightness or as much absurdity, as in the movie. It cuts deeper, it’s more satirical, and it has consequence. There’s something of a macabre edge to the novel’s world, which is complemented by the narrator’s continual allusions of his life circumstances to the short stories of August Van Zorn, an obscure writer who descended out of Edgar Allen Poe.

One of the best parts about the book is the way Grady Tripp’s character relates himself to his literary interests, including his own characters. At WordFest, the weekend event which is the backdrop to the whole book and film, there is a professor who gives a lecture entitled “The Writer as Doppelgänger”, referring to the idea of a shadow self which follows one around causing mischief, e.g. see Peter Pan. Having what Grady calls the “midnight disease,” many writers find that their literary aspirations and characters become doppelgängers, as they gradually lose hold of the line between the physical and fictional world, always suffering the quintessential fates of their characters. After awhile, a writer confuses reality with dreams, or himself with his characters, or the random happenings of his life with the machinations of a plot. The line between fiction and reality becomes overrun.

This aspect of the novel changes it completely, I think, from the movie. I’m not sure which one I like better--the movie is darkly funny and familiar and disarmingly touching. The book has a darker edge to it, a shadow which is the doppelganger and the midnight disease, and a realization that real consequences happen and that one must face them, and that they set the artistic consequences into better, clearer relief.

TimesSelect

2005-09-29T14:15:00.000-04:00

Does anyone want to split a subscription to TimesSelect with me? I've lost a hunk of good time-passing reading material for work when the New York Times stopped publishing the opinion columns for free online. Funny how the Internet makes one feel as if they have an intrinsic right to free access to any kind of information. In the end, it's a good thing, and why those authors suing Google for its mission of digitizing the world's libraries are, in my opinion, incorrect. While they say they're insulating the creativity of writers by protecting copyrights, aren't they really gouging the boundless opportunity of having one's writing available to anyone, at any time? Certainly there the question of how the writers will get paid. But it isn't as if Google is handing out all this information; they have a good system in place. Still, how long can this corporate system remain effective? There are now self-publishing houses, and bands that gain a wide listening audience and showing up on critics top ten lists, without even have a label. What would happen if those bands demanded that their music be removed from peoples' hands because they wanted to put it through some antiquated corporate system? Obviously, they'd rather have people listening. They'd rather have that information available to anyone.

It's mind-boggling to consider the possibilities of having all information centralized and accessible. Things like Google Earth make it possible for one to travel via satelite photographs anywhere in the world. Eventually the detail will be impeccable, and one will have the ability to virtual-travel anywhere in the world. At some point, all of this would cause us to run up against the basic fact of our physical bodies, our physical limits. If one can know anything and see anything virtually, the limits of perception and experience will come into relief. Our minds can't keep up, we can't know everything. Of course, people have always understood that, but there have always been limits to how we experience and record information. What if all that experience is available instantly? All information? It's like a parabola opening out exponentially into infinity--equally parts intoxicating and frightening. Nothing will ever replace our basic sensory experience, a conversation with somebody over tea and madeleine cookies. But with all of these blogs and podcasts and things, it does feel a bit like the world is exploding.

Sheesh. And all I wanted was to read was Paul Krugman.

Lotus

2005-09-29T00:24:00.000-04:00

The weather finally got cooler, and I'm amazed at my mood. I walked home and was genuinely happy, which has been hard to do when it's hot and I'm wearing a dress shirt. The novelty of wearing a tie has, by now, worn off.

I went to Bloomington, Indiana this past weekend to attend Lotus, the annual international music festival. Seu Jorge was the highlight, playing inventive and lively brazilian-inflected acoustic guitar music. You might recognize him from The Life Aquatic or City of God. He was also incredibly cool and spoke terrible English quite earnestly. At one point, he lodged his cigarette in the tuning pegs and played through an entire song.

There was a really excellent Trad Irish group called Teada, and a trio of Frenchman called Samarabalouf who played "gypsy jazz" with an upright bass, lead and rhythm guitars, and who played their intruments as if they were making love to them, in true Frenchman fashion. The bassist's human-sized instrument was especially accosted, and he ran his fingers and hands down the length of the strings while looking mischevious and creating really fascinating sounds. They also spoke English terribly and earnestly.

I have yet to unpack. My room is feeling quit small at the moment. On the bright side, I have to clean up a lot more often, i.e. I'm becoming a more fastidious person. Is this a bright side? For now, I'm reveling in the fact that I can open my window and it becomes cooler instead of hotter.

Crash

2005-09-20T23:04:00.000-04:00

Nick and I just watched Crash and I am rubbing the bump on my head, which the place where the movie beat me repeatedly. Yes, it is about questioning our prejudices and staring them in the face and all irrefutable goals which one wouldn’t think to question, but I can’t begin to believe that the way to move past racism and prejudice is by making heavy-handed stories which are melodramatic and which make one feel exceedingly guilty. In fact, just the opposite: one needs a light heart and humor. I believe that the best way to discourage something is to refuse to indulge it, to pay it no attention, to act, if necessary, as if nothing about it is interesting at all, even if it’s not the case. In other words, look through the thing and see the much better thing beyond it, to illuminate that other thing. It’s a matter of focus, from scolding the bad thing to encouraging the good thing.

The film’s entire schematics rested on exaggerated racial tensions which were put into high relief against “post 9/11 Los Angeles” in a series of interconnecting stories. But this merely gives those tensions more room to exercise themselves, to grow and take shape. True, there were some compelling scenes and genuine relationships, notably between the black couple who get pulled over near the beginning. But in the end, exaggerating and forcing the racial tensions adds fuel to the fire, when we ought to be letting it wither and slip through the cracks.

The movie had good intentions, and I'm not suggesting that we repress latant or present racial prejudices. What I'm suggesting is that the way to deal with them requires more nuance, and more good humor.

On a Symphony of the Absurd, and Adolescence

2005-09-19T22:20:00.000-04:00

I realized yesterday that it takes about 7 minutes to walk to Central Park from my apartment, and on any given Sunday you can expect lawns scattered with frolicking dogs, strollers with wheels that are increasingly absurdly large, smoking hipsters, earnest, frowning scholars, old men in brown hats, couples in canoes, athletic men hopping over each other like gymnasts for show, Sunday-times-reading businessmen, friends in circles at a picnic, sand volleyball players, religious ceremonies replete with sitar music, games of ultimate frisbee, engaged people from foreign countries taking their wedding photos, gray-haired men who play chess on stone tables, which look over into a park from a high-standing veranda, and quartets playing jazz for new families who want to educate their three-year-old son, so they hold his hands over his head and bounce him around like he’s dancing.

Really, it’s any day with Sun that inspires this symphony of behavior.

I sat on a sloped lawn in the partial shade and read a poorly-translated Japanese novel (the writing in English is barely serviceable and I know it’s a good book, so I’m inferring) by Banana Yoshimito called N.P., which stands for “North Point” and which is about young people who meet, discover their mutual, secret love for this rare book of stories (also titled N.P.), and metaphorically relive its legacy of secrecy and suicide, only to triumph in the healing message of the final story. Despite the translation, there is an almost adolescent happiness/sadness conjoinment to the writing that makes it perfect for a Sunday, in which one feels happy for the sun and melancholy for the nostalgia of a lost afternoon. On weekends one is unusually, closely aware of the passing of time, and in some instances it’s a feeling that the time is draining away. For me, it brings me back to the memory and nostalgia of adolescence, that “riotous country” from which there’s “a type of cultural news that can be delivered only by those who’ve recently crossed over”, as Jay McInery wrote in the times a while ago, describing Benjamin Kunkel’s novel Indecision. In any case, it’s fun to remember those days, and read about characters who still live with the up/down intensity of their gravity. When one’s emotional life and aesthetic concerns are the center of the world. I’ll never stop romanticizing that time, and it’s the reason why I am prone to sentimentality, and why I listen to Tilly and the Wall (who are a band that sing about teenage love and adventure, with a woman who tap dances for percussion), and find myself agreeing earnestly with the urgency of their affections (rather than merely observing them).

All of this to say in reminder to myself: get out of the apartment on the weekends and visit the most completely happy place in New York, because you live under ten minutes walk away; and, now is the time of life to pretend like you’re still seventeen. Because later, it’s going to seem a little bit absurd.

Feist

2005-09-15T15:35:00.000-04:00

Max and I went to The Knitting Factory last night to see Feist, as apart of the CMJ festival. The first band that we saw play was called "Flipsyde", and I have been struggling to remember a time when I saw a worse band. They are, nevertheless, signed to Interscope. Comprised of an average DJ, a barely servicable rapper, a beefy crew cut guy who couldn't play guitar, and a guy who looked like Santana (and served the same purpose: mostly predictable lead guitar coming over the track and the most predictable times. Imagine "Smooth" all over again, but no talent). But the lyrics, you say, they must have saved it! The first song was called Flipsyde (a caveat: when a band mispells their own name on purpose, you can be fairly sure that such uninspired "cleverness" is going to be the extent of their innovation--see Puddle of Mudd, Staind, etc.), and was mostly pointless. Then the crew cut guy sang something called "Patroit" very earnestly, and kept poorly strumming the same boring chords. The next song was called "God Bless America" sung without a hint of irony, so we went back into the lobby to get another drink.

Next up was "The Lovemakers", who were better but not great. Your typical 80s ripoff drenched in dramatic sexualized energy, i.e. the two lead singers began making out onstage while playing a song, which was riveting but mostly gross. They felt like suburban kids who put on makeup and tried out S & M, and the girl singing kept dragging herself around the stage and making contorted faces and generally acting like she was in a constant state of orgasm. It became banal rather quickly. Also, Ty had something good to say about The Lovemakers' on-stage PDA:
"I mean, come on, The Strokes don't get up their and stroke themselves; The Killers don't live up to their name; The Walkmen; The Bravery; no one actually tries to do just what their name says...Bastards."

Everthing changed when Feist came on. The air was different. She was all mystery and suggestion, the opposite of the act before. She has bangs that start way back on her head and fall at the perfect length in front of her eyes, which are big and brown. She was clever and gently self-effacing, and used big words, and sang whimsical Parisian-sounding jazzy rock, and had a red eyemask around her neck like a pair of spectacles.

We were also privileged to hear a brand new Broken Social Scene song that she played, even though she wasn't "supposed to". She sang on their last record. I recommend picking up her release Let it Die. The first half are original songs, and the last half demonstrate an impeccable taste in covers. It's very well put together, a great album to put on in the afternoon as the sun is bronzing the sides of buildings or setting fire to the tops of trees, whatever the case may be where you happen to live. More to come of the CMJ festival.

Sept 11th and the debate over "-isms"

2005-09-12T23:36:00.000-04:00

I spent the day yesterday, which began when I woke up at 1:30, lying around with a general feeling of disuse and inoccupancy. As with the other variously empty Sundays of life, which I tried to fill with all manner of periodicals and books and food and browsing the Internet, I mostly felt like I needed to get out of my head (or apartment) and lose the self-centric perspective.

Even though half of what I read yesterday tangentially surrounded the four year anniversay of that incomprehensible morning, I managed to go until 11 or so at night before I realized how utterly unaware I was of the fact that it was, indeed, a day in which I ought to be doing a lot less thinking about my own emotions and a lot more thinking about what has happened in the last four years.

I don't have much to say because I feel without the right to say anything, but I did do some thinking about it today. When did this way change from a war against terrorism to a "war against terror"? In other words, when did we lose sight of an empirical, real battle against physical people and specific acts, and when did we get caught up in a battle which can never be demonstrated as won? When did we drop the -ism?

What I can't get away from is that we are in a country that is in a climate still dictated by fear, which is, of course, the method by which terrorism itself operates--to commit a violent act on a few which reverberates a feeling of terror to the rest. The way our media seems to operate, and indeed the way that the ideology of our administration propogates itself, is via a feeling of fear. We are fighting in Iraq as a statement against the terrorists, but Iraq has instead served to demonstrate the limits of America's power. It feels as if we lashed out, that it's misplaced, that we are throwing our whole weight into a quagmire of a war because we're afraid of terrorists who are hiding in caves, somewhere in the desert.

I went to a taping of The Daily Show last week, and I keep thinking about the guest, Marc Spiegel, who wrote a book called "False Alarm" about the way our media tends to elevate most situations to an overinflated degree of hype, which results in every risk being at the same high level, and therefore fear-inducing but meaningless. Jon Stewart brought up something that FDR was famous for saying, that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." Is this the bold defiance something that we believe in now? Is it something our administration believes in? Consider that FDR was fighting Hitler, and Bush made clear immediatly after September 11th that these terrorists were the direct descendants of the murderous ideologies of the 20th century, despite a pretense to piety. He may be correct on some level. But the effect of this shaping the terrorists into a familiar enemy is, I think, to abstract them, to ideologize them. Of course, there must be ideology to some level. But it is the gap between rhetoric and reality that has always been disturbing about the way things have gone in Iraq.

Even as the terrorists are made to be mere echoes of a past enemy which has already been defeated, and even as Bush has led America into Iraq with bravado and fanfare, we nevertheless still live with some motivation of fear. We are fighting against terrorism, of course, but Bush has also declared war on terror itself, as an abstract concept, as apart of the goal of "eradicating the world of evil" in general. Can we fight terror and still be afraid without risking an absurd contradiction? Eradicating the world of evil is impossible, as is fighting an abstraction. How will we measure when this war is finished? When will we stop counting the anniversary years after Sept. 11, 2001?

For example

2005-09-09T00:29:00.000-04:00

http://myragerl.blogspot.com/
Not the most eloquent or interesting, but can you believe this sort of thing is out there?

The Pyoneer ov Simplifyd Speling

2005-09-07T21:33:00.000-04:00

There is a society based in the UK which aims to reform the spelling of words in the English language, removing what they term as corruption of the “alphabetic principle.” Over time, the idea that letters out to directly correspond to sounds, that a language ought to be consistently phonetic, has been lost in the English language. Unlike, say, Spanish, a language in which a student can learn the sounds which correspond to a letter and then, once having that reputable base, go on to depend on those letters producing those sounds, in English the student is rather lost in a jungle of combinations of letters which, at times, seem disingenuously and unfairly misleading and suspicious.

The society was started in 1908 and presided over by subsequent professors from Cambridge, Oxford, and University College London, and it remains faithful to a vision of the English language in which all words are be updated into logical and undeviating spellings, in the interest of promoting ease of learning and economy in writing, and in general, increasing literacy. They maintain a spirit of this high-minded and idealistic goal of increasing literacy, of helping people (mostly young children) learn. In other words, they are not separatists and intentionally avoid snobbery: they want more people to read more words with more ease.

Nevertheless, part of this nobility comes from early in the society, when those at the head wanted to make it simpler for colonies of the British Empire to acquire a knowledge of English, and, perhaps to attract the entire world to a universal language:

“All who love our language and realize the responsibilities of our Empire will agree that every British citizen should be able to speak English. That is far from being the case at present. To take India alone, there are millions who do not know English. [...] It is our duty to educate these millions; the key to their education is the English language. We place great difficulties in their way by our irregular spelling. If it were reasonable they could almost teach themselves. [...] What a splendid prospect, that of a world in which all men can speak our tongue! What a vast audience for the writers and the speakers who use our splendid language! What a great step towards the brotherhood of man!”

The whole movement lost steam around the middle of the century, when various attempts to integrate a simplified spelling system into the educational system in Britain did not take hold, and were mainly rejected. Today the society has 146 members, 29 of which have not paid their subscription for this year, yet. The society also now realizes the rather obvious futility of changing the spelling of English by an institutional process (alterations in language occur naturally over time through an evolutionary process, and are almost never intentionally fashioned). Giving up the original aspiriations for “New Spelling” (is anyone eerily reminded of Orwellian “Newspeak”?), their best idea now is a concept called “CS”, an acronym for Cut Spelling, which assumes the process by which the brain reads is almost wholly dependent on the first and last letter of a word, while the letters in between can vary greatly without a loss of comprehension. Removing unnecessary letters which are redundant in the language, Cut Spelling is born: Most words ar unchanjed , and we hav th impression not of a totaly new riting systm, but of norml script with letrs misng here and ther. Th basic shape of most words, by wich we recognize them, is not fundmently altrd, and nearly al those that ar mor substantialy chanjed ar quikly decoded; very few ar truly puzlng.

Cut spelling is really a combination of removing letters as well as replacing phonetic letters for sounds--the phonetic “j”, for example, replaces the soft “g” in “changes.” It’s a trimming down of the makeup of words, a leaning up of things that supposedly makes this easier. I tried to find out more about it, but the rest of the paper was written in this gibberish, so I gave up.

The problem is, we’re robbing the language of its ancestry. Certainly there’s a good idea somewhere underneath all of this intention, but hacking away at words hardly seems like the right idea. The entire field of etymology would basically be hung out to dry, reduced to working like archaeologists piecing together bits and shards of a skeleton that was once a living, breathing thing. And language really is.

Nobody in the society has said anything (at least not publicly) about the tool that is right in front of them, a powerful venue by which language’s public and gradual process of change can be immensely sped up. Never before in history has there been such a rapid exchange of information on such a large scale: the Internet is a forum for how we write and think, reason and decide. There are places like the Urban Dictionary, whose sole purpose is to record in one place these new words which pop up. Things like blogs have allowed anybody to write whatever they’d like to, however they’d like to. In one sense, that whole notion of an institution as authority can be subverted: they don’t need to change the educational system, they don’t need to convince principals and educational boards that changing spelling is a good idea: they can just start writing in this new way, and watch it ripple out in to the ether the digital world, which, via the mass exchange of information, will certainly make its way into our everyday language.

Not that I think it’s a good idea, by the way. I like how weird English is. It means you’re surprised almost as much as you’re certain.

Home, etc.

2005-09-05T21:35:00.000-04:00

Today, for the first time, returning to New York felt like coming home. I couldn't imagine more beautiful weather, which brings everyone outside and creates an overall sense of camaraderie with everyone you meet. You can really feel it in the air--totally infectious. Coming from a visit to Philadelphia, I had a strange sense that New York is, paradoxically, a cozy city. Everything is packed in, and the variety between neighborhoods keeps it from feeling claustrophobic or depressing. Our apartment isn't big, but I like the feeling that I am using all of the space, that nothing is wasted, that there's a degree of intelligence with which everything is laid out.

The chinatown-to-chinatown bus is a cheap and wonderful (if rather disorganized) way to travel, if you can survive walking through chinky street vendors and sewage, of course. Round trip for twenty bucks, I visited Austin and Duncan who are settling into an apartment and post-bacculurate classes at UPenn. We had a night of utter ridiculousness and consternation: I climbed a tree and couldn't get down, we met a tall black man named "Country" who promised Austin protection in West Philly and claimed to have fathered seven children (which Nick then asked, concernedly, if he ever visited), we found our way into a party at a Beta OIT which Nick insisted on finding, Duncan refused to speak anything but a combination of French and Korean for what seemed like hours, we met two guys who read Pitchfork (which I apparently thought was the most incredulous coincidence one could ever imagine, evidenced by my shaking Nick and repeatedly yelling the news into his ear), Austin relieved himself on the tire of a Jeep on a busy road and also honored a lesson from Country on how to box effectively.

Philadelphia is a nice town with a goofy trolly car subway which feels like a ride at Disney Land. People were friendly and genuinely interested. The UPenn campus is fantastic and feels like a different world from the rest of the city--you walk in the gates and there is a sudden dead quiet. We visited the library and spent a half hour gawking at the size of it. I had an overwhelming feeling of smallness walking through the stacks, knowing that just one of the bookshelves was more than I could read in the rest of my lifetime. Seeing old novels from forgotten writers discouraged me, too--nobody reads them, and even if there is some permanence in a book's publication and printing, what's the use of it? People who wrote those books are immortal only in a theoretical sense, only if somebody pulls it off the shelf and cares about it. Too few people have read Moby Dick for it to matter.

I finally organized my bookshelf, which was a more difficult than I expected. For the first time I have most of my books with me, and I went from putting them together by author, then genre and author, then just genre, then by size, then by (would you believe it?) color scheme. I settled on genre followed by an equal balance of recentness of purchase, size, and approximate date of publication. I'm sure it will change soon enough.

I don't know what to say about Katrina, only that the best I can do is flood myself with pictures and video clips until they garner an emotional impact, because otherwise I feel totally isolated from it. The op-ed section of the Times has been really good. Everyone should take 10 minutes and donate to Red Cross on their website, use your credit card. I'm not normally preachy, but there's really no other option.

Not looking forward to work tomorrow, but I suppose it's only four days. And this weekend I'm not going anywhere, finally--just spending a weekend in the fourth largest city in the world, which, for the first time today, definitely felt like home.

Late Lunch

2005-08-29T12:35:00.000-04:00

It's rather absurd, but I'm getting a feeling here in the office that eating a meal is a sign of weakness, especially if it's early. Somebody who takes a lunch break before noon gets more than a couple of looks, and I can't figure out if the looks are of jealousy, disinterest, or disdain. People who do get lunch wolf it down at their desk with a spreadsheet in their other hand, looking around nervously. Personally, I subsist on coffee all morning, take oatmeal at noon, small lunch at 3 (which makes the afternoon very, very short), and a BIG DINNER. Then there's this woman who makes a bag of microwave popcorn at exactly 3:15 every afternoon, and while it was sort of nice the first couple of days, I am now not all that excited to feel like I'm visiting a movie theatre all the time. That smell of popcorn used to be special. But now...

New Haven

2005-08-28T19:22:00.000-04:00

On the train home from New Haven and it looks exactly like the scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--also gray day, cloudy, spare number of people on the maroon and navy seats. Elin and I spent a weekend doing a fine job of posing as Yale students, and stayed with her high school friend Abby who is starting in the Anthropology department, and her boyfriend John, who is a genius at pointing out puns.

This is my third visit to a prestigious university when it's been raining and cloudy the whole time--Oxford, Princeton, and Yale--and it's adding to a romantic image I have of places like them, where people live a melancholy life of the mind, subdued on the outside, a mirror of some intellectual detachment that is soundtracked by the patter of rain. It's really rather nostalgic, the idea that intellectuals and writers reside in rainy cities laced with a feeling of sadness, which, for me, is a close cousin of the profound. No great novel was written in a sunny veranda in Mexico. Not a true statement, but it's still a stereotype I hold on to.

We ate well: had fantastic Eggs Benedict with avocado and roasted tomato in a small corner place, which Howard Dean walked into halfway through our meal; garlicy tomato-bread salad with basil in a park watching an outdoor jazz concert; coconut ice cream bar at the top of the New Haven bluffs; homemade strawberry pie at the potluck.

We also saw a lifeless movie called "You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her", a faux-artsy thing from the late 90s which chronicled the lives of seven women and how they were utterly depressing (though sewn together, however patchily, with the thread of some silver-lining fate). It never took off the ground and was sort of frustrating. I think what I didn't like was the way the movie pretended to be very important and was weighted down by a lot of self-seriousness, when really its story was conventional, the writing was self-consciously "artsy", and the way characters functioned and interacted felt canned and un-human: homeless woman who is actually a prophetess and serves nicely to insert all important themes; lesbian psychic who takes care of revealing the character's personality via a tarot card reading (while the character says absolutely nothing); precocious children to explain to the adults how-things-really-are.

On the whole, spent great time with Abby and John who are the best of the best when it comes to people.

Word of the Day

2005-08-26T12:43:00.000-04:00

Denouement

1. The final resolution or clarification of a dramatic or narrative plot; The events following the climax of a drama or novel in which such a resolution or clarification takes place.
2. The outcome of a sequence of events; the end result.

As in: Realism in painting, at the advent of Modernism (especially abstraction), devolved in a rapid denouement. Brush strokes, line, color, and form became more important (see Monet and the Impressionists, for example) and eventually became the subject of painting, breaking through in a leap to pure abstraction with Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich.

This assumes, though, a very linear progression of art, i.e. as a straightforward evolution. This isn't the case--see Duchamp, Rauschenberg--and by the 60s the whole thing really fell apart with the Minimalists and Pop Art and a million other "-isms".

Anyway, I like the word.

Idiosyncrasy

2005-08-25T10:19:00.000-04:00

There is a feeling, which most would probably anticipate, that corporate offices discourage idiosyncrasies and individuality. I started thinking about this idea when I read a (partly tongue-in-cheek) definition of "collaboration" in another's blog: "the means by which idiosyncrasy is overridden by mutually intelligible procedure". This is mostly true in an environment in which there is one underlying goal that motivates most decisions: making money. Spend less to make more, which translates to a slavish adherence to some abstract ultimatum, which is the "bottom line"--save a few at the top, no one knows much about it, but nevertheless lives in its shadow. Working at a place like The Economist, I thought that I could save a certain idealism in that there is a parallel goal of providing some service to society. But anything outside of the editorial department has very little to do with that idea. Editorial is upstairs in a quiet, sun-filled office, scattered with books and punctuated with the clacking of keyboard keys. They are absolutely isolated, suspended in an otherwise idiosyncratic-less world of mailrooms and check acquisitions, excel spreadsheets and hushed phone conversations. Editorial could not exist without this web around it, holding it up, but they have almost no interaction with it. The people down here are either oblivious to the writers upstairs, or have a vague respect for them and make sure to tiptoe when they go by their office.

I try to joke around as much as I can, like when someone prints out a large number of pages, I say "Printing War and Peace again?" Not all that funny but deserving of a smile, I'd say: but nothing. Interestingly, the higher-ups in this department are the most humorless, while those near the bottom harbor a small part of themselves in which they can laugh knowingly.

What is idiosyncrasy, exactly? I think that the sense in which we use it only refers to one of its definitions, and we stretch it slightly. We mean it as a general word for strange quirks in a person's makeup, a personality anomaly. But really it has more to do with structures and systems, or physiology, and it can refer not to an individual, but a group. The people down here think that the entire editorial department is idiosyncratic, I suppose, that as a group they are peculiar. They are using the word correctly. Man, I wish I were working up there.

Broken Flowers

2005-08-20T18:23:00.000-04:00

Go see Billy Murrary in Broken Flowers. Jim Jarmusch’s new film is gloriously awkward, better so than Coffee and Cigarettes, which was merely awkward and only glorious at the very end. While Coffee and Cigarettes was interesting in its variety, the strange pauses and fumbled words did not accumulate into lasting place in the narrative, to expand and become comfortable. What I loved about Broken Flowers was that the lack of grace in the interactions between Bill Murray’s character and the rest of the world passed, until one could inhabit the movie and find freedom in the disconnectedness that Murray’s character felt. It allowed one to turn off, or perhaps to live a vicarious life in which social normality wasn’t important. In this sense the film felt approximately real. Jarmusch’s film style is rather painstaking, and I was glad for the large coffee I bought right before the show. Yet there is something to be experienced at the breaking point of an attention span, which is where Jarmusch forces you.

I suppose Murray’s ability to mine the depths of the “past his prime” character--see Rushmore, Lost in Translation, The Life Aquatic--plays well into the slow-to-the-point-of-lethargic style of filmmaking that Jarmusch uses. In that way they are suited well to one another, actor and director. I’m inclined to say that Lost in Translation was the peak, with Rushmore being an essential primer and The Life Aquatic the point when it became old, but I was surprised by his performance this time. There was something more genuine to it, a level of subtlety that seemed impossible, and if the performances of those other three movies swayed close to the inherent self-parody (certainly The Life Aquatic), Murray moved past that in Broken Flowers. Suspended in Jarmusch’s otherwordly dimension, I think that Murray felt undeniably more human.

New Jersey

2005-08-20T12:09:00.000-04:00

It’s my first time out of the city since moving in, and I am sitting in what strikes me as an extravagantly large room. Elin and I took a bus to Montclair to spend a few days with a family friend, who lives with six cats. I’m allergic to all six of them, I’m afraid, but knowing that, she quarantined the guest bedroom and everything seems to be fine. Better than last time we visited (at that juncture, there were ten cats in the house), when my throat began to close up and I eventually conceded after an hour of stubborn denial to the fact that I am, indeed, allergic to cats.

We have internet installed in our apartment now, so the blogging shall resume. I have a number of things fill in from the last few weeks, most of them strange experiences that I’d be amiss to not record.

We are leaving for Ikea to fill in the last corners of my five foot wide room. It’s a cloudy day. It’s always seemed interesting that on a cloudy day, the sun’s more indirect light causes everything to seem brighter, like each thing gives off its own light.

Friday

2005-08-12T14:33:00.000-04:00

Many apologies for the lack of posting--our free wireless internet disappeared into the woodwork, so we're left stranded. I'm at work sneaking in sentences while the boss goes to fix her coffee. At least she isn't asking me to get it for her, which is what I suppose is expected.

9-5 takes more out of you than you'd think, especially considering that fact that you tend to do very little that is physically exerting. I had more energy when I worked construction and spent the majority of days getting sunburned on the roof of a half-completed garage. But today is Friday, and Friday means jeans! Go denim!

Went to a concert in someone's store-front apartment in Brooklyn last night. It was pretty average until a guy wearing a bumble bee costume came out (fishnet stockings, fabric wings), turned on a smoke machine, and started hopping and dancing around like a character from Yellow Submarine. Except the music wasn't nearly as good. Nonetheless, this city continues to suggest the ever-present reality that if you can imagine something, it's probably happening somewhere.

A job posting just went up on The Economist Intranet for a fact-checker in the New York office, which I would give my arm for. I am eating free hummus and losing my eyesight via tedious spreadsheet entry. And I'm picking up Elin from the airport in five hours.

Econom(istr)y

2005-07-26T23:02:00.000-04:00

One thing that's great about New York is fire escapes. I sit outside in the humidity and watch what I have fortuitously calculated to be about 68% of traffic: cabs.

I started a job at The Economist today, which is a temp position that's "indefinite," until they begin a search to replace the woman who was fired yesterday. It's a great setup, and I get to feel like I'm working towards something valuable--instead of, say, what I was doing yesterday, which was playing the part of receptionist for a real estate auction company that sells off peoples' foreclosed homes. One thing I learned, at least, while working through lunch: when it's your job to answer phones, don't take large bites.

Also, a bus picks me up across the street and economically drops me off ten feet from the door to the office. The heat in this town is off the charts, so the more spare one's movements (in a dress shirt, no less), the better.

Go listen to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. It's a surprising amount of fun.

Clyde S. Kilby on Art and Evangelicalism

2005-07-23T00:20:00.000-04:00

I want to base what I have to say on three facts which I think indisputable. The first is that the Bible belongs to literature; that is, it is a piece of art. The second indisputable fact is that the Bible is an imaginative book. The third indisputable fact is that the greatest artist of all, the greatest imaginer of all, is the one who appears at the opening of Genesis. [...]
Now when we look from these three facts to contemporary evangelical Christianity, we find a great oddity. The people who spend the most time with the Bible are in large numbers foes of art and the sworn foes of imagination. And I grow in the feeling that these people have quite an astonishing indifference to the created world. [...] Furthermore, when evangelicals dare attempt any art form it is generally done badly. [...]
Evangelical Christians have had one of the purest of motives and one of the worst of outcomes. The motive is never to misleed by the smallest iota in the precise nature of salvation, to live in it and state it in its utter purity. But the unhappy outcome has too often been to elevate the cliche. [...]
There is a simplicity which diminishes and a simplicity which enlarges, and evangelicals have too often chosen the wrong one. The first is that of the cliche--simplicity with mind and heart removed. The other is that of art. The first falsifies by its exclusions; the second encompasses. The first silently denies the multiplicity and grandeur of creation, salvation, and indeed all things....The contrast suggests that not to imagine is what is sinful.

from "The Aesthetic Poverty of Evangelicalism" March 1969

69 Love Songs

2005-07-22T20:03:00.000-04:00

I've spent most of the day listening to the Magnetic Fields, which has both comforted and enabled a short bit of depressed feeling I've had for the last few days. The three disc collection called 69 Love Songs is just about three hours long, and I got through it one and a half times. The songs are as realized as the misanthrope persona that all the songs are written from.

Part of my down feeling has to do with the fact that I've spent the week in a poorly ventilated room with permanent markers crossing out personal information from medical records, though they let me bring my headphones. The Cardiovascular Research Foundation is conducting a study on patients who have had bypass surgery and they want all 400-some records to be anonymous, each of the 200 sheets in every file labeled with a number and letter code instead. Enter the lowly "temps" to do the grunt work. It really felt like manual labor, and the fumes, ironically, couldn't have been good for my heart.

It was interesting and partly disturbing to rifle through people's medical records, especially because they were filed chronologically, from the initial emergency room records citing "chest pain" to what I, as the omniscient observer in the situation, knew would inevitably result in extensive surgery. I read about a legally blind piano tuner from Queens who quit smoking in 1990, the Wonderbread delivery man who is 5'6" and 215 pounds, and the 65 year old practicing physician who ran tests and listed himself as patient and physician, then submitted them to the hospital.

So the dizzying monotony of sitting in a room doing the same thing for 8 hours, along with the strange predetermination of worst-case-scenario outcome in the medical records--long week. Enter Magnetic Fields and the cheeky, perfect love songs. Really, they're not about love, but love falling apart. But somehow, they avoid self-pity, even though the lyrics seem like they are full of it. And Stephen Merritt's extraordinarily low voice, of course, doesn't exactly lighten things up. It took me around 4 trips through the whole 69 songs to start liking it, to develop what is definitely an acquired taste. What I realize I love about the songs is that they don't beg you to like them; they barely even ask. It's not slick production that's smiling at you to join in, but as you learn to pick up the ridiculously clever lyrics and appreciate the subtlety, you realize that they are what love songs really ought to sound like: effortless, honest, silly, introspective, depressed, pretentious, casual, self-consciously sentimental. Part of the way they avoid annoying self-pity is that Stephen Merritt plays it up in a persona--that and the songs are so well executed, one doesn't ask questions. I think if something is written well enough, I'll believe pretty much anything it says.

I got a letter from Con Ed this afternoon saying that we have been illegally using electricity, and it will be turned off in three days. I guess I should call them tomorrow.

"I could make a career of being blue / I could dress in black and read Camus / smoke clove cigarettes and drink vermouth / like I was 17 / that would be a scream / but I don't want to get over you."

"There'll be time enough for sleeping when we're dead / You will have a velvet pillow for your head ... There'll be time enough for sex and drugs in heaven / When our pheremones are turned up to 11."

"Heather, Heather, we belong together /like sex and violence / Like death and silence."

Sentimentalism

2005-07-16T11:28:00.000-04:00

I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close recently, and I have been reading reviews that call it a sentimental--or worse, manipulative--attempt at addressing 9/11 and other tragedy. The novel sugests that we can benefit from some innocence that a child narrator brings to our perspective, which through its disarming honesty and precociousness (which marks any portrayal of childhood in fiction, it seems), allows us to feel better about the world, as a child does. The greatest danger in writing about childhood is sentimentalism, of losing a balance between sentiment and a complexity of emotion, or intense vitality.

I’ve never been quite certain when something is sentimental and when something is genuine--I don’t have a good bullshit meter, or perhaps it’s better to call it a critical impulse. I like bad art sometimes, and then I feel like I shouldn’t, and I’ve cried at movies that critics lament as trite. I feel that I’ve got to learn to teach myself, to train myself strictly, to resist sentimentalism. Why does it come easily?

"A sentimentalist," Oscar Wilde writes, "is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." All vanilla with no chocolate, frosting with no cake--when you eat too many sour patch kids and they turn saccharine in your mouth.

At least one review I read applauded Foer as being a writer willing to “risk” sentimentalism in order to address questions of truth and beauty. The reviewer seems to be suggesting that we need more sentiment in contemporary writing, but it must be true sentiment, which perhaps leads the reader to contemplating something deeper and more serious. However, too much of it and we’re in a sea of good intentions without anything complex to balance it, without a genuine reason for it to be there.

So why does Foer return--or regress--to childhood to address these great questions of truth and beauty, in a time of turmoil? I myself talked about a return to childhood in my first post, but I wasn’t using it to address tragedy, not in that scope. Childhood innocence and the like may teach us to regain a poetic imagination, but is it appropriate to make claims about large issues like 9/11? Shouldn’t we be “paying” something great for our response to these tragedies, for understanding them? Shouldn’t it not be easy? Or should we inhabit some kind of poetic imagination to understand it well? Yet there is something disturbing, on the whole, with the way Foer ends the whole thing--it’s all regression. The narrator wants to literally reverse time, and there is a little flip-book gimmick at the end of the book which takes one of the more desperate images in our recent collective visual memory and turns it into just that: a gimmick. Whether it’s powerful and justly emotive, or whether it’s manipulative and sentimental, I can’t exactly decide: the line between the two remains one I’m not comfortable drawing with confidence.

New York Post

2005-07-09T16:20:00.000-04:00

I just listened to the opening cut on Vitalic's album OK Cowboy and I am amazed--it's a track that manages to call attention to both its melody and rhythm in a very distinct, fully-formed way. It could be that I am just waking up from a nap, and music always sounds the best just after you wake up. Why is that? Do we get pure ears for a short time after we wake up? Is it because music is an abstract medium that we can more easily understand if we've just left our abstract dreams? When I've just woken up, each instrument of the music is clear and I feel more closely tied to what's happening.

New York is perfect. There is a French grocery store/bakery/deli next door to our apartment, and I've spent at least 4 meals there since we've arrived--large coffee is just over a dollar, and a fried egg on a kaiser roll only sets you back $1.25. I knew it was a good sign when I was sipping my coffee yesterday morning, and saw chefs through the window picking out produce.

The apartment reminds me of a treehouse, which I mean as a compliment. I am exactly one quarter of an inch shorter than the 6 ft ceilings under the lofts, and I am finally thankful that I am not, indeed, a 6 ft. tall man. The kitchen is tiny but adequate, the view onto York Ave. is nice, and we're in a fantastic location at 73rd st.. Although we are probably paying the cheapest rent of anyone in this zip code and are therefore continually reminded of our inferior economic standing, there's the added perk of really nice furniture that people leave on the curb. So far we've found a stand for the TV and a really nice chair with three legs. Looking at piles of trash becomes instinctive and unconscious. It's actually sort of a nice system of take and give away, like there's an unsaid friendliness.

Back to wading through boxes and prodding myself to work on my resume to find a job. For the record, I read the Times.

Beginnings

2005-07-03T18:11:00.000-04:00

I am standing at a number of edges--17 years of schooling, 20-some-odd years of childhood (when, exactly, does childhood end?), and I am trying to see them as beginnings. I suppose that you are required to leap when you reach the edge of something, but that seems like a cliche, like something out of Grand Canyon or a self-help guide to living a more exciting life with abandon. A beginning isn't always a glamorous leap into the void, though what lies ahead for me is completely unclear and feels shrouded. I prefer to avoid the metaphors and go with Emily Dickinson: "I dwell in possibility."

I've always been a person who tends to burn bridges, and I couldn't say why. Once again I find myself lacking any bit of sentimentality for what I'm leaving, and something of a reserved hopefulness for what comes ahead. I never understand it when people cling to the past, though it's interesting that most of the fiction I write tries to rewrite my own past with characters who are smarter and have the insight that I have now. They live easily the life I wish I had: more poetically, more insightfully, and, cliches be damned, with more abandon. Metaphors and resonant images come out of the woodwork. The world has a careful architect who places things just so, who clips down conversation to a bare-bones poetic minimum. I've always read fiction with some vicarious intent, I think.

How I translate those characters' qualities into my own future is what I'm most interested to see. My imagination paints the next year in New York as a world in which I can live and act like them. My desire to let loose and live a little more recklessly speaks to the tendency I am having to reinhabit some childlike (or perhaps childish) past that I never had.

In the meantime, I've got to decide which artifacts from my growing up to keep, and which to pitch. I've also been amused that I'm now giving many of the clothes I've worn for the last 6 years back to Goodwill, where I bought them.

We leave Wednesday.