Flowbear

The Worst Commercial Ever Made: Chevy Silverado

2012-01-07T17:41:00.004-06:00

In this commercial, a man is asked which house is his. He says, "The one with the Silverado out front." So far, there's no real problem here. A Silverado is a pretty singular marker -- I don't see a lot of people driving them, and can't imagine why anyone would -- and a good way to identify something as distinct from other things, like "the woman with the hairy goiter" or "the dog with the huge balls, you know the one I mean."

Then, friendlily enough, the interrogator asks, "What do you do?" The man -- our hero -- says, "Well," and seems on the verge of answering the question like not-an-asshole. At which point, the commercial smash-cuts to a montage of the man doing the following things: Swimming; pulling dirt bikes with his truck; driving his family and singing; playing paintball; wearing a hardhat and throwing lumber in the back of the truck; fishing; chopping a log; washing his hands with a hose; loading the back of his truck with hay; playing chess with an old guy; pulling a boat; lighting a barbecue; and having dinner with his wife, who is giving him the googly-eyes. Then, he says, "Ayyyyye," trails off, furrows his brows, and looks down, discouraged, overwhelmed by the glut of possibilities. Then, Tim Allen tells us something about how manly and efficient the Chevy Silverado is, and then the anti-actor who plays the jock on Numb3rs gives you some specifics about a sale because his rate per hour in the recording booth is way more reasonable than Tim Allen's, and finally Tim Allen comes back and there's something about "From work site to home front, Chevy runs deep," which if you think about it doesn't make any sense at all. Does Chevy burrow under the ground to get from one of those things to the other? Is Chevy an underground river, and is the entire neighborhood going to collapse into it when it erodes the cave ceiling?

Ok, so ultimately the message the commercial is trying to convey is the ol' 'Merkin corporate standby, "If you buy our product you're a rugged individual who, like Thoreau, cannot be bound up by definitions or constrained by the strictures of society. And like Whitman, you contain multitudes. You're not like everybody else, everybody else being sheep and ciphers." In this, the commercial is only as egregiously awful as just about every other commercial ever made. It becomes uniquely terrible in trying to be specific about the unique multiplicity of the asshole -- our hero -- in question.

A couple of points. First, the two men are at a children's party. The interrogator is drinking out of a clear kitchen cup; the Silverado doucher is drinking out of a blue flippie-cup. So he's probably wasted in the middle of the afternoon at a kid's birthday party, so fuck that guy.

Second, no American of average-or-better intelligence doesn't know that when someone asks "What do you do?" the question is actually shorthand for "how do you make money, what do you do for a living, please don't walk me through a list of all the things you actually do with your life like walk, eat, breathe, drink water, and smirk at your own cleverness." This last, you will have noticed, is exactly the function of the montage.

It seems to me there are three options here: First, the man is unemployed, and so he's trying to come up with a way to answer the question that doesn't cause him public humiliation, exacerbated by the fact that he's just moved into a bougey new suburb and owns a brand new truck; second, he doesn't understand the utilitarian function of the question "what do you do" and thinks it is an open, metaphysical question -- "what do you really do, y'know?" -- and is therefore the kind of person I can't imagine anyone enjoying to be around; and third, that he understands perfectly well what the question implies, but smugly thinks that his job, his career, the source of his income, doesn't encompass his identity, so the question insults his personal special-snowflakeness, and he is therefore the kind of person I can't imagine anyone enjoying to be around.

For the sake of argument, we'll assume he has a job, and are left with options 2 and 3. Based on the list of options presented by the montage, there are two new options: 1) he is a construction worker (loading lumber), or 2) he works in some agro-business or livestock capacity (loading hay). He is not, that is to say, in all likelihood a professional swimmer, a professional dirt bike rider, professional chauffer for his own family, a professional paintball player, a professional fisherman, a professional lumberjack who specializes in splitting a single log at a time by hand, a professional hand-washer, a chess grandmaster, a barbecue chef, or a kept man. Why, then, he doesn't simply answer that he is either a) a construction worker or b) in agro-business in some capacity isn't easy to say without making him look like a terrible, terrible person.

Let's also remember that the man is new to the neighborhood -- his house still has the "sold" sign out front. He's making a first impression at somebody else's party in this back-and-forth. And it actually flashes through his mind to say, "Well, sometimes I eat dinner with my wife and then I probably fuck her based on the look she's giving me," and, "I play chess with an old guy," and, "Me and my asshole friends won a paintball tournament and then we got all rowdy about it, it was sweet." He thinks about saying "I own a boat and some dirt bikes and I pull them with my truck." This is an infant who, when you ask him his name, tells you that he's Adam and he's five-and-a-half and he has 112 Pokemon cards exactly wrapped up in a rubber band want to see them? This is the waitress-who-says-she-is-an-actress elevated to the nth degree, and made even worse by the fact that this guy doesn't define himself by an aspiration, a goal to someday reach, but by perfectly trivial day-to-day activities that nobody outside of his little clan of mouth-breathers could possibly give a shit about.

But the worst part about this commercial, to me, is the implication that this guy, who does all this trivial shit, is inherently deeper than the other guy, who is a fucking schlub, too, obviously. The other guy probably drives, like, a Honda Camry or a Ford Accord or something, and is just as entrenched in the breeding, nose-wiping middle-class as Silverado Man. He has enough disposable income to have a cute little montage of his own where he, I dunno, sits in an expensive La-Z-Boy and drinks brandy out of a crystal snifter and hits an expensive golf ball with an expensive golf club and goes to a jazz concert and slaps his daughter for back-talking and blindfolds his wife after they come up with a safe-word. All of this is possible. But it's not necessary. You know why? Because as awful as this man no doubt is -- the commercial invites us to disdain him, so we might as well play by its rules -- he doesn't need this montage. Because when somebody asks him what he does, he says "I'm an accountant" or "I'm a pharmacist" or "I run numbers for the mafia." And he does this because he is, against all odds, the less awful man in this awful, awful commercial: The Worst Commercial Ever Made.

M'lady is possessed of haunches

2011-02-28T02:05:00.004-06:00

A Lover's Plaint,

By

The Good Sir Mix-A-Lot

I am given to rotund backsides. I, duty-bound against prevarication by the strictures of honor, trust none amongst my peers-at-court can repudiate the honorarium of tumescent attention he pays when a lady, svelte of belly and plentiful of thigh, strikes his fancy. These gentlemen halt, no matter their endeavors, upon observing this lady's derriere, squeezed pleasingly and with no room to spare, into her pantaloons. For myself -- when in the presence of such damsels, my fixation is almost monomaniacal. I would not only like to engage these peerwomen in sexual congress, but also to capture the image of their orbitual posteriors for obituary posterity.

When my chums, confederates, and confidants note me in this comportment of desire, they attempt to give me pause by prophesying hexes and mongering doom. I, however, am unable to attend to their advertisements as the sapid hindquarters inspire me with a lasciviousness rather difficult to brook.

Oh woman, since it is the case that the flesh of your rump has the look and feel of something soft as felt or suede, I invite you to exploit my attentions and affections for the use of my equipage, for you are not a common whore of the street. You are something more.

I have seen these vaunted women performing saltations; such sights render me inimical to the conventional proprieties of courtship, as when a lady is glistening with perspiration, moist as the morning dew, and in such spirits as a well-bred mustang, high of blood in the mating season.

I find myself fatigued by certain recent popular periodicals, endorsing the position that buttocks of attenuated convexity are attractive. On the contrary, put the question to the representative man of equatorial complexion and, I pledge, his response will be, "The marked convexity of her buttocks is paramount!" So brethren, fellows, is your paramour possessed of adequate hips for birthing? If indeed she is pleasingly shapely, enjoin her to waggle her goodly rump.

M'lady is possessed of haunches!

Her countenance is of a sweet, angelic city; her privity of a land of hardwood trees.

It is to my preference that the anatomical oddities in question be both spherical and bountiful, and whilst engaged in bardic oratory I become enraptured, ravished, ecstatic -- all but deprived of my humanity. But soft, friend, it might be controversial, nay outrageous to opine that it would be desirous to me to retreat with this paragon of femininity to mine own abode and, so to say, make the beast with two backs, if you will.

This truth is not to be had by the blue-books of our time, and not to be found in them. The embellishments undergone by these publications in the pursuit of voluptuary delight instead give the impression of playthings.

What is wanted, on the contrary, is authenticity, density, and a preponderance of moisture. And yet not without danger, for I, the good Sir Mix-A-Lot, am often afflicted with doubt and botheration by these aphrodisiacal lures.

Even as we speak, I turn my attention to musical tableaus preferred by the occidental rabble, and in them see coquettes with thighs so emaciated that their knees percuss in the manner of bone rattles. These coquettes are less to my taste than, for example, the esteemed track-and-field athlete Jackie Joyner--Kersee.

An aside, to the women of corporeal solidity and ethereal mystery: My desire is to fornicate with you. I will neither upbraid you verbally nor abuse you physically, but it is my duty to be forthright, and therefore to tell you my desire is to fornicate with you for many hours, perhaps until the sun rises. You are sexually desirable, and I desire you sexually.

Many philistines will disapprove of my lover's plaint because they fornicate with these women in question but once; I on the other hand, due to my abundance and mesomorphism, am more inclined to create heat through repetitious rubbing of tumid flesh and the slapping of bone on bone for sustained, hedonic duration. If you, fair lady, are possessed of these qualities, demonstrate them outwardly and you will be rewarded with the ululations of even the fairest of youths.

Some men's concubines, in the pursuit of shapeliness, employ the routines of Jane Fonda, and, for the purposes of rhyme, drive popular and economical Japanese automobiles. Yet backside of the former, Ms. Fonda, is bereft of the power afforded by the locomotive engine of the latter, a Honda, and as such, the longing of my serpentine phallus is unprovoked by this undesirable want of curvature. I grant the importance of exercise, and cast no prohibitions upon it as long as it comes in the form of side-bends or sit-ups. However, I enjoin and remonstrate, to perform exercises such as those demonstrated by Ms. Fonda might have the loathsome result of slimming the callipygous fundament in question.

There may even be those diabolical tricksters and madmen who argue that sizable haunches are less valuable than lead run through the alchemist's alembic and, in their phrenzy, part with you as lovers. In a way, I even thank these men -- their castoffs are my treasure, my dread pirate's booty!

Though the aforementioned popular periodicals confuse your copious voluptuousness with corpulence, I cannot agree with this assessment. Your stomach does not protrude, but your hips and breasts protrude mightily, and I want to have sex with you. The overly-linear ladies proffered by these periodicals are not to the taste of the times; rather, a woman who has not been denied a diet high in starches and complex carbohydrates is to the liking of the modern man.

Even some men who prefer these zatfig ladies, as is proper, are nothing but fools and charlatans. Though practiced and successful in the ways of wooing, these mongrels smite their embonpoint maidens with fists. But again, the rakes' refuse is my reward, and even as the unfortunate women nurse their wounds and anoint their bruises, I anxiously approach with the intention of engaging them in prurient caresses.

In conclusion, damsels and peeresses: If your hindquarters are orotund, and you are desirous of engaging with me in lubricious and shocking contretemps, dial 1-900-Mix-A-Lot and divulge to me the perverse and demoniac motive and content of your phantasies.

M'lady is possessed of haunches.

Your Life Stitched Shut

2011-02-18T17:19:00.007-06:00

In a hysterical Wired UK article about social networking called Your Life Torn Open: Sharing is a trap, Andrew Keen decries the "increasingly ubiquitous social network -- fuelled by our billions of confessional tweets and narcissistic updates -- that is invading the 'sacred precincts' of private and domestic life." He wants us to know that he thinks narcissism is bad, and that exposing strangers and would-be voyeurs to the machinations of our private lives is sacrilege, defilement of the holy ground that makes and keeps us human.

But he also wants us to know what a fucking cultured world-traveler he is, so he begins the article with this: "Every so often, when I'm in Amsterdam, I visit the Rijksmuseum to remind myself about the history of privacy. I go there to gaze at a picture called The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, which was painted by Jan Vermeer in 1663." See, he's in Amsterdam a lot, but sometimes when he's in Amsterdam -- he'd like us to know -- he goes to "the Rijksmuseum," which, he would further like us to know, he refers to as if he only speaks with people who know what that is. It wouldn't be enough to tell us that this painting exists; he has to set the scene, placing himself front and center, standing with his fist pressed thoughtfully to his chin, contemplating reverently this monument of Great Art. Because Andrew Keen, you understand, is very sophisticated.

The painting, Keen tells us, "is of an unidentified Dutch woman avidly (?) reading a letter. Vermeer's picture, to borrow a phrase from privacy advocates Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, is a celebration of the 'sacred precincts of private and domestic life'. It's as if the artist had kept his distance in order to capture the young woman, cocooned in her private world, at her least socially visible." This painting, in which a girl who doesn't know she's being watched is captured in a moment of privacy, is a "celebration" of not invading private spaces. I guess you've got to show a kid what his bathing area is before you can tell him that it's wrong for strangers to touch him there. Painting is one way to do it, but I tend to celebrate this blessed sacredness by watching women towel off while sitting on a tree-limb just outside their bathroom windows.

So Vermeer's painting keeps its distance "in order to capture" this poor woman "cocooned in her private world," which is basically the equivalent of preserving the magic of its transformation into a butterfly by tearing open a chrysalis and freezing a caterpillar with liquid nitrogen. Nothing celebrates what you love quite like killing what you love, embalming its corpse, pinning it to a wall, and inviting any dilettante with enough money to fly into Schiphol International Airport to take a look.

But Andrew Keen isn't just an appreciator of the arts and a champion of privacy -- he's a student of philosophy (and an ogler of corpses) as well. Oh, and he's still a fucking sophisticated, jetsetting, globetrotting playboy, he'd like us very much to know, and he's still strongly opposed to narcissism. "Every so often, when I'm in London, I visit University College to remind myself about the future of privacy. I go there to visit the tomb of the utilitarian social reformer Jeremy Bentham." See, sometimes he's in London -- but he's in London a lot, and only sometimes when he's in London does he vouchsafe his bougie taste and sophistication, and also his intense concern over the issues of the day that will be up to him to diagnose and, if this article is successful, maybe even cure, by communing with the dead body of a man he regards as his ideological enemy. Because, you see, Jeremy Bentham didn't believe in privacy, so it's not at all creepy for Andrew Keen, who says that looking into the private lives of other people is a kind of secular sin, to stand, fist pressed thoughtfully to chin, to gander at the "glass-and-wood mausoleum... from which the philosopher's waxy corpse has been watching over us for the last 150 years." Dead people don't have private lives. You can't rape a corpse.

Keen also demonstrates that I'm not the only writer in the world who can come up with misleading analogies: The compromised "real life" we're left with after the encroachment of omnipresent digital networking "could have been choreographed by Bentham." Moreover, Mark Zuckerberg's idea of "sharing," Keen writes, "could have been invented by Kafka." I like this misleading analogy very much: "Just as Josef K unwittingly shared all his known and unknown information with the authorities, so we are now all sharing our most intimate spiritual, economic and medical information with all the myriad 'free' social-media services, products and platforms." Except for the superficial differences -- like Joseph K being denied jurisprudential due process, being forced to undergo all kinds of meaningless and bizarre rituals that make it all but impossible for him to carry on with the job he hates at a shitty bank, and, in the end, being convicted for an unspecified crime and then stabbed to death by anonymous officials as punishment for this obscure guilt -- I am persuaded. Perhaps Kafka was secretly working on a manuscript he destroyed before his death called The Social Network, in which a number of shallow-yet-clever people search for meaning in their lives, against all odds and in the face of the strangling authority of the Law of the Father.

Keen further doomsays, "Today's digital social network is a trap. Today's cult of the social, peddled by an unholy alliance of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and communitarian idealists, is rooted in a misunderstanding of the human condition. The truth is that we aren't naturally social beings. Instead, as Vermeer reminds us in The Woman in Blue, human happiness is really about being left alone." This, of course, is preposterously stupid, and is based the idea that lasseiz-faire liberty -- "being left alone" -- is the opposite of being "social." If Keen is setting himself in diametrical opposition to the sociality offered by networking, then his ideal of human happiness -- and his idea of the truth of the human condition (!) -- is that we don't want to be watched or touched by anyone. The ideal manifestation of our humanity is solitary confinement, in which prisoners suffer "memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions and, under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy" (CNN). This craziness, according to a different psychiatrist, is a "a specific syndrome" due to "inadequate, noxious and/or restricted environmental and social stimulation. In more severe cases, this syndrome is associated with agitation, self-destructive behavior, and overt psychotic disorganization."

The Woman in Blue, we should remember, isn't left alone -- she just doesn't know she's being watched (by Vermeer and by us, voyeurs all). She is reading a letter, and enjoying the social contact that can be created -- miraculously -- in the void left by the absence of loved ones. Social networks, sinister as they can be, also let us feel watched by people we care about; and the feeling of their eyes on us is, not to put too fine a point on it, a reason to go on living. Keen asks, "What if the digital revolution, because of its disregard for the right of individual privacy, becomes a new dark ages? And what if all that is left of individual privacy by the end of the 21st century exists in museums alongside Vermeer's Woman in Blue? Then what?" Then we'll go on living our lives, just like they did in the "dark ages." And when the next renaissance comes, they'll have persecution and crusades, just like they did the last time. And if this is the beginning of the apocalypse, Keen will just be lucky to have blindfoldedly pinned the tale on the ass of the donkey every other fearmonger in history has missed.

High Theory: Accessible at Last!

2010-10-17T06:21:00.010-06:00

The prose style of what is known as literary theory -- a hodgepodge of German metaphysics and French gibberish spun out by a loose coterie of gay continental philosophers, post-gendered beard-strokers, half-mad babblers, and the odd full-on hypocrite -- is about as preposterous as a three-legged triceratops gouging with its horns at a whirlwind of duck feathers. (Witness, for instance, Judith Butler's infamous Bad Writing Contest-winning sentence for 1998.)

This style is adopted, argues evolutionist-cum-jester and disliker of theory Richard Dawkins, by "intellectual impostor[s] with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life." In a legendary depantsing of theory, reformed hoaxers Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont declare that a work of uncut Theory-with-a-capital-T is lucky to squeak out "a handful of intelligible sentences -- sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous" -- like so many pearls cast before, gobbled up, and shit out by swine. Semifamous (serious) philosopher Thomas Nagel isn't sure which piston drives theory's engine more forcefully: "invincible stupidity," or "the desire to cow the audience with fraudulent displays of theoretical sophistication." In fact, no one seems to be sure whether theory is the work of a dangerous cabal hellbent on undermining the very fabric of intellectual discourse, or a b-squad of Mr. Beans whose ineptitude would almost be charming only they could stop drooling all over their MedicAlert bracelets that warn of allergies to peanuts and lawn-grass.

Indeed, the rage for order shared by these unmaskers -- this desire for words to make sense -- wouldn't be nearly as interesting if the venom wasn't in part meant to conceal the deep anxiety that perhaps there exists an almost-unimaginable third way, somewhere between diabolical evil and developmental disability -- what if this theory stuff isn't total horseshit? What if it's brilliant and I just don't get it?! When it's invoked, this anxiety is brushed aside with a mirthful chortle, as if these hatchetmen were conceding, as an afterthought, "Of course, everybody knows it's true that OJ Simpson is technically innocent, according to the Constitution -- but come on."

Noam Chomsky, who has had Serious Documentaries made about him and is referenced in Good Will Hunting, and whose intellectual credentials are therefore unimpeachable, has offered the most concise example of the confused combination of rage and insecurity, condescension and defensiveness that characterizes any really rollicking anti-theory screed: "No one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of 'theory' that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out." It's a dazzling rhetorical strategy -- Chomsky plays the wide-eyed naif who is loathe to think an entire international industry of professional writers, thinkers, teachers, and students is... well... it's too horrible even to say!

But if he is capable of scoring from the goalie box, he is also adept at playing offense-as-defense, crossing and striking so as not to be struck. Of seminal theory bigwig Jacques Derrida, Chomsky says, "I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I’ve been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain." You see? Even as a baby -- or close enough -- Chomsky would have been hip to the con. Derrida's work is appalling. Pathetic. A failure. Unless it's actually really good. Doubt it though.

This dexterous double-doubt -- "is it good or does it suck, and either way, why am I so mad about it?" -- wobbles on the crux of that age-old problem, the problem which is very nearly theory's only subject of concern: Is the meaning of a given statement comprehensible in all its facets and tints, or does some of its significance evade ready comprehension? Put another way, "Does this here word-caterpillar mean something smarter than what it looks like?"

Well, in a half-assed attempt to clear up this confusion, to tear down the language barrier between self-evident Dawkinsian or readily-intelligible Chomskese and the Nonglish of English departments worldwide, I have gone beyond the pale and violated the unspoken pact that binds all of us who make our living, no matter how obliquely, through the incantations and ululations of the unkempt and savage hobo-philosophy known as high theory. I have taken it upon myself to Benedict Arnold the whole theory enterprise by translating select paragraphs by certain theoretical luminaries -- without losing an iota of intended meaning (jk lol) -- into voices that might be less alien to those casual readers repelled by theory's uncircumcised pomp and smooth-shaven circumstance. In so doing I hope to allow self-loathing positivists, pragmatists in the throes of a dark night of the soul, and scientists on their brain-period to accept the brilliance, profundity, and salubrious revolutionary power of theory, as God intended, or to reject it wholesale once and for all, without the self-conscious pussyfooting of men wearing skirts for the first time publicly.

On with the show. First, the abstruse theoreticians in their own words. Next, their words banged and yanked into the everyday speech of unicorns and pegasusi.

Theodor Adorno, sourpuss: "Cultivated philistines are in the habit of requiring that a work of art 'give' them something. They no longer take umbrage that works are radical, but fall back on the shamelessly modest assertion that they do not understand. This eliminates even opposition, their last negative relationship to truth, and the offending object is smilingly catalogued among its kind, consumer commodities that can be chosen or refused without even having to take responsibility for doing so."
Theodor Adorno, as translated into an embittered-but-lazy art school traditionalist: "Posers who say they care about art but really don't care about art, man, all they want to do is take, they don't want to give anything back. But they're too stupid, or too scared to be wrong, even to be mad that this gallery is showing poop sculptures and blood paintings. They just stand there looking at some installation, like some mobile made out of used tampons glued to turtle bones, and they're all, 'I don't get it.' They don't even call bullshit. They're just like 'well, that's not really my thing.' That's bullshit, man. They don't even take a stand for anything. That's why the art is dying."

Giorgio Agamben, crypto-fascist: "Being in force without significance:...What, after all, is the structure of the sovereign ban if not that of a law that is in force but does not signify? Everywhere on earth men live today in the ban of a law and a tradition that are maintained solely as the 'zero point' of their own content, and that include men within them in the form of a pure relation of abandonment. All societies and all cultures today (it does not matter whether they are democratic or totalitarian, conservative or progressive) have entered into a legitmation crisis in which law (we mean by this the entire text of tradition in its regulative form, whether the Jewish Torah or the Islamic Shariah, Christiam dogma or the profane nomos) is in force as the pure 'Nothing of Revelation.' But this is precisely the structure of the sovereign relation, and the nihilism in which we are living is, from this perspective, nothing but the coming to light of this relation as such" (Homo Sacer, 51).
Giorgio Agamben, as translated into a caricature of an Appalachian wingnut: "The gubmint just do what it want for no good reason. The gubmint always hangin' 'round behind you, but you can't see it, you don't know when it be making you do something and you don't even know it's making you do it. Everybody in the world being run by gubmints, and gubmints don't care none 'bout people -- just suck us dry. Everywhere in the world, Muslims and liberals and fascists and pinkos, all the same. They take away your freedoms. Gubmint's the enemy of the common man. It don't care none. Never did."

Walter Benjamin, tragic tramp: "What does language communicate? It communicates the mental being corresponding to it. It is fundamental that this mental being communicates itself in language and not through language. Languages, therefore, have no speaker, if this means someone who communicates through these languages. Mental being communicates itself in, not through a language, which means that it is not outwardly identical with linguistic being. Mental being is identical with linguistic being only insofar as it is capable of communication. What is communicable in a mental entity is its linguistic entity. Language therefore communicates the particular linguistic being of things, but their mental being only insofar as this is directly included in their linguistic being, insofar as it is capable of being communicated."
Walter Benjamin, as translated into a stoned dude who just put down an acoustic guitar at 3 in the morning: "It's like, we think we say stuff with language. But what does language say? What if what language says is itself. Like, do you ever feel like when you say something, it's not like you're talking with language, it's like language is talking with you? Like, what if language is like, this body, and we're all just like little cells in it. No, think about it -- like, sperm is part of us, but at the same time sperm are these little animals in our bodies. What if we're just language's sperm? So like, what we think we mean isn't really what we mean, because like we're just on a mission for language, and we can't see the bigger picture. So like, when we say stuff, we mean what we think we mean, but we also mean, like, way more. Because, like, language means all this other stuff, too."

Paul de Man, Nazi-sympathizer who Jews sympathized with, fan of irony: "In the study of literature, the question of the self appears in a bewildering network of often contradictory relationships among a plurality of subjects. It appears first of all, as in the Third Critique of Kant, in the act of judgment that takes place in the mind of the reader; it appears next in the apparently intersubjective relationships that are established between the author and the reader; it governs the intentional relationship that exists, within the work, between the constitutive subject and the constituted language; it can be sought, finally, in the relationship that the subject establishes, through the mediation of the work, with itself. From the start, we have at least four possible and distinct types of self: the self that judges, the self that reads, the self that writes, and the self that reads itself. The question of finding the common level on which all these selves meet and thus of establishing the unity of a literary consciousness stands at the beginning of the main methodological difficulties that plague literary studies."
Paul de Man, as translated into a middle school English teacher so careful to be precise that she almost becomes confusing: "In this class we're all going to put on different hats and go to a lot of faraway lands without leaving our seats! You're all going to have opinions about what you read. But what's funny about reading is, someone else's words are in your head! Think about that -- you're thinking in your head, but you're thinking somebody else's thoughts! That'll tickle your noodle! So we're all going to have to try to figure out what the author was trying to say in his book, and what it means to us. But also, it's important to think of what it the writer thought his book meant. So we're going to have to put on four hats in all. We're going to be reading, and thinking about what we read, and writing about what we think, and even thinking about what we think! Did that blow your mind? Believe you me, it's not easy to wear those hats all at the same time! Have you ever put on four hats and looked at yourself in the mirror? It might be a fashion no-no, but it's an English yes-yes!"

Jacques Derrida, grand wizard of nonsensical sense: "The two concepts (friend/enemy) consequently intersect and ceaselessly change places. They intertwine, as though they loved each other, all along a spiralled hyperbole: the declared enemy (Blake declares the enemy by ordering him to declare himself: be my enemy), the true enemy, is a better friend than the friend. For the enemy can hate or wage war on me in the name of friendship, for Friendships sake, out of friendship for friendship; if in sum he respects the true name of friendship, he will respect my own name. He will hear what my name should, even if it does not, properly name: the irreplaceable singularity which bears it, and to which the enemy then bears himself and refers. If he hears my order, if he addresses me, me myself, he respects me, at hate's distance, me beyond me, beyond my own consciousness. And if he desires my death, at least he desires it, perhaps, him mine, singularly. The declared friend would not accomplish as much in simply declaring himself a friend while missing out on the name: that which imparts the name both to friendship and to singularity. That which deserves the name."
Jacques Derrida, as translated into a teenage girl who wants you to think she's more distraught, and more thoughtful, than she really is: "Omigod, sometimes I hate my friends so much. I know it sounds totally stupid but I feel like my enemies are the only people I can trust. It's like, I trust my friends one minute but then they stab me in the back. Ashley is totally acting like we're total BFFs, but ten seconds later she went through my bag while I wasn't looking and she's using my lipgloss again without asking, which is just super disrespectful. It's my property and she doesn't even have the common courtesy to ask if it's ok, and I've already told her not to do it a bajillion times. She totally would ask if we weren't such good friends, so it's like, what good are friends anyway? But like, when Blake told me I was his worst enemy when we were playing badminton in gym, I totally trusted him. I know it sounds retarded or whatever, but it's true. It's like, at least I know where I stand with Blake. I feel like Ashley just hangs out with me because people think she's cool, she does it just to be seen with me, so she doesn't look like such a spazz like she did when she was all fat and had acne last year before I showed her how to put on foundation and not eat three Fruit by the Foots every day at lunch. But Blake like totally hates me and he doesn't even care how it makes him look. It's so honest that sometimes I almost feel like he's, like, in love with me. He doesn't go rooting through my bag and taking my stuff and pretending he didn't think I would be mad. Even if he did, at least he'd just be doing it to piss me off. He'd be thinking of me and not just how everybody thinks he's totally popular because I let him smoke with me in my car during open period. God, Ashley is such a bitch!"

You know what's fucked up? I'm not even high.

2010-09-15T23:24:00.004-06:00

It's interesting that people who are intellectually invested in defending evolution and denigrating intelligent design are also, in a strange way, backed into the corner of viewing intelligence as a uniquely human thing, qualitatively different (and more valuable) than whatever animates the other bits of space-junk randomly bumping uglies out there.

The design argument runs that the world has clearly been planned and built with such care that some intelligence must be in control, must have lain the ground rules and must in turn be enforcing them. Nonsense! cry evolutionists. It's perfectly plausible that it was merely a random string of events, and as we all know, on an endless timeline the infinitesimally unlikely becomes all but predestined. It's science, not intelligence! There's no wizard in the sky! The heavens are filled with trudging mechanisms, spasms of inky plasma, stars swallowing other stars and spitting out comets that crash operatically into balls of unimaginable flame in a fit of cannibalistic rapacity even more harrowing for the fact that the universe has no desires. It doesn't want to destroy. It doesn't care either way. It just destroys, because insensate things are fucking cruel. Except not really, because again, they don't give a shit.

It's odd, right? We say that there's no intelligent force governing everything, which in a sneaky way ratifies the idea that there's something fundamentally unique, special, and singular about human intelligence. Our atheism becomes a kind of self-congratulation -- we're special! -- that we're trying to critique in believers. Instead of arguing that there's no such thing as intelligence, or at least that human thought -- and life in general -- isn't qualitatively different than all the other crap that's going on, we implicitly argue that we're the only tiny pocket of intelligence for as far as the eye can see. Creationists argue that there is a god and we are created in his image; we argue that there is no god, because he would have to be created in our image it would just make too much sense and shit would be cool and nice and pleasant to live in when clearly that's not true. I mean, look around, man. Everything is a swirling mass, a primordial blob of who knows what, and we're a privileged enclave whose spasms of thought make us special, if for no other reason than the exquisite awareness of our impeding, collective doom, the fact that someday we will be washed away by the cosmic equivalent of Scrubbing Bubbles, and our recorded history will become a cold, dead monument to nothing. The power of observation will be gone, and with it will go any shred of significance, in any sense of the word.

On the other hand, we take heart by reading BBC Science articles and saying things like, "it's a statistical near-certainty that there are other intelligent life-forms somewhere in the deep reaches of space!" But we belittle people who believe -- based on what they swear is experience but what we insist is misguided faith -- that they've seen, say, a UFO. We have to say we believe wholeheartedly in the fantastically improbable, but we don't believe it cares about us, and to suggest otherwise would be lunacy. Because, again, we're the only thing in our neighborhood with the special skill to care about stuff; and even if we weren't, we're not that interesting anyway. (Narcissistic self-loathing.) If there's anything intelligent out there, it hasn't found us yet, because we haven't found it. And we're kind of the gold standard around here, I don't know if you noticed. We're kind of the only game in town.

Quantum and string theory -- not that I understand the first thing about them or can talk about them without mumbling like a nincompoop -- are fascinating in this respect: By suggesting that, say, the universe is just a tiny bubble in an endless sheet of bubble-wrap with and endless number of other sheets of bubble-wrap above and below it that an insane toddler is taking its sweet time popping, one bubble at a time, we get to imagine all kinds of insane Rube Goldbergish scenarios for the creation of the world.

If our argument, as Free Thinkers and all that shit, is that the universe makes an elegant kind of sense insofar as nearly impossible things become necessary in the long run, does it become logically necessary to suppose that at some point, a three-eyed troll in negligee named Carter Burwell once vomited up a celestial pool of filth, one lonely rising bubble of which was the Big Bang, or a Bigger Big Bang before the Big Bang that contains our Big Bang and a billion like it? And Carter Burwell is, in turn, a quivering quark in a monumental atom of gold so vast it's dense enough to make you cry and valuable enough to cause a war between a Greek in a loincloth and an Egyptian with a weird animal head, which the Egyptian wins because the Greek is crushed from out of nowhere between the thumb and finger of the lunatic toddler?

The forms bigness this big take on are predictably anthropomorphic & anthropocentric. I can't imagine the kind of new, mind-incinerating entities I hope straddle universes, and what kinds of personalities they have, and what kind of complicated things they might do that, if we had a vantage on them, would look strikingly like intelligence, except of a sort so vast that it merks humanity's like '86 Tyson did Marvis Frazier.

So I imagine awesome, slobbering babies and giant titans fighting over shiny stuff I wish I had. But this is optimism. More likely, the universe and the universes around it are cold, dark places lit up periodically with terrifying flashes of rending light none of it matters, in the scheme of things, any more than we do. Which is to say, not at all. Fortunately for us, the antidote to despair is ignoring its causes and acting like we're fucking awesome. We're so fucking smart, it's incredible.

Here's what bothers me about, but also saves me from going insane under the weight of, eternity and infinity -- it's impossible not to think of them as, respectively, A WHOLE BUNCH of time and A WHOLE LOT of space or stuff or whatever. But that's never seemed quite right to me. Eternity and infinity are the same as no time and no space; not just the biggest number you can imagine +1, but the smallest number you can imagine and then it vanishes. Absolute zero. This, to me, is a great consolation. If it turns out we're wrong -- if it turns out there's a smartypants god and he invented everything and the last will be first and the first will be last and the last and the first will be judged by their acts, it's comforting to know that an ever-lasting suffering in a never-ending lake of fire is also a never-starting suffering in a non-existent lake of fire. Hell takes so long that it's over in literally less time than an instant, the smallest division of time imaginable but even shorter; and heaven is so big it can fit in the shoe of one of the army of angels dancing on the head of a pin.

On attention sp... hey, look, a beaver!

2010-08-20T22:05:00.006-06:00

Speed is important to me in a really troubling way. Basically I mean efficiency, as in "requiring little time to work," but I would be wrong not to mention the dextroamphetamine salts in the generic Adderall I get from my psychiatrist who looks like a skeleton. Mentally, I am a rat-race addled working man. I just happen to have the schedule of a bum. I want to do things as efficiently as possible, with as little effort as possible, and glean maximum results with minimum expenditure. I don’t like spending a lot of time on anything except trying to absorb things – recently, it’s been podcasts about things I half-care about.

I listen to hours of podcasts every day or two. Semi-professional production values meshed with semi-articulate talkers all served over a bed of self-serving unselfconscious hypocrisy and convenient position-taking. It doesn't really matter what they take themselves to be about; that's what they all consist of. Every podcast I listen to is basically terrible, but they’re all comforting. I don’t learn very much, except by a sort of osmosis – I’m only half paying attention, and I’m not paying attention to learn so much as I’m paying attention so I don’t feel so alone. This is one of the amazing things about all new media, to me – especially new media that captures the voice or movement of another human being. I’m pretty sure we haven’t entirely learned to parse the fact that they’re not really there – it’s a presence that feels good, that takes a certain burden of solitude away. Radio, at its best, is like being told a bedtime story all day.

There is this sense of absorption – of learning without trying, of doing or being able to do without trying. This was what I was trying to do by getting lots of audiobooks and mp3 lectures about my field. I wanted to replace reading and learning via elbow grease with the facility of absorption. But it hasn’t worked for me, and it won’t. And that’s partly because I’ve come to identify literature – particularly American literature from the 19^th century, the subject of the aforesaid audiobooks – with work. And work is something that I believe you should only do on the clock.

I have a more or less evil, capitalistic sense of time. I’m entering my fourth year of grad school – my writing year, in which I’m supposed to produce on my own time and with my own schedule – so I don’t have a clock. Nobody watches me, or makes me do anything, so I always have the sense that I’m shirking responsibility to do something fun at the expense of some Scrooge-ish overseer who, for once, isn’t paying attention. It's like, the only way I can make my dalliance with irrelevancy significant is by making it a romanticized "fuck you" to the powers that be -- which, make no mistake, actually exist, but also don't give a fuck what I do with my day to day. I think deep down I feel I’m cheating my employers out of something by getting paid not to do any work, and there’s something incredibly satisfying about that – I am exploiting them right back for exploiting me, the bastards.

But there’s also something absurd and pathetic about it all. It’s just such a waste, such an orgy of resentful feelings and bad faith. I don’t do anything because doing stuff is hard, and doing stuff is hard because it’s work, and it’s work because it’s what I do. It’s who I am. It structures my identity and my reality. But I hate my reality and I hate my identity and I want to escape it. How can I use literature or theory as an escape from my identity or my reality – which is WHAT LITERATURE AND THEORY TELL ME I’M SUPPOSED TO USE THEM FOR – if they’re the very things that structure my identity and my reality? I want to escape from these things, not use them to escape something else.

So I do.

I play Red Dead Redemption, which I bought for my new Playstation 3. It’s an incredibly immersive experience. It will never yield anything. But it's awful fun, though.

Yesterday I took a legally-procured Adderall. I have a medical condition, you see, called attention deficit disorder, the symptoms of which only rear their heads when there's something I am supposed to be doing but cannot do because I lack the willpower and ability to care and gumption and tenacity and sticktoitiveness. It's in the DSM-IV, look it up. I fully intended to do some work after taking said psychostimulant, but my new HDMI cables came and I just had to see how Red Dead Redemption would look on my new LCD TV without decades-antiquated component cables.

I ended up playing for 9 and a half hours or so. Finally forced myself to stop out of disgust when I couldn’t find any cougars – I’m supposed to kill two cougars with my hunting knife to become a “master hunter” – and I kept getting mauled by grizzly bears, which are entirely too stealthy and entirely too aggressive to be plausible in this fucking game.

I stopped to go to Target to buy a wrench so I could finally put together the Ikea kitchen shelf unit that’s been obstructing some pathway or other since I moved into this new apartment some weeks ago. The cheapest adjustable wrench at Target was $20, so I bought a $5 pair of non-needle nose pliers and stripped the shit out of the bolts tightening them up. So I hope I don’t ever have to take it apart, but at least I put it together, and now it stands there, monolithic, holding up my microwave, my Foreman grill, my coffee maker, and my toaster oven. A true monument to convenience. Except I accidentally installed one of the shelves in such a way as to block the outlet, and I haven’t the gumption to take it out and put it back in. I blame my ADD.

But the point of this story is that, when I drove to Target, I felt simultaneously like I was sleepwalking and like I was still playing a video game – everything felt consequenceless, and everything seemed at a remove, as if through a screen, projected onto my windshield instead of existing on the other side of it. I knew I was driving recklessly and dangerously, but I couldn’t make myself care enough to correct it. I fiddled with the radio, flipping until I found a song, not that I wanted to listen to, but that I wanted to soundtrack my experience. When I got to Target, I stared at the wall of tools long after I’d discovered that the kind of wrench I wanted wasn’t to be had, as if it was a problem I could solve if only I scoured the terrain long and concentratedly enough.

An interesting question, to me, is whether or not video games and the like are actually going to destroy the attention spans of generations to come. I guess I’m in one of the first generation of kids who never knew what it was like to write without having a word processing equivalent on a personal computer at home, and I never knew what it was like not to have recourse to, say, Microsoft Solitaire when I got bored. I have played Microsoft Solitaire for entire days, before, honing technique, subconsciously learning probability, adjusting the way I move the mouse for speed and precision. I have dreamt in solitaire. I have lived life seeing things and people as if they were solitaire cards, and as if what I was supposed to do with them was turn them over in the proper order.

The first time I took Adderall, I looked at porn for eight hours.

Adderall is a wicked drug. Some new users, yours truly tragically included, enter a state called "hyperfocus." Hyperfocus is about what it sounds like -- at the expense of everything else, you sink into the Fire Swamp quicksand of whatever subject happens to be at hand, and you don't leave until the subject or the drug is exhausted. It's a race for last place.

Adderall also makes you incredibly, preposterously, Pepe Le Peu-ishly horny.

But mainly what Adderall does is suck all the non-essential blood out of your body and send it to your brain. The effect of this is more or less what you'd expect: In the end it's something like being a late-career Philip Roth character -- desperately wanting, prurient, desiring, wanting, needing, lusting, craving. But there's just not a lot going on down there.

On the other hand, you can concentrate forever. On anything. But you don't want to concentrate on anything, because this hotshot of speed to your brain has made you into a quasi-impotent sexual dynamo -- you're like one of those Greek statues of a fertility god with the dick broke off. Pornwatching, in this state, makes you a kind of ultramodern Tantalus, reaching for grapes but not having long enough arms. There's a terrible pun to be had in there in there somewhere.

So anyway, the first time I took Adderall, I sat there looking at gallery after gallery of still shots. I decided to play a game. With most Thumbnail Gallery Post sites, certain thumbnails will redirect you to an entirely new TGP site with entirely new thumbnails of entirely new and promising galleries, which in turn direct you to new TGP yadda yadda yadda. The game I made up was to click on every thumbnail that -- at the time -- struck me as "undeniable," and only stop when I had managed to close every single gallery and every single TGP array.

I completed this mission. It is possible. It is horrible, horrible, and it takes eight hours, but it's possible. When I stopped, I started seeing porn in my life the same way I had seen solitaire years before. Everything took on a certain positional or appendagial significance that was wholly unwanted and thoroughly unsettling. When I finally went to bed, 36 hours after my first dose of the drug, I dreamt about porn. But not porn as in porn -- porn as in everything in life is porn. I was able to focus for eight hours on this thing that I really did not want to be focusing on, and for hours and hours after that it wouldn't leave my subconscious -- it provided a kind of organizing principle for my entire life.

Yet, I have trouble sitting down to read a single page, or to think about – much less write down – what’s been on my mind. The idea of paying attention to something at the expense of everything else is an almost crippling affliction to me.

When I was a kid, I had a paper route. Every morning, I would deliver 40 or 60 newspaper, and at the end of the month, I would get 40 or 60 dollars. It was a pretty shitty gig, but it gave me exactly enough money to spend exactly one entire day at the arcade. My mom would drop me off in the morning and pick me up a workday or so later. I would be drenched in sweat, almost post-coitally spent. And in those eight, ten, twelve hours, I would have participated with full focus in a fantasy world built out of pixels by other people. I would have a near-obsessive drive to correct mistakes I’d made, to approximate the goal of perfection that videogames, so much more than life, render approachable and plausible – even if, like life, they leave it lingering past the horizon of your limited capabilities. It was a state of deep concentration, totally oblivious to time or space, only interested in Street Fighter 2 or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or The Simpsons or even – and most agonizingly – that fucking machine with the tub full of cheap toys and The Claw.

I spent hundreds of dollars on that Claw, always winning an armful of stuffed creatures and cheap watches before my money was up, never feeling like I got my money’s worth, and always returning to it with a sense of indignation, as if THIS TIME would be the time I wouldn’t let the machine beat me – I’d come away on the upper hand. This is, I imagine, what it feels like to gamble – to develop an animistic relationship to “the house” that makes you resent your own (probabilistically pre-ordained) failings as the sinister machinations of some imposing but faraway intelligence. Winning becomes personal, but it’s personal against no one – it’s nothing but a measly point of pride, and your triumph wins you no plaudits and tarnishes no rival's honor.

Later, as a young teen, I punched holes in my bedroom's plaster walls – perhaps a dozen holes. Some of them were because I was growing up in small-town Iowa and the small-town Iowa girls I thought at the time were hot but have gone on to learn were on the threshold between gross and average didn't like me like I liked them; but most of the holes were punched over Mortal Kombat II for the Sega Genesis. I would come home from school, where I had been bullied and shamed in a million disparate, and always somehow novel, ways, where I'd been marginalized and made to feel insignificant – and, what’s more, like I was playing a game for which everybody else knew the rules, but they were so baroquely complex that I’d never be able to make sense of them without a crib sheet I’d never be given. And I’d come home to this box, which I’d play for hours every day, until my parents told me to stop – that is, until I realized I could just keep playing after they told me to stop and they’d eventually stop trying to get me to stop.

This made sense to me. I knew that if I honed my reflexes, learned very specific and recognizable patterns, adapted my idiosyncratic way of understanding the problem to the fully intelligible problem itself, I would end up solving it. I could win, which was a sensation I was promised nowhere else in life. Not in art or literature, not in social interaction, not in organized athletics – and I was a good athlete, goddamnit, but I was mercilessly bullied off the soccer team by a kid who was bullied so much he finally had to transfer. The big wheel keeps on turning.

I certainly couldn't hope for this kind of promised success academically. I couldn’t win at school. I couldn’t escape the sense that no matter what I did I was a disappointment to someone, that I couldn’t delegate my time in a way that would make my efforts satisfactory to everyone looming over me in judgment – a half-dozen teachers in wildly disparate subjects and two parents who only showed genuine interest when something was wildly wrong, and who brought me up to think I was at my best when I didn’t cause trouble but didn’t do anything that warranted special attention, so exhausted were they from dealing with my terrorist of a criminal of a sister.

It’s not that I particularly wanted to underachieve in school. I didn’t much care either way. But my teachers so thoroughly drilled it into my head that I was underachieving so prodigiously that my young, stupid mind only took away that I was young and stupid, and that I couldn’t really do any of the things they wanted me to do, so I should only do what I want to do. I can only assume that their attempts to shame me for putting zero scholarly effort in were intended as motivational, intended to stoke the fire of passion for knowledge they suspected burned just under the surface ashes of my cartoonishly morose persona. You should have seen my shock when I saw that my history teacher, who I’d only given the form to that morning in spite of the fact that we were supposed to give at least 2 weeks notice, gave me all 1s on a scholarship recommendation. But I didn’t catch any of these subtle signals. I thought he was just fucking with me. It was all part of the game I so stupendously misunderstood at the time, which I now take such delight in trying to decipher. I’m not sure if it’s across-the-board difficult to hint kids in the right direction, but I do know that it was impossible to hint me into doing what they wanted me to do. I wanted to be told, and no one ever told me shit -- the nudged and finessed and cajoled, and if there's one thing I've learned from my romantic life it's that I'm entirely too thick to take hints. So I did what I wanted to do.

And I wanted to play Mortal Kombat.

And when that didn’t work out the way I wanted it to, I wanted to punch holes in my wall.

This seems off the beaten track of concentration and attention span. But consider what people bemoan when they talk about the intellectual decline they see in the youth today. Great Books. Epic Poems. Ethics. Fucking Opera. Intellectual issues considered broadly, apart from soundbites or blurbs.

Youth’s inabilities are painted as a decline in the faculty to pay attention to shit we don’t care about, and have no reason to care about (or at least, are given no incentive to care about). And, what’s more to the point – these things are unpleasant. And nobody makes bones about this. Reading a Henry James novel, for the mass of men, is awful. Sure, there’s the odd odd duck who does enjoy it – and these are generally the people who try to make everybody else feel guilty for not enjoying it – but enjoyment isn’t really the game, here. Rather, it’s about tradition or heritage or genius or greatness or fucking human dignity (which I’ve always found to be a remarkably curious concept for a species whose coping strategy for dying appears to consist of forcing the aged to become senile and shit themselves and move very slowly and take very seriously things nobody else takes seriously at all.) It's about doing what people have always done, because that's just the way people do it, and it would just be a shame to lose that.

With videogames, the rewards are immediate and visceral.

They’re not, on the other hand, metaphysically satisfying. At least not when they’re your primary means of subsistence, the thing upon which your life is predicated.

But here’s the thing. NOTHING that you predicate your life upon is satisfying to the least degree. Literature is not satisfying unless it’s an escape from the horrors of your own life. Work is not a solace unless it blocks out the horrors of home. Alcohol isn’t any fun if you drink it all day, every day -- then it's just another fucking job. Vocations are miserable. But most of the people who tell us we should be doing more things that are intellectually rigorous – that require more attention, that force us to concentrate – seem to have no idea that we can immerse ourselves, life and mind and body and all, into Madden ’06 for 18 hours straight without eating or drinking anything. They have no idea that when they tell us we’re failing when we don’t learn this shit they think we should learn for the betterment of our souls even though none of us believe in souls anymore, we want to fail because what did THEY ever succeed at? I would love to be shown the generation who excelled at mathematics and concentrated on things that aren’t fun and really hunkered down to read long works of literature who didn’t, at the end of the day, feel as empty as we do, and who didn’t, at the end of the day, engage in wars and crimes and rape fantasies and wicked thoughts and petty thefts just as callow and horrifying as our own. It would give me something to shoot for.

The only problem now is, I hate all of my peers.

The end.

I, Power-Bottom

2010-07-25T14:54:00.010-06:00

I have a theory that the closest a heterosexual male can come to learning what another heterosexual male is like in bed is by grappling with him. But this doesn't go for just any two guys who have never grappled before. As with sex, the first few times basically consist of flailing, barely-concealed terror, unrealistic expectations, and crushing ineptitude. But once you know where to put your hands, and once you know how to shift your hips, and once you know the appropriate responses acts of aggression, you establish a baseline comfort level and start to develop a legitimate personality -- a set of skills and tactics that actually constitutes a kind of identity. It's hard to imagine, for instance, what it would be like to have sex entirely differently from how you have sex now, but once you have sex with your second partner it's surprising how different -- for all the consistencies -- each person is.

Grappling is the same way. Everyone has a certain style. Everyone learns the basic moves, but they work differently for everybody's body. And entirely different idioms, virtually different languages, develop out of roughly the same syntax. This is, in a sense, true of all sports, but grappling is more intimate than just about any other athletic endeavor. It's competition based on the unmediated communication of two bodies in contact. For instance: I know, by feeling where your limbs and your core are, and where your body is going, where I need to go to beat you to the spot. I know, by listening to your breathing, whether you're tired, and how hard you can push. I know when you moan you're about to give up, and I know when you grunt you're about to fight back. I know, by feeling your sweat all over me, that you are fucking disgusting and I'm going to get a staph infection.

As you can see, it's very much like sex. And everyone has a different specialty. There are guys who are wizards from side-control.

There are guys with suffocating back-mounts.

There are well-rounded guys with skills in all areas, but who don't dazzle you anywhere. There are guys with gaping holes in their games, weak spots, so you know if you wiggle a specific block they'll topple, Jenga-style. Then there are virtuosos, the kind of people who make every person you've ever met who says they're "good in bed" because they've gotten over their fear of leaving the light on look like a fraud. Watching my instructor grapple is like that scene in Watchmen where four Dr. Manhattans are having sex with Laurie while simultaneously making scientific breakthroughs in the other room. Basically the difference between him and me as grapplers is the same as the difference between me and Gandalf as wizards.

There are also pressure top-control guys, and I hate grappling with them.

They get on top of you and just wrench and twist you, manhandle you, out-strength and out-muscle you until they get you where they want you. They make mince-meat of you.

Of course, pressure top-control is the classic way to grapple. It's the way it's supposed to work, and the way it works at its highest level. It's why amateur wrestling is the best foundation for combat sports. The philosophy is simple: You power a guy onto the ground -- you get into a dominant position -- you neutralize his defense -- you attack until he submits. In amateur wrestling, the fight is over when you pin a guy's shoulders to the mat. The objective is simply to be on top, and for your opponent to have no way out. It's just all kinda... rapey-y... isn't it?

Amateur wrestling is generally done by the kind of people who wrestled at your high school, and those people are generally bad people.

I, on the other hand, am a guard player -- or what some affectionately (?) refer to as a "power-bottom." I like to fight off my back. This also means I start every fight in the least threatening position imaginable: the butt-scoot.

(We could go into all the ways this parallels my courtship strategy, but I believe it's important to leave certain things unsaid, for mystery's sake.)

There are a couple reasons for this. First, it's the best way to exploit my Gumby-ish flexibility by gift-wrapping people with my armlike legs into awkward positions with stupid names like "crackhead control."

More importantly, it allows me to attack and control from a situation that is typically submissive. It's a subversive way to fight -- by doing it, I re-appropriate a subaltern position and extract a new kind of power that counters the hegemony of the bourgeois status-quo of what fighting is "supposed" to be. It enacts a leveling deterritorialization that explodes constrictive stratifications, provides a line of flight to escape from the fascist regime of vertical, top-down power into the horizontal bleed of The Real.

I'm totally kidding. But hey, look, you can do Deleuzian literary criticism on literally anything, and that's something, right?

I herniated the left side of the C6/C7 disc in my neck -- again -- about a month and a half ago during BJJ class. This is apparently one of the worst discs to injure, because the nerve it protects is responsible for the left side of your body. Such as your heart. And your arm.

The first thing that happens when there's direct pressure on this cervical nerve is that your tricep shuts off. Poof. Gone. Nothing. It can't flex, and it almost instantly starts to atrophy. It turns out that this is the worst possible coping strategy your body could adopt, because when your tricep shuts off, all the other muscles in your arm and shoulder clench up into a vicelike Rube Goldberg contraption of overcompensation. The main problem here is that these other muscles are the muscles that pulled the disc out of alignment in the first place, and the only way to get it back where it needs to be is by engaging the tricep. But your central nervous system is telling your body that flexing this particular muscle is impossible, and your central nervous system is one hell of a bureaucrat. What it says, goes.

I hurt myself doing duck-unders, a wrestling move that somebody with a bad neck has no business practicing with a fiery ex-wrestler who really, passionately wants me to do it right for some reason. My head hit his arm, my neck folded back, and I felt a tingle in my shoulder that trickled, Reaganomically, down my arm.

At first, I thought I'd just pulled a muscle, and in retrospect I regret the fact that I shook it off and kept wrestling with people much bigger and stronger than I am for the next hour and a half; though, when I got to my car and the adrenaline wore off and I felt the characteristic numb tingling in my fingertips, I felt like a fucking savage for having toughed it out for so long. I felt considerably less tough after the half-hour drive home. I pulled up to my apartment building feeling like an army of radioactive wasps had gone to war with my shoulder, and I'm not sure I would have been able to finish out the drive if I hadn't kept myself occupied by screaming non-sequiturs at the top of my lungs at people on the sidewalk. Which is hilarious, by the way.

One of the most unsettling, and most characteristic, side effects of this particular herniated disc is "referred pain." All the signals from the nerves in your arm are routed through the central master-nerves in your spinal column on their way to your brain, but when your spinal column is compromised it interprets the pain as coming from everywhere other than where it's actually coming from. You're not supposed to feel anything in your spine -- that's why it's wrapped in armor. Essentially this is the same thing that happens to amputees when they get phantom limb -- acute sensations that actually exist nowhere below your neck, and yet are absolutely real -- except, mercifully, the limb is still there.

So that's the upside -- your arm isn't gone. The downside is that herniating this disc is, so they tell me, one of the most painful mundane injuries that can happen to a body, up there with kidney stones and childbirth. It has unfortunate social consequences, too, because it's difficult to explain -- to your friends why you're in such a terrible mood, to your doctor what hurts when what hurts is just past your fingers and somewhere to the left of your elbow, to your bosses why you can't get out of bed for a week straight.

I hurt my neck on a Saturday and didn't get out of bed until Monday. I didn't go to the doctor, because my health insurance makes it much cheaper to go to student health before I go to any independent providers. So I sucked on Aleve like Now 'N' Laters for forty-eight hours, moved as little as possible, tried to sleep, and tried not to breath.

I called Student Health services and made an appointment for 1:30 that afternoon, but the receptionist transferred me to the head nurse told me to go directly to the ER because "there's not a lot we can do for you here." I told her I would, hung up the phone, and started sobbing uncontrollably. I'm not a crier -- I once went plus-or-minus ten years without crying, and mostly all I can muster is a couple of dry-eyed convulsions and a choke or two. But not on this day. I'd all but forgotten what it feels like for tears to trail down your face and leave that wet feeling, and then dry into the same trail but sticky this time.

So I called my friend Nick, trying to pretend for some reason that everything was cool, asking him how he was, crying hard but fighting through it, and asked him to drive me to the emergency room. He finished his bowl of cereal and pulled up outside fifteen minutes later, and dropped me off in front of the emergency room entrance. I thanked him and hobbled away, clutching my elbow in a makeshift sling.

That was the last social contact I had for fifteen days.

I got to the ER at around noon. I paced. I avoided eye-contact. I resented the people in line ahead of me, and I resented the nurses who didn't seem to feel sorry for me. Forty-five minutes later, a doctor who spoke at least passable English called me into an examination room and asked me some questions -- I take Adderall, Sertraline, and Xanax sometimes; I'm not allergic to any medications; I have health insurance; my pain is a nine out of a possible ten. He looked at me skeptically and shuffled me off into another waiting room, where I got to hang out with three cool, friendly guys passed out in their chairs and two loving mothers ignoring their children. The moms turned on the TV in the corner that said "DO NOT CHANGE CHANNEL" and changed the channel to a soap opera. They talked to each other with incredible fluency about the characters on the show. One of the little girls cried. The other one played at the little toy-station in the corner. When her mother saw what she was doing -- a half hour later -- she called her away, forbade her to play on something so dirty, and scraped her hands, hard, with a baby wipe. This little girl started crying, too. The women talked louder about the soap opera.

I was called back into the examination room by the pretty nurse, by this point almost delirious with pain from sitting and standing -- two things, if you don't mind me saying, we as humans generally take for granted. In my brain, I told myself I would say, "You're one of them pretty nurses, like I done seen on the TV!" My brain told me this was a really very good idea, but when I opened my mouth my shoulder flared and all that came out was a sad little squeak that sounded like "gak!"

A teenage boy with his dad were led into the next room. I listened to the same pretty nurse interview him. "I had surgery for some abscesses and the stitches are torn and the cotton packing is coming out."

"And where are the abscesses?"

"Uhm, well, one's on my inner thigh, one's on my lower buttock, and one's on my... I guess... my taint area?"

"Your what?"

"My taint area?"

"Oh... OH."

"And every time I take the antibiotics I throw up."

I wondered what was wrong with this poor kid, and what it was like for his dad to be there. I wondered if they were scared. I was scared.

After an hour or so, a dignified greybeard of a doctor, earth-tone business-casual head to toe, swept into the room and asked what he could do for me. By this point it was about 3 pm. I'd had an appointment, you'll remember, with student health at 1:30, but they were not qualified to serve my needs. Well, it took all of three minutes for this doctor to confirm my self-diagnosis and write me scrips for Percocet and Prednisone. And then they turned me out the door. Three hours and three minutes for synthetic opioids and oral steroids seems like a small price to pay.

But I still haven't got the ER bill.

The Super Awesome Mega Championship

2010-07-21T22:27:00.012-06:00

I'm back from Chicago after a long weekend (or a lean week) of sunbaking while watching bands that aren't quite ready for the big time play in front of many thousands of sunscreened assholes at the Pitchfork music festival, and I am just as happy as a clam. My friend J housed me as he always does: with some implausibly shaped pillows and a sleeping surface (after a manner). My favorite parts of these vacations to Chicago are always the weekdays, when he and his girlfriend are at work and I get to pad around the house siphoning oodles off his stash of PERFECTLY LEGAL DRUGS and watching grotesque effluvia on the NFL Network before popping in a Bond VHS tape on his St. Bernard-sized monstrosity of a television.

Usually, anyway.

This trip, my favorite part was going to Chris's Billiards, the poolhall where they filmed that scene in The Color of Money where Tom Cruise has a temper tantrum and tears the balustrade out of the wall on the stairs.

J is better than I am at pool. Substantially better. This is infuriating to me, because I'm better than you are at pool. I'm better than you and your three best friends who are good at pool. I'll take your money, and I'll make sure you leave with a shaved ass when your wallet is empty, just because that shit is funny to me, and also, fuck you. I'll beat you in front of your girl with a fifteen ounce cue and a bee-sting on my aiming eye. I don't give a fuck.

But J? He'll buy and sell you for a dollar.

I managed to tie it up at 2-2 after going down 2-0.

The reason I was able to do this is because, as previously indicated, I am really good at pool. If being good at pool were the precondition for attaining a title in medieval England, I would be at least a Baronet.

But J? He would be something even better and more prestigious than a Baronet. He would be a Marquess or a Viscount or something else even more badass than a Baronet, like a Duke or a King even. And it seems to have nothing to do with skill level, at least not in the rustic American pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps sense. I can and have practiced baroque bank shots for sixteen hours a day, and he can practice being handsome and having nicely windswept hair whenever he remembers, and he'll still beat me seven games to five at pool -- and two of the games I win, it'll be because I left him an insanely easy shot on the eight ball and he scratched it because he either (a) pities me, or (b) folds like a sucker when the shit goes down. Seriously, if I could compete with this guy based on intestinal fortitude instead of talent, I would maul him like some kind of fantastical bear that has claws on its teeth, because pressure crushes him into a little origami hula girl, and I eat origami hula girls for breakfast.

Unfortunately, J eats me for breakfast, so there's a weird Mobius strip effect going on here.

I had to sacrifice some handsomeness for anonymity in this shot. So I do him all kinds of favors in photography, but in pool I'm like his medieval puppy-dog bitch court jester.

Seriously, this is the kind of shot-to-win I leave him.

It turns out that I'm the worst pool player in the world, even though I'll still destroy you financially, ruin your marriage, and make your kids hate you on a single behind-the-back, double-bank 'n' kiss-off-the-nine combo.

Don't fuck with me. I'll end you.

(J racking because he lost like a hack coward loser. PATHETIC.)

Many years ago, J and I devised a strategy to cope with the most troubling problem in amateurish competitive pool: How do you know when to stop? As is our wont, it was decided that all decisions should be made in the most childish manner possible. We reckoned that, with children, the championship is never the championship.

This is how kids work -- the alpha-boy declares that the next game is to be the last game. Then, because even alpha boys are shoddily designed and often dressed constrictively, even he sometimes loses. But rather than suffer his ignominy with dignity, he deicides -- through the god-given fiat of being the handsomest, the angriest, and the first one to crack four foot tall -- that the game is not over. The championship isn't the Championship -- because we haven't played the Super Awesome Mega Championship yet.

And the Super Awesome Mega Championship is what separates the winners from the losers, and the prematurely pubed from the late-bloomingly shorn.

Naturally, I almost always win the championship -- the meaningless exercise that does nothing but give my oppressor an opportunity to try.

Then J comes back and bulldozes me with a six-ball run in the SAMC, and pretends like it's not a big deal.

But right here and right now, I've got a message for J. It's a simple message -- the only kind he can understand, BECAUSE HE'S TOO STUPID TO UNDERSTAND COMPLEX SENTENCES BECAUSE FUCK THAT GUY WHAT AN ASSHOLE AM I RIGHT?

That message is this: Next year, I'm going to crush you, you homunculus.

Spielberg's Hook, psychosexual smorgasbord

2010-06-29T18:41:00.043-06:00

I Baited that Hook

In 1991 I attended a Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch concert in southern Massachusetts. Mr. Wahlberg rapped, stiffly but not without enthusiasm, while a pan-ethnic cadre of backup dancers broke their parents' hearts behind him. He took off his pants -- remember how that used to be one of our now most recognizable living actor's gimmicks, taking off his pants and rapping about being "drug free, so put the crack up"? -- and stalked the stage, flexing his jagged abs provocatively. After a wardrobe intermission, Wahlberg retook the stage wearing a bathrobe. He took it off and revealed himself to be wearing only... his boxers. Underage girls screamed. I left feeling perplexed -- why, if he'd already taken off his pants, did he have to put on new clothes only to take them off again? -- but having had a mighty fine time. I felt the vibrations. Come on, come on.

Outside the civic center was a booth organized by a local radio station. They were giving away promotional items to shill for the launch of one of the year's most anticipated blockbusters: Spielberg's Hook. The bulbous, haggard DJ threw a t-shirt to me, rolled and taped. I opened it immediately, and was crestfallen to find it was an adult medium. Puny as I was -- the shortest kid in my class, girls included, until grade 8 -- when I put it on, I looked like a refugee in a muumuu. I sighed and resigned myself to the fact that I would never be able to walk around, impressing my friends by billboarding for the all-the-rage motion picture event of the season.

That shirt is now my oldest possession. As far as I can tell, I've had it for several years longer than anything else I own.

It's survived 4 states, 13 moves, an accidental bleaching (thanks a lot, mom), and being used as a painting smock. It was with me that next year, 1992, when I went on my first date -- to Aladdin and then Big Boy, who I thought had the best hot dogs on the market -- with a girl named Sam (and my parents). It was with me on my last date, to a cupcake store for my ex-girlfriend's birthday, where I told her "I can't take you anywhere" after she was rude to the clerk, thereby precipitating the weeks-long fight that would end with a perfunctory breakup. It now fits me almost preternaturally well -- every gaunt angle, every malnourished crevice, every worrying mole, stretch mark, and superfluous third nipple on my torso is swaddled tight in its cotton embrace, as if I've grown to fit its shape as it has shrunk to fit mine. Like a Venom symbiot.

Perhaps it's just a cheap coincidence. Perhaps its a cosmic confluence of taste and happenstance. Perhaps this shirt is responsible for the man I've become -- but sometimes it seems like I'm the only person in the world who likes Hook.

It has a 22% "fresh" rating on rottentomatoes, and the positives range from condescending ("muddled but fascinating," or "It's worth a look. But overall, Hook feels like an exercise in cynicism") to milquetoast inanity ("The movie is a strong reminder of the freedom of youth and the quest for pure adventure, one that looks to the stars and sees the possibilities are as bright as a child's own imagination"). Gag.

I've seen it perhaps 15 times -- just enough to be able to annoyingly recite pretty much every significant line of dialog a second before it's uttered onscreen. I love Hook. I really do. But I never realized what a fucked up movie it is until last night.

Peter Pan and the Women Who Love Him

"I don't ever want to become a man. Yuck!"

Three characters are in love with Peter: his wife Moira, Moira's grandmother Wendy, and Tinkerbell.

When she first appears in the movie, Tinkerbell pummels Peter with a rolled up magazine until he falls onto a baby's bed and then stands, triumphant, on his crotch. It's all fairly infantilizing and emasculating, innit?

"If less is more, there's no end to me, Peter Pan."

Peter explains her appearance this way: "You're a complex Freudian hallucination having something to do with my mother, and I don't know why you have wings. But you have very lovely legs, and you're a very nice tiny person, and what am I saying, I don't know who my mother was and I'm an orphan, and I've never taken drugs because I missed the sixties. I was an accountant." It takes a while for the irony of the invocation of Oedipus -- and the creepily incestuous vibe in Tinkerbell's brand of pedophilia -- to come into focus.

About halfway through the movie, Peter has a torrent of remembrances that begins with an image of his birth-mother discussing her plans to send Peter to attend Whitehall and Oxford before ascending to "the highest court" as an attorney, all the while saving time for "a marriage, and family, and all of that." Meanwhile, she forgets to watch her pram, freighted though it is with precious future-barrister cargo, and it rolls away.

So her priorities kind of suck.

Peter explains, in a kind of voiceover that supposed to be directed to Tinkerbell, but is really just hammy exposition for our benefit, that at that moment he realized that he didn't want to grow up -- this must have been a fucking smart baby -- because "everyone who grows up has to die some day." So instead he "ran away." Ran away in his baby carriage. By making it roll down a hill. Until apparently it tipped over in the rain? And he fell out into the middle of a spiral on the pavement in a suspiciously well-framed shot?

Like, how did the baby get from the pram to the middle of the spiral on its back?

So Tinkerbell finds and rescues baby Peter -- and he's thrilled about it, clearly.

Tinkerbell absconds with the little dude, in what would look suspiciously like kidnapping if baby Peter hadn't had a preternaturally sharp baby intellect capable of high-level practical reasoning, awareness of his own inexorable mortality, and the amazing ability to navigate a baby carriage of which he is inside.

He explains: "You came and you saved me. You brought me to Neverland. You taught me to fly." So Tinkerbell is, at the very least, on the cusp of felonious babynapping. But she also raises Peter, provides him succor and care and nourishment, for the first twelve years of his life in Neverland.

At which point we run upon the rock of an insuperable problem. Isn't the whole point of Neverland that you stop aging when you're in Neverland? If I didn't know better, I'd be tempted to call it shoddy filmmaking.

Fortunately, it's a problem with a payoff: without this loophole, Tinkerbell couldn't be simultaneously Peter's mother-figure, nursing him to manhood from his first days on earth, and want to jump his bones.

If Peter doesn't want Tinkerbell -- his surrogate mother -- he doesn't want Wendy -- his foster-grandmother -- either. But, of course, this movie has a moral responsibility to us to creep us out with quasi-incest as much as it possibly can. So, the now ninety-something year old Wendy Darling, who still calls the now middle-aged Peter "boy," is also still in love with him, eighty years after the fun summers in Neverland. Only one problem: Peter married her granddaughter, Moira. Imagine getting left for your thirteen year old grandchild. That would sting a little bit.

In his initial visits to her open window, Peter resists the advances of the young Wendy -- who looks strikingly like a young Gwyneth Paltrow -- because he's a fucking idiot, apparently.

And, in the immortal words of Michael Bluth, "you gotta lock that down," because this asshole has the gall to be surprised when young, hot Gwyneth Paltrow turns into old-ass Dame Maggie Smith.

I mean, she's hot for an old lady, but... come on.

In a genuinely affecting scene early in the movie, Wendy explains to Peter that she has always been in love with him: "When I was young, no other girl held your favor the way I did. I half-expected you to alight on the church and forbid my vows on my wedding day. I wore a pink satin sash... but you didn't come."

Peter, taken aback by her bedroom eyes and her clumsy groping, responds, "Grandmom?"

And this is where we find out what kind of chap the young Peter Pan really was. Wendy says, "Yes, I was an old lady when I wrapped you in blankets. A grandmother, my thirteen year old granddaughter asleep in the bed. Moira. And when you saw her, that was when you decided not to go back to Neverland." It will take an hour and a half of screen-time to learn the rest of this story.

Not only does Peter decide to stay; he decides to give the sleeping girl a kiss. Wendy begs him not to -- "I couldn't bear for Moira's heart to be broken when she finds out she can't keep you!" -- but Peter is adamant. He hawks in and plants one right on her pie-hole. In one fell swoop, Peter devastates the woman who has served the role of mother for, and who is in love with, him;

he terrorizes the woman who will become his grandmother, and who is in love with him, thereby consigning her to decades of torture in providing for him financially and emotionally while watching him seduce her descendant right in front of her;

and he commits something that looks eerily like sexual assault on a minor incapable of consent.

We should remember that this is Britain, and the laws might be different there -- after all, if they locked up every pervert and pedo on the street there wouldn't be a whole lot left over. But no matter where you are on the globe, this is big-league dickweed stuff. The kid's a world-class asshat.

Happy Thoughts

This whole cavalcade of reminiscence is triggered by Peter finding an old teddy bear his bio-mom put in his perambulator to keep him company while she talked about his future with her shrew-friends.

After he describes the aforementioned gray-rape incident to Tinkerbell, she responds, "I can see why you have trouble finding a happy thought. So many sad memories, Peter." Because you totally dicked me over, you son of a bitch, she continues silently.

Fortunately for Peter -- and pace Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life -- "teddy" sounds kinda like "daddy."

And lo, Peter has his happy thought, and he can fly -- which is one of the three important things, along with fighting and (for some reason) crowing, and blah blah blah.

The "happy thought" is, of course, an important, if borderline-nonsensical, theme in the movie. Peter's happy thought is Jack, his son; later, Jack's happy thought will be Peter; Peter's daughter Maggie's happy thought will be her mother Moira. Only two Lost Boys are allowed to have happy thoughts: Tootles and Thud Butt (more on him in a minute). Tootles's happy thought is somehow literally manifested in his marbles, because, as Foucault has convincingly argued, crazy people cannot be happy. When Tootles gets his marbles back at the end of the movie, he flies to Neverland, the doddering old bastard.

He's in for a rough go of it when he gets there and remembers the Lost Boys think "all grown-ups are pirates," let alone that "we kill pirates."

Also, Moira seems surprisingly placid when a senile old man starts flying.

Wishes

Happy thoughts aren't for everybody. Only for the fulfilled. The Lost Boys can't fly, and no wonder -- just look at the ridiculous shit they suggest to Peter when they're trying to coax him skyward.

Man cannot fly on gum alone.

Two disappointed characters, Tinkerbell and Rufio, have the bummer obverse of a happy thought -- both have, instead, a "wish."

Tink's wish is expressed in one of the movie's most perplexing scenes. Peter has found his mojo again -- he can fly, fight, and crow, and is a full-on, raging, rock-hard Pan. But he's also regressed emotionally: He thinks he's in Neverland "to always be a little boy and to have fun," and he doesn't remember that he has kids. Tinkerbell has to make a melancholy choice between brainwashing the man she loves into being a little boy again so he might love her back, or reminding him of what he truly wants.

And so she does the clearly wrong thing and chooses to try to seduce Peter and make him forget about his life.

The people in this movie are pretty shady.

Some monumentally cheesy special effects erupt and Tinkerbell becomes as tall as Julia Roberts for some reason. "I did it," she says. "You're humongous," says Peter.

"This is the only wish I ever wished for myself. Oh Peter, this is the biggest feeling I've ever, ever felt, this is the biggest feeling I've ever had and this is the first time I've been big enough to have it."

Did I mention Carrie Fisher was brought in to rewrite Tinkerbell's dialog?

"Peter, I want to give you a kiss." He reaches out his hand for a thimble. "No, I mean a real kiss."

Did I mention that Julia Roberts was nominated for a worst supporting actress Razzie for this performance? (She lost to Sean Young in A Kiss Before Dying. I haven't seen it, but that performance must have been something special, because Ms. Young won both the worst actress AND worst supporting actress Razzies for it.)

They kiss. Tinkerbell says, "I love you, Peter Pan."

At this point I wonder, do you think Tinkerbell breast-fed the infant Peter? Or did she feed him neverberries and roots from the neverforest?

Fortunately, at this moment of ethical crisis -- and, let's call it like we see it, fairly brazen sexual manipulation -- the ol' word-association trick kicks in again, and when Peter asks Tink to kiss him "more," it makes him think of "Moira," which is the name of his wife. It's a good thing she wasn't named like Agatha or Isabel or something -- the movie's second moment of soft adultery could have turned pretty explicit. This is, after all, one of Julia Roberts's best-looking movies.

The second disappointed character, Rufio -- the interim leader of the Lost Boys in Peter's absence -- conspicuously doesn't have a happy thought. He's got authority -- "Ru-fi-oooooo!" -- but he seems insecure. He growls, "I've got Pan's sword. I'm the Pan now!" But, in the justly famous dozens/food fight scene ("Bangarang!"), Peter reminds Rufio that he's "a one-celled critter with no brain that can't fly," and that he's "suffering from Peter Pan envy."

The two trade insults (including two of my favorite from Robin Williams: "prison barber" and "nearsighted gynecologist"), and then move on to imagining delicious frostings into existence and hurling them at each other.

No homo.

Even Tink gets hit with some splashback.

By the end, it looks like Chan-Wook Park tried to direct a grindhouse bukkake flick and it went horribly, horribly wrong.

Peter wins, of course, and in vanquishing his rival he also becomes a fairly clear father-figure to Rufio as the film progresses -- both in the sense that Peter gives him someone to look up to, and in the sense that Rufio is continually placed in conspicuous proximity to Peter's crotch.

I mean, if the story doesn't make it fairly explicit, the camera angles do a pretty good job.

"You are the Pan," Rufio says.

But Peter isn't satisfied until he has totally humiliated the pretender. Even though Rufio has just abdicated his station of his own volition, Peter still feels the need to draw a literal line in the sand, forcing the Lost Boys to desert Rufio and join Pan's side, even though it's strictly pro-forma.

Also, I don't know if you picked up on this, but the sword is, like, some kind of symbol for a dick or something.

So anyway, Rufio's wish is expressed in the wake of the scene that broke ten-thousand hearts -- "looky, looky, I got Hooky."

Dying in the arms of the man who usurped him, disrespected him, forced all his friends and allies to betray him, and didn't save him because he was busy saving someone else, Rufio says, "Do you know what I wish?"

"I wish I had a dad..."

"...like you."

Captain Jack

Rufio, we must remember, is an orphan with no history, and therefore a sacrificial lamb whose only role is to make young Jack, Peter's son, realize what an ungrateful little prat he has been to his father.

Even though, let's not forget, his dad's kind of a cocksucker.

Though God knows I haven't got the energy to tease out the Oedipal threads of this thing, at the beginning of the movie, Peter misses Jack's baseball game. So the son wishes the father dead.

"Where's my parachute?"

Then, when Peter remembers his happy thought he says, "I know why I grew up. I wanted to be a father." So it's an old, evo-bio inflected story, really. Boy wants to be boy in perpetuity; boy meets girl; boy realizes girl is exemplary candidate to bear seed forth into the world; boy feels irresistible caveman urge to possess girl as sexual object by any means necessary; boy renounces bid for immortality to spawn son who resents him; boy-as-father shames son for resenting him, even though the resentment is well-founded and justified.

Thud Butt

The only other Lost Boy with a happy thought is the aforementioned Thud Butt.

I'm serious. That's his name. You can tell because it's inexplicably embossed on a wheel of cheese.

Thud Butt is the kid Peter implausibly leaves in charge when he leaves Neverland at the end of the movie. Thud Butt's happy thought is his mother.

It's a mean-spirited touch -- only characters with "happy thoughts" can fly, and in nearly every case, "happy thoughts" are mothers, fathers, or children. Tootles can fly, in spite of the fact that he's a Lost Boy -- but his happy thoughts are marbles, god knows why. Thud Butt can't fly (yet), but he's got the Pan's sword and a nuclear family-based happy thought, and that seems to be all you need. The movie actually has this weirdly sinister anti-orphan undercurrent -- it seems to say that unless you're connected to the world by lineage and legacy, you're adrift, cut off from happy thoughts that empower you not only to make magic, but to lead men. Rufio was a tragic accident, and order was restored when he was relegated.

However, Thud Butt seems by all accounts ill-equipped to fill the role that Pan and Rufio held in Neverland. He's fat and unathletic. In battle, the Lost Boys display their characteristic whimsy by shooting pirates with guns full of eggs and paint and marbles that trip them. They also stab the pirates to death with swords. It's a pretty heavy-duty contrast. Thud Butt, on the other hand, is effete and weirdly feminine -- he rolls down gangplanks and bowls people out of the way, and stomps on boards so they hit guys in the nuts. He's not a stabber. No one seems to respect him or take him particularly seriously. When Peter leaves him in charge, he even hits him with a fat joke: "I want you to take care of everyone smaller than you."

Yet, on the merit of this one happy thought of a time long past, he's given responsibility and sovereignty over the whole tribe of boys.

The Hook Appendix

Plenty could be said about Captain James Hook, but I'll limit myself to my two favorite bits.

First, his attempt at suicide. "I hate living in this flawed body... I've just had a sublime vision. All the jagged parts of my life have come together to form a complete and mystical whole. An epiphany... My life is over."

"I want to die."

The second bit includes my favorite line and my favorite sight-gag in the movie. The Lost Boys are having a game to "steal Hook's hook as fast as you can. It'll make you proud. Then you'll crow like Pan." Hook is sitting in the bleachers, waiting for his pirates to indulge master Jack in a game of baseball.

He says, "Confound it, Druscilla, glove me! The game's about to start."

Gets me every time.

The Shadow Addendum

Early in the film, Peter is haunted by the literal shadows of two things Captain Hook reminds him of in the final fight scene. He says, "You know you're not really Peter Pan, don't you? This is only a dream. When you wake up, you'll just be Peter Banning -- a cold, selfish man who drinks too much, is obsessed with success, and runs and hides from his wife and children."

His son.

Booze.

The Weaver Affidavit

Is it just me, or does this kid look like Sigourney Weaver if she was really, really sick?

Love Disinterest

Soon after he gets to Neverland, Peter falls into the water with his hands bound. Tinkerbell screams after him, terrified that he's going to drown. He's saved by some mermaids, who make out with him, presumably thereby blowing air into his lungs. The first of the movie's soft marital infidelities.

Peter is taken back to shore, and he bumbles his way through Neverland for a few seconds until he steps on a trap and is hoisted up to Tinkerbell's house. Now, in the time it takes all this to happen -- about a minute, which the movie portrays as if it were real-time -- Tinkerbell has already flown from the pirate ship back to her little clock-house...

...and fallen asleep.

Sure, she wakes up and she whoops and hollers and seems pleased that Peter's alive. But I mean... come on, girl, damn. You're his mom and his mistress. The least you could do is grieve for a little while.

Purple Impact, or, I am ready to lead with my face into the foot that fate has in store for me.

2010-06-09T12:08:00.023-06:00

There are two things I have known since childhood.

First, I can be arrogant. It's only too easy.

Next, I can take a beating. A sound, knuckle-scraping, face-stomping beating. I can walk into a buzz-saw of limbs and digits, joints and extremities, and welcome the pulverizing, tenderizing impact. In the end, I will be doubled over in agony, writhing and mewling like a cur, but I'll still be there. And tomorrow, I'll come back for more.

Yes, these two things always came easy to me. But something was always missing. Some essential tertiary term haunted me, kept me from feeling complete, made sure I was always one-third phantom, only ever almost whole.

Today, I am whole.

One of my favorite movies -- both for sentimental reasons and because it is, without hyperbole, easily the greatest film ever made -- is the 1991 Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle Double Impact (imdb.com rating: 4.7/10). In it, Van Damme plays dual roles: twins named Alex, a streetwise tuff from Hong Kong who smuggles and steals and beats ass, and Chad, an effete Los Angeles karateka and dance instructor who wears salmon short-shorts and black silk underwear (the last of which details is an important plot point). Implausibly enough, they have the same accent, and Alex Van Damme calls Chad Van Damme a "faggot" more than once. It's as good as it sounds.

In an early scene, Chad Van Damme is teaching what appears to be a class on sexual innuendo to some ladies who probably seemed pretty in the late 80s but are now terrifying.

"Because of my big legs and karate, I can do the splits no problem."

Uncle Frank -- who, spoiler alert, isn't really his uncle -- calls him away to take over the karate class downstairs. "Dressed like this?" Van Damme asks.

I think he looks good. Uncle Frank checks out his package.

Keeping with the theme of peculiar couture, for some reason, the karate class is dressed like this.

An unruly Australian, identified as "the new guy," is picking on some poor kid, and Van Damme, following the Bushido code of honor, has to step in and defend the weak in his samurai spandex.

"Are you the ballet teacher or what?" the Aussie asks. "Dancing, yeah, dancing... also some, ah, karate," Van Damme responds nonchalantly. And so the web is laid -- the trap is set. It's all over but the pain and humiliation.

(You could do worse, at this point, than to notice that the Aussie is wearing barrettes in his hair.)

"Show me one of your special kicks," Van Damme enjoins, pointing somewhere off-screen. This moment has always puzzled me. JCVD seems to be suggesting that the bully is well-known for his kicks, indeed that his kicks are perhaps even advertised at JCVD's own karate studio. Yet the bully is referred to only as the "new guy," and his belt matches his gi, which would normally mean he's a white belt -- and being a white belt in karate usually just means you haven't paid the first month's gym fees. On the other hand, perhaps the movie is trying to suggest that he's a light-pink belt, a rank so formidable it doesn't even exist.

At any rate, the Aussie obliges.

And bitch, that's a mistake

because

you're

gonna

get

KNOCKEDTHEFUCKOUT.

Ahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha!

For some obscure reason, this Aussie became something of a hero to me. Something about his verve, his pomposity, the way he plowed headlong into the intractable foot of justice, appealed to me. He owned what an asshole he was -- he didn't pussyfoot or tiptoe. He laid it all out there, and he took what was coming to him. He showed his true face to the world -- and then Van Damme kicked him in it.

Perhaps it's as simple as this: I admired his style.

As the years wore on, it became clear what I couldn't do. The dullness of karate's katas doomed me to wash out early, far before I would ever develop any "special kicks" of my own. My hair thinned, and was summarily shaved clean, ensuring that barrettes would never be my calling card. No matter how hard I tried to sound suave and sunkissed, my accent remained a resolutely Midwestern twang, only undertoned by the last remaining evidence of my first decade in California and Massachusetts.

But there were three things -- the three most important things -- left over. We already know I can be arrogant. We know I can take a beating. But what about sartorial flamboyance?

Well, this morning, I dumped a package of Rit dye and 3 gallons of water into an empty garbage can, dropped in my spare jiu jitsu gi, and kneaded it until my fingers were blistered, cracked, and stained a regal hue.

Behold, mortals, the wages of my labor!

I see this as having two related practical benefits. First, if you kick my ass in jiu jitsu class, of course you kicked my ass, I'm wearing purple -- you're supposed to kick my ass. Second, if I kick your ass -- dude, you just got your ass kicked by a guy wearing purple.

But far more important than this is that I am finally ready to become my destiny. I am ready to lead with my face into the foot that fate has in store for me. I am a new man.

I am the new guy!

The American Heroic Myth

2010-03-07T01:05:00.003-06:00

I'm going to spend the next several years writing a dissertation somehow related to the concept of heroism in American literature. The first step in writing a dissertation is research, and the first step in researching is Google. This much is uncontroversial.

When you google "American hero myths," the second result is this amazing wingnut article about why America needs a hero myth to protect us from Marxism. I wouldn't have made much of this -- it's your standard-issue conservative True Believer stuff -- if it hadn't been for the about-the-author tagline at the bottom of the page.

Ron Liebermann is a contractor and manufacturer of mylar balloons in Louisville, Ky.

This article -- which begins by defining "hero" as "a legendary figure, often of divine descent, endowed with great strength or ability," and ends with the a "heroic call to greatness" which is "the path to freedom" --is by guy who makes balloons.

Now, far be it from me to castigate the mighty manufacturer. The balloon, after all, is a powerful metaphor for the ascent of the soul and for the enlargement of the mind. Thoreau's family made lead pencils, and he toiled many a weary day in the pencil factory... making pencils. Which are a great metaphor for writing... and also penises. Thoreau was able, in true Democratic fashion, to extricate himself from such a life of toil by elbow-grease, gumption, and a little cabin on a pond; and he landed himself in literary and political anthologies with his incisive insight about the state of men's souls and his vicious diagnosis of the modern world.

So let's see -- on a properly capitalist metric literary merit, in this case defined by how susceptible the source material is to satire -- how this guy stacks up. (Spoiler: Really super well.)

Somehow this article was written in 2002, 2 years into Dubya's phallic and virile reign. I didn't think the 2002 edition of the official Government Dictionary had already taken this stride, but Ron makes it clear that "the State defines heroism as triumph over adversity, or danger." We know on the other hand, comrades, that heroism is really about evil. But the state can't have that: "To call heroism a triumph over evil makes the state uncomfortable. It knows that an increasing number of Americans are engaged in a heroic battle against domestic tyranny, which is clearly evil. The State thus denies it's evil nature, all the while increasing it's tyranny." It's kinda hard to follow the logic here, so let me streamline it: the government is clearly evil, so it's uncomfortable being called evil. Cartoonish, mustache-twiddling villains are sensitive with the word "villain" the same way fat people are sensitive to the word "fat." It just hits a little too close to home, you know? I do dearly love the first of the typos that rounds out the quote -- The State denies it is evil nature. It's like that part in Army of Darkness where Ash gives shoulder-birth to his doppelganger, Bad Ash, who pokes him in the eyes and kicks him in the balls.

(Oh hai, what's domestic tyranny? Is someone tryin' to stop you from makin' balloons?)

So we've already seen good nature and evil nature, but hold on to your butts, because we're about to see supernature! "Government animosity towards heroism has it's roots in the conflict between Jeffersonian Democracy, and the Marxism we have today." It's very similar to the conflict 1985 Marty McFly had with 2015 Griff Tannen; all Marty (hero) wanted was to bring Jennifer safely back to 1985 and keep his future son from going to jail, but Griff (evil) wanted to hit him with his pneumatic bat and run over him with his gnarly Hoverboard. Similarly, all Jefferson wanted was to protect agrarian farmers from corrupt aristocrats and industrialists, and to provide a codified series of rights for all people regardless of wealth or social standing, but instead he had to travel to 2002 to rescue Jennifer from the evil Marxist government (Griff) and keep his principles (son) from falling into the hands of wicked bureaucrats (jail). The two line up so well it's barely even a metaphor.

Indeed, what really boggles the mind about evil Marxism is how it ever managed to dupe anybody in the first place, since it doesn't even try to hide its evilness (much like fat people before the invention of pinstripes). It might have something to do with the fact that Marxism is whatever the fuck this guy wants it to be. "Everyone knows, of course, that lack of effort does not create equality, it creates poverty." (C.f. the little-cited footnote on page 12 of The Communist Manifesto, "Nobody has to do anything under communism; no, I'm serious, you don't have to work, ever.")

Ron continues, "When a Marxist such as Al Sharpton promises to elevate the poor, he is really promising to deliver equality as an illusion." (Spoiler: in a second Ron will use Horatio Alger's protagonist Ragged Dick, the quintessential arbiter of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, as a central tenet of the American hero myth -- and while I knew Ragged Dick had a special place in American culture, I thought it was more because of our predilection for dry-humping in wool pants. Spoiler 2: Horatio Alger was white. Al Sharpton, not so much.)

But again, Ron: "Children are taught to expect reward without effort, and status without achievement. Military rank is a prime example: Promotion occurs as a result of political correctness. The ability to win battles is no longer a factor." I love this idea -- there's a whole new breed of kids rushing into the military because it's so easy. Seriously, boot camp? A breeze. Long tours overseas without contact with loved ones? A snap. Fear of death? A non-issue. All you have to do is not diddly-shit and you'll be promoted to Rear Admiral just because you're developmentally disabled, or Korean, or four inches shorter than average, or something. Affirmative action, baby! It's a disease! "The Marxist disconnection between effort and reward has resulted in a new pathology: The cult of non-effort." See, entitlement is emphatically not a problem among people whose parents are rich enough to provide for them, and to keep them from having to work for themselves. No, entitlement only rears its ugly head... well... in the military, I guess?

But the military isn't, after all, the best example of this new freeloader ethic now holding truck with the goddamn lazy kids. "To witness non-effort in action, tune to MTV. There, one can view young Anglo's Hanging Out and young blacks Chilling." Truer words, my friend -- truer words! It's some kind of wonderful zoo where you can go to see these fanciful creatures, "Anglo's" and "blacks," in their native habitat of narcotic indolence, a beautiful dance of idleness, "a celebration of sloth within a materialistic utopia." It's actually really beautiful. They don't do anything! MTV is straight out of a Keats poem, a pastoral choked with melody too soothingly beautiful to die yet too achingly beautiful to live.

But Ron, let's get specific, who are these anti-capitalists who want to cripple the free-market with their lazy-bonesed selves? "Kid Rock, Snoop Doggy Dog, and Puff Daddy are the primary arbiters of this worldview." Since it should be obvious that none of these men are proponents of the free market, and none of them have any interest doing stuff -- ie, Marxists -- we can forgive Ron for his indulgence in that time-honored defensive tactic, If I'm Such a Racist How Come I Included a White Guy? Marxists have no colors. Their color is evil.

But let's just take a look at a sample Snoop Doggy Dog [sic] lyric, in which he proclaims himself to be, "Rollin' down the street, smokin' indo, sippin' on gin and juice / Laid back, with my mind on my money and my money on my mind." Sure, it implies a certain degree of relaxation, but it sounds to me like the relaxation that comes with a hard day's work. Surely Snoop is driving home from another day at the mylar balloon factory, indulging himself in a pair of relaxing adult beverages in his automobile -- and after all, who is the government to step on his right to drink Seagram's and smoke a fat sack on the interstate? The time to toil is over, and what is this but ciphering up the day's credits and debits, the gains and losses in his head? Not only is Snoop a model for the free market and for non-interference, he's also a model for fiscal responsibility. This guy's management material!

So it's a good thing for Ron that this "cult takes other forms, as well. Consider the lottery. Everyone is equal in the eyes of Lady Luck, so effort is pointless. The lottery is self-funding Marxist propaganda."

I don't even know what to do with this one, so let's move on. Question: You know what my favorite extreme sport is? Answer: EXTREME SUPERFLUOUS DISPLAYS OF SUPERFICIAL LEARNEDNESS!!!! "St. Augustine wrote extensively on the subject, saying that the conflict between good and evil rages not only in mankind as a whole, but in every individual." When I read this, I nodded sagely. It's true, you know.

But let's not forget those ladies, y'all. In an all-new episode of Unlikely Allies, Freud is enlisted in the defense of that lovable underdog paradox, libertarian paternalism: "Fathers are the primary mythical heroes. Young men internalize the heroic myth, and use it to form an identity. This identity serves as a rudder, which helps each man to steer a course through a dangerous and complex world." Women, it should be noted, do not matter. But don't take my word for it: "The heroic myth is masculine, and chivalrous. It exists exclusively in the minds of men. It is Camelot, King Arthur, and the Damsel in distress. This fact is intolerable to female Marxists who demand, but can never achieve, heroic equality." So... sorry babe. No balloon factories for you. Plus, "Feminism encourages divorce, which separates fathers from sons, breaking the heroic myth continuum." Nothing says "freedom" like an unhappy marriage, eh comrades?!

Meh, I'm done with this.

Make it fun

2010-02-21T01:18:00.000-06:00

Why wall between worlds of experience? Plunge into something, something that might be cold or warm, you're not sure, soft or grainy, wholly liquid or just mostly wet, you don't care. Fun does not have to be kept on a leash in a small house behind the large house where you live, miles away from the sad, drop-ceilinged office where you work to rhythm of the clock ticking whip cracking. That boundary is the business of the reifier, who puts tagged collars on dogs made of mist, who dresses spirits up in suits so form-fitting they chafe; the business of the boss and the business of the dog-catcher. To experience every experience as the dog you'll come home to, to prepare to plunge into grainy wet warmth or cold soft wet without anxiety -- the cold wet warm nose of the dog leads the way -- shouldn't this be enough?

Woof woof woof!

a bluesman in the life of my balls, a jazzman in the world of the second and third Matrix movies

2010-01-24T12:16:00.004-06:00

Just real quick.

This is the second time I've seen Cornell West describe himself as “a bluesman in the life of the mind, a jazzman in the world of ideas, forever on the move.”

There's so much wrong with it I don't know where to start.

I mean, just obviously, it's arbitrary. It would be, presumably, just as easy to be a bluesman in the world of ideas or a jazzman in the life of the mind. But not just arbitrary; it's got the unsettling confluence of self-congratulation and arbitrariness. Name one person you care about who's a bluesman AND a jazzman. You can't do it. Pick one, motherfucker! You don't get to have it all the ways. I don't go around naming every career I respect or envy and then ascribing it to myself and my own day-to-day: "I'm a classical guitarist of the life of sitting on the couch watching TV, a neuropathologist of ordering pizza, a priest of not giving a shit about literary criticism, a really good chef of not exercising enough, forever on the move. I am a porn star of checking my email on my phone, forever fucking bitches (on my phone)."

Besides, what's the relationship between being a bluesman or a jazzman and being forever on the move? Like, is there a predicative relationship? Or mightn't it be more accurate to describe oneself as a railroad hobo of the life of the mind, or a traveling salesman of in the world of ideas, forever on the move? Or is Cornell West ok with dismissing every stationary, non-itinerant blues and jazzman in the world? Dick move, Cornell.

Dick move.

Emily Dickinson & Erectile Dysfunction: A Secret History

2010-01-05T11:10:00.001-06:00

Emily Dickinson wrote a poem called “I started Early – Took my Dog” which comes in, prestige-wise, right after the ones about “Funeral brains –” and “Slants of death –” that you had to read in high school. The early Dickinson impresario – and amusingly named – Yvor Winters declares “I started Early” to be one of Emily's “most nearly perfect poems.” The poem is so fucking good, as a matter of fact, that its “defects do not intrude momentarily in a crudely obvious form.” What an asshole.

The poem is also, in my opinion, entirely about sex. It is on this proposition that I propose to meditate.

Confession: I see sex everywhere. In every situation that admits doubt or calls for interpretation, my interpretation is invariably, “They're doing it.” If there's only one person, my interpretation is usually that he or she wishes he or she was somewhere else, doing it. If there are three or more people, I posit that all the people just did it together and are dealing with the attendant shame each in his or her own way, or – when one of them is fat or a eunuch or on the rag or something – that at least two of them wish they were somewhere else doing it together, and whoever's left over is feeling pretty jealous about it and would like to be somewhere else doing it, too.

Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe this is the stone-soberest, clean-livingest, no-private-parts-havingest poem there is. But...

Before the poem: a summary of what I imagine to be the poem's essential plot points, rendered in Edgy and Hip contemporary youth-speak:

“So I'm this girl, and I live in Solid Town with my folks. One day I told them that I was going to start walking the dog. They were cool with it. They figured the dog would protect me in case the shit goes down, like, “woof woof woof!” haha. I'm pretty stoked to get out of the house and be on my own, so I leave pretty early and start walking around with the dog, just checking people out. All these women look at me, but who cares about them, right? Meanwhile though, there are all these old guys and stuff who are like, flirting with me, like “Hey baby,” thinking I'm easy, like I'm naïve or innocent or something and they're all touching me and I'm like “gross!” None of the guys ever did it for me or kick-started my four-stroke or made my flame burn blue or whatever. Until... well, there was this One guy. He took me under the boardwalk, and he lifted up my dress, and then he put his mouth on me like he was going to eat me all up. [extrapolation] Then we had sex, [end extrapolation] and I came, and then he came right after me. I could tell because I felt it, and then it started dripping out of me. After, he walked me back to Solid Town. He was worried about running into somebody he knew, like he was embarrassed to be with me or something. We didn't run into anybody he knew for a while, but then we DID run into somebody he knew, and he acted all like we had this really innocent friendship and like he was my stupid uncle or something and then he took off.”

The poem:

I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –

And Frigates – in the Upper Floors –
Extended Hempen Hands –
Presuming Me to be a Mouse –
Aground – opon the Sands –

But no Man moved Me – till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe –
And past my Apron – and my Belt –
And past my Boddice – too –

And made as He would eat me up –
As wholly as a Dew
Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve –
And then – I started – too –

And He – He followed – close behind –
I felt His Silver Heel
Opon my Ancle – then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl –

Until We met the Solid Town –
No One He seemed to know –
And bowing – with a Mighty look –
At me – the Sea withdrew –

We, fellow argonauts, we are not the first to ponder upon the poem's meaning. It was Mr. Winters himself who made all of our all of our head-scratching worthwhile by misunderstanding the poem so badly out of the gate (1947) that one shudders to think he judged its quality in clear conscience: “The sea is here the traditional symbol of death.” (At this, in the margins, I noted: “I thought it was about fucking!”) Winters writes that the poems is about navigating “forces which tend towards the dissolution of human character and consciousness.” (I wrote, “Orgasm!”). Mr Winters does not mention orgasm.

A short while later, in 1951 – not coincidentally, the same year King Leopold III abdicated the Belgian throne in favor of his son Baudouin – a woman named Kate Flores took off the kid gloves and slapped Baby Yvor around something awful. Miss Dickinson, she writes, has been “rather misinterpreted... the sea can hardly be so understood” as a symbol of death. The poem is, on the contrary, “a study in fear, fear of love.” (Marginal comment: “?!?!”) The poet's “fear of the sea is based upon the very power to undo her.” Her “whole being is endangered” by the sea's awesome power to ablate her identity. In the final stroke, Flores deals Winters the blow that kills: the sea, she writes, threatens “the dissolution of human character and consciousness.”

No, I'm just kidding, she didn't write that. Remember? Winters wrote that! Then Flores said he was totally full of shit and rubbed it in by stealing his point.

But Ahh, but the bittersweetness of the poem! In the poetess's “blind terror of the sea [she] can know no man.” But though she's doomed to spinster virginism, untouched by man-hands and man-stuff and so forth, the poetess will not be swallowed by the sea; she succeeds, “by the strength of her intellect, her will, in turning to go.” This is a supreme celebration of the lady-poet's valor and ingenuity. It is a triumphant expression of her feministic overmanning. I have no idea what the fuck she's is talking about.

But still, Flores has saved her most persuasively unintelligible assertion for last. It “seems clear that [the poetess] will never venture forth again.” Ruh-roh. Good thing she lives under the floorboards of a sybian factory.

As you might imagine, it took the Dickinson industry no great time nor energy to totally disregard this bewildered Flores woman and her impossible ideas. In 1952, Laurence Perrine – a young paladin in the holy order of Not Reading All That Much Into Things – drove his rapier as deep into the debate as practically no effort at all could drive it: “Both Yvor Winters and Kate Flores... load Emily Dickinson's 'I Started Early, Took My Dog' with a weight of meaning, symbolism, and emotion which this wholly delightful bit of poetic fancy simply will not bear.”

Legend has it that, after writing this sentence, Perrine was so exhausted that he had no choice but to loosen his belt to play with his balls for a while in a kind of self-satisfied stupor. And yet, with a last gasp of effort – an impossible phrenzy of will – Perrine's vim rushed back and, summoning all his Inner Resources, he set the record straighter than a bunch of bankers in Hawaiian shirts and shit playing in a Jimmy Buffet cover band on Thursday nights in a guy named Maury's semi-finished basement: “The poet is describing a morning walk to the sea – real or imaginary.” After writing this, perhaps inevitably, all the capillaries and shit in Perrine's brain fucking exploded from just thinking too hard and his roommate Cooter had to spend days scraping brains and shit off the walls with a plastic fucking dustpan, and he didn't have any paper towels either. Nothing would ever be the same after this, Perrine's great doomed sally, which all but matches Jimmy Buffett in its undeniable elan vital.

The bitterness of critics, who actually had to work for a living, was palpable. In 1962, when the aftershock of Perrine's back-to-basics approach was showing first signs of settling, Eric W. Carlson desecrated the memory of our fallen Ur-Lebowski by claiming Perrine's interpretation “left unresolved the question of the basic meaning of this poem.” One cringes to think how much more the allegation would sting were there so much as a grain of truth in it.

But Carlson wasn't done. All simultaneously, he danced and pissed and puked and cried on Perrine's grave by claiming the poem is about the “frightening realization that toying with love may arouse a tide of emotion too powerful to control.” Make no mistake: “toying with love” is a singularly mean-spirited reference to Perrine's heroic, recuperative balls-fingering a decade earlier, and the “tide of emotions” is the typhoon of blood and gray matter bursting through skull, all of it looking like a stepped-on frog. And poor Cooter, who had to clean it up, synapses and dendrites and all, still alive to read such villainous calumny!

Yet Carlson's analysis is too dangerous to be ignored, too alluring to be cast aside – like the bag of weed you found outside Burger King, next to where the immigrants break down boxes.

Carlson's analysis is compelling because – Jesus Christ, took long enough – it introduces the notion of the narrator's “pleasure and desire.” No longer is she a wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie, but a woman with wants – a woman on fire!

And yet, Carlson claims, the poem is haunted by a “power greater than romantic love.” Only in “mystic surrender to Nature” – as opposed to just the regular kind of surrender to Nature – “lies the most insidious threat – the loss of self-identity.” Cowardly editors expurgated the most significant conclusion Carlson draws from this point, still one of the most insightful observations in the history of the debate over the meaning of Dickinson's poem: “Didn't that Yvor Winters thing about this poem say something really similar? I think he said exactly what I'm saying about identity! And then that Flores lady introduced the idea of romantic love, but then she said exactly what Winters said about identity! And now I'm saying exactly what he said about identity to argue against this romantic love business that she said! Jesus Christ, I can't believe this is an actual job that people actually get paid to do. In fifteen years of tenured scholarship all we've agreed upon is that the ocean can threaten your identity. What a joke.”

After this, perhaps from shame or perhaps from confusion, critics forbore analyzing the poem for over two decades. They split into small groups, huddling together for warmth and debating in decreasingly affluent dialects about their next move.

Finally, in the wake of this Great Tribunal, there was an anointed one: Cristanne Miller – all the way in nineteen hundred and eighty seven – the first to mention the term “sexual” – god bless her, amen. The poem is, she claims, “deceptively innocent.” (But I think she means deceptively lascivious. I mean, right?) It begins as what seems like a single event – starting early, taking dog – but it quickly seems to be something “repeated” or “customary.” Our dear little poetess has been cruising the beach! On the regular! She “teases” the reader and she “teases” herself. She even teases – and I swear to God, there seems to be absolutely no registration that this is an all-time egg-on-the-face unintentional pun – the “Sea/man.”

She teases the “Sea/man.”

She “pretends to be entirely innocent in her motives” while she teases the “Sea/man.”

Then, having teased the “Sea/man” enough, the poetess gets “to the point of mutual arousal” with the “Sea/man” before she “runs away.” So, in this reading, the “Sea/man” becomes aroused, which is a lot like the Poop Monster in Dogma pooping. One can't help but feel that Ms. Miller could have pushed into herself just a knuckle or two deeper, analytically speaking.

In '88, Kenneth Stocks – I call him Ken, because he hates it and he's a douche – claimed that, in “the bad fright and the race for home,” our poor pretty poetess is “pursued by the rising tide of consciousness.” This avails nothing. We forge ahead.

Ahead! To a woman named Shakinovsky. In '99, we get from Shakinovsky – who is a Russian stripper/dancer or I will eat my hat – one of the more delightfully symptomatic readings of the poem. We should not, however, conclude from this that she's a “no means yes” kind of girl.

In Shakinovsky's adorably doe-ish eyes and easily terrified brain, the “welcoming, 'extend[ing] hands of the Frigate are not entirely friendly and contain a slight sense of threat, as 'Hempen' implies the possibility of trapping, tying, and strangling.” I know I, personally, cannot escape the throes of panic, when I'M STANDING ON A BEACH, that I am going to get TRAPPED, TIED, AND STRANGLED by the motherfucking SAILS OF BOATS WAY OUT IN THE OCEAN. It's a close cousin of that terror we none of us can escape: The fear of falling out of a tree you're not in. Which in turn has rent near as many hearts as the fear of slipping on ice you're not on. Pooping your pants when you're wearing a skirt.

[Here it is worth noting that Shakinovsky is the author of the classic studies, “I'm Afraid of My New Neighbors: They Might Be Foreign, or They're At Least Jewish or Something”; “Falling Coconuts: A Blight on The Nuclear Family”; “The Effects of Nuclear Fallout on the Coconuts of Enewetok Atoll”; and “Shark Attacks: Just Because They're Rare Doesn't Mean They're Not Still Scary.”]

Later, Shakinovksy writes, “This threat is made explicit as the Sea turns into a Man who follows the narrator, which serves to sexualize the image.”

[Be on the lookout for Shakinovsky's new book, “When My Cat Oliver Follows Me Up the Stairs I Feel Like He's Going to Rape Me and Sometimes I Get So Scared I Run and That Makes Him Run and Then I Scream and My Neighbors Call the Police,” forthcoming from Palgrave.]

This “increasing encroachment... and... personal threat... REACH THEIR CLIMAX [all-caps added] in 'And made as He would eat me up.' The threat here is that the narrator will be incorporated into the Sea and swallowed up... The relative size and impact of a drop of dew in relation to the ocean also serves to indicate the narrator's sense of her own powerlessness and fear of ravishment.”

[Shanikovsky doesn't date much. It's not that she doesn't want to meet somebody. It's just... it's complicated.]

So what about it? Who's going to lance these jokers off their steeds and be presented with my laurel-bush to wear around his head?

Russell Reising takes the prize (my bush). First, because he's the only critic who even comes close to acknowledging the weird, but also eyebrow-raisingly straightforward, female sexuality of the poem as something other than timidity and oppression and and running away from a cat named Oliver.

Second, because it does it in a fucking hilarious way.

So here it is: the only academic article I've seen which talks about the sexuality of “I started early,” and gets bonus points for doing it in terms that somehow manage to be over-the-top in their explicitness, and euphemistic, at the same time.

Reising doesn't wast time. He goes straight for the poem's “nearly pornographically fetishistic specificity.” Without, that is, specifying it. What's wonderful about this formulation is that not one of the critics perused above noticed the “nearly pornographically fetishistic specificity.”

Thought experiment: can you imagine any other form, any other medium, in which something could attain “nearly pornographically fetishistic specificity” and it would take experts in that field over fifty years just to notice it?

So wait, what's fetishistic? Well... each item of clothing – shoes, apron, boddice, and belt – takes up a “demarcating and fetishizing position on the speaker's body.” You see... shoes go on your feet. And feet are a fetishizing position. And then an apron goes over, like, your whole front area. And your front area, that's for fetishizers. And then your boddice, don't get me started on your boddice that covers pretty much the same stuff as your apron. And your belt, oh my stars, that's on roughly the same area as your belt and your apron. So, as we can see, this is a pervert's dream vacation. How many women have the common courtesy these days to highlight and demarcate their fetishizing positions by wearing clothes on them? They might as well just go naked and paint big florescent arrows on themselves towards their naughty bits. But not their normal naughty bits, just their weird naughty bits. Such as a belt would cover. Also, did you know the ocean is a pervert? We can tell this because Reising tells us that “fairly explicit sexual maneuvering [is] attributed to the sea.” He gets goo all in her shoes!

But is the ocean just a pervert, or is the poetess a pervertess, too? Reising notes that “I started” might be construed as a “sexual awakening.” IT ONLY TOOK US FIFTY YEARS to get from “The sea is here the traditional symbol of death” to “maybe 'I started' is kinda sorta a euphemism for orgasm.”

Ah, but the disgusting euphemisms will come hot and heavy now, because – in 1999 – women get to want to have sex in our interpretations of literature. This is the best thing that's ever happened to hermeneutics, if this is the kind of stuff it cranks out.

You see, “whereas the speaker 'started,' the sea could only 'follow' her lead.” So our new, dominant, desirous poetess “domesticates and limits the previously irresistible and overwhelming force of the sea within the phrases 'His Silver Heel' and 'Pearl,' both of which transfer the fetishistic specificity previously reserved for the representation of her own body to the body of the sea.”

CATECHISM

Q: What are we fetishizing?

A: The “ejaculatory culmination of the sexual act.”

Q: Why are we fetishizing the ejaculatory culmination of the sexual act?

A: Because of “the appropriation of the male emission as an object of female ownership (pearls and jewelry).”

Q: What weird, hard left turn are you about to take?

A: “Even if we read the image of her shoes overflowing with pearl as one of male sexual climax, the speaker nonetheless represents that climax as equally female – it is her shoes that overflow, suggesting the possibility that her desire, however generated, culminates in its own dripping fulfillment.”

Ladies: did you know this is what happens to your shoes?!

* * *

One Parting Reason to Fire All English Professors Post-Haste: “The 1862 composition date for this poem also enables us to read 'started' within a context capable of highlighting its responsiveness to the confinements and oppression peculiar to a slave culture, in this case reimagined by Dickinson to include the oppression of American women, even in the North. Frederick Douglass, to cite just one example, refers to his and his companions' planned escape from slavery as their 'intended start.'” The only way I could brook this is if Douglass wrote of his and his companions' planned escape from slavery as their “intended orgasm.”

How Friday Night Lights rung me out like a rag

2009-01-17T00:02:00.006-06:00

My dream girl, the girl of my dreams, is a plot device on the NBC series Friday Night Lights.

Let me explain.

My dream girl is not Adrianne Palicki, which would have surprised me two days ago. Adrianne Palicki plays Tyra, a character who is apparently supposed to be the mutant offspring of some Apollonian Greek God who never appears onscreen because he's pure concentrated attractiveness so undeniable that if he's captured on film it mysteriously melts (I assume this is the implication), and a trailer trash train-wreck whose other daughter is a stripper, played by Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, seen below in a towel.

Now, when I used to watch Fletch a lot, I had a serious crush on Dana Wheeler-Nicholson -- there's something about her utter lack of personality in that movie, her abject tabula rasa-ness, that almost lets you think she's just really cool under pressure, and not just overmatched by the prospect of being the female lead in a major motion picture opposite Chevy Chase at his most bombastic. I really love her in that movie. Then, she was the tumultuous, bitchy, and laudinum-addicted love interest of, like, Kirk Russell or somebody in Tombstone. Then she disappeared, and popped up again, playing these horrific and de-glammed people. I saw her in an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and her role was to play somebody who used to be beautiful, but then got all this plastic surgery and it all came out wrong and she was ugly and tragic. But the thing was, it just looked like Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, who I had a huge crush on as a teenager, so I'm like WTF! Come on, tv, there ain't nothing wrong with an aging Dana Wheeler-Nicholson. Then she popped up again on Friday Night Lights, as the absolutely hopeless Tyra's mom, the girl who gets dumped by the men who beat her and pops pills to stay homeostatic, until she falls through a plate-glass table and has to be rushed to the hospital by a bunch of drunk 15-year olds.

If you google image search "Dana Wheeler-Nicholson" with safesearch turned off, the first result is a vidcap of her doing what the website describes as a "drunken strip tease!" from, apparently, the first season of Sex & the City. It's pretty worth it.

Adrianne Palicki is one of those people who I find so attractive that it actually makes me recoil -- every time I see her -- with some emotionally confusing mixture of terror, rage, and, well, confusion.

I feel this heightened sense of danger, but I am totally stupefied. I know something very wrong is happening, but there's nothing I can do. Like a cow getting cattle-prodded down the conveyor belt to where the illegal immigrant is standing, knee-deep in the blood of my brethren and fallen comrades, with a rusty old knife to cut my throat. My friends, Adrianne Palicki is that illegal immigrant, and I am that cow. Her boobs might be the knife, or maybe it's the little mole between her eyes, I dunno... this trope needs some work.

So, Landry Clarke, played by Jesse Plemons -- who looks like Matt Damon if Matt Damon looked like a pancake with Matt Damon's facial features carved into it like a two-dimension Mount Rushmore --

is this geek. Actually, to call him a geek is to miss the point, because he's not a geek -- he's the culmination and fulfillment of the secret desires and fantasies of every geek, and he's masquerading as a real geek. He is the secret geek in every geek, the psychotic geek who follows his instincts even though that's exactly what geeks never do. He does all the things geeks don't do, while maintaining the appearance of something uncannily like geekery, like those aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers that look like people but are something else. Here's an abridged rundown: Landry beats a man to death to protect Tyra's honor. Then, he punches a starting quarterback in the face, inciting a lunchroom brawl that turns into a happy-go-lucky food fight, and then back into a brawl, in defense of Tyra's honor and also just because he's pissed. He joins the football team in order to win Tyra over, and then turns out to be unaccountably good at football -- so good it doesn't really make any sense at all, in terms of the fictional logic the show has been working with for, oh, I dunno, twenty episodes. Like, the coach repeatedly calls him "Lance" because he's so ignorable and forgettable and bad at football, and then suddenly he's going into games and making saving plays and scoring touchdowns and doing these implausibly athletic things in practice that have the coach saying "who's that guy?" and giving speeches about how he's "not the most talented athlete on the team" even though he just joined the team after what seems like a lifetime of absolutely sedimentary inactivity only to miraculously see playing time as the tight end (the tight end! the dude's like 130 pounds!) in a must-win game for a Division 1A state champion Texas high school football team. It gets to the point that, in the penultimate episode of the second season, the coach is running through the list of the devastating losses to the team's personnel, the players who aren't practicing that day, and he says, anxiously, "Landry, Saracen, and Smash." So the list goes: the geek who got, like, a two-minute montage of getting run over by people during his first practice because he was supposed to be so inept and is injured because he tripped over a curb... followed by the team's two stars and offensive juggernauts. It makes very little sense, except as ubergeek wish fulfillment. As ubergeek wish fulfillment, though, it makes every sense ever.

So anyway, the matter at hand is, my dream girl -- the girl of my dreams -- she's a plot device on this show. She appears, arbitrarily and out of nowhere, as Landry's "physics partner." She exists because Tyra is, in the logic of the show, the kind of person who Only Wants What She Can't Have, or, to be more precise, the kind of person who Has Something She Doesn't Want, Then Realizes She Might Lose It, And, In A State Of Panic, Goes Through Every Means Available To Possess It Even More Stringently And Exclusively And It Works Because She Can Have Whatever She Wants Which Is Why She Only Wants What She Might Lose, Until Eventually She Loses Interest And Doesn't Want It Anymore.

So the writers, they're thinking, "there is, at this point, nobody who believes that Tyra would be with Landry, and it's such an elephant in the room that we've actually written it into the show. Shit, we had Landry's Father accost Tyra and say 'you could have any man you wanted, so what do you want with my son.'"

(The sine qua non of ubergeek wish fulfillment.)

"So," the writers say, "we better do something -- anything! -- to make this make sense. Time for a plot device!" And thus is introduced my dream girl, the girl of my dreams.

When we first see her, she's just sitting there, across from Landry at the lunch table, being interesting. Knowing stuff. Being smart. Having a ton of pluck and just a zest of sass. Talking about cult movies and independent music. She is, in other words, carefully, meticulously calculated to be the girl of my dreams. She is manipulating me, owning me, conning me, and the bitch of it is, it's not even her that's doing it. It's the writers, the producers, the motherfucking Wizard of Oz. I'm being conned by the whore and her pimp. They cast her, knowing they could cast somebody as beautiful as they wanted, then give her glasses and a silly haircut and, instantly, she would suffer from the "I'm Rachel Leigh Cook and I'm in high school and I have glasses and a haircut carefully calculated to make me look slightly frumpy but also totally quirky and the kind of outfits middle aged women who don't yet know they're middle aged call 'funky'" effect. And they also knew that, in the last analysis, it wouldn't matter if the girl they cast was the prettiest girl in her high school, which she probably was, because she's very short, and Adrianne Palicki is very tall, and Adrianne Palicki is a motherfucking goddess. So, when the girl of my dreams, Jean, my dream girl, is placed side by side in the same frame with the impossibly awesomely named Adrianne Palicki, this six-foot firebrand with the upturned nose and the surprisingly black roots, who doubtless gave any number of junior high teachers incredibly guilty consciences about the content of their fantasy lives, the producers know Jean, the girl of my dreams, will fade into the margins. She'll bleed off the screen. She'll walk in like Buster Douglas, owning the joint, and then be carried out after 60 seconds in the ring with Tyson. The writers know this. They know that the difference between a 9.4 and a 9.8 is the difference between a yellow banana and a banana with a tiny bit of green just right at the top that can't possibly hurt, but when both of those bananas are crowding up your visual field, you can only really see one of them. Adrianne Palicki is that yellow banana. The writers know this. In the immortal words of Mitch Hedberg, "Yellow means go. Green means stop. And red means, where the fuck did you get that banana at."

The writers also know that, when Jean, the girl of my dreams, is allowed on-screen by herself to shine, she will be incomparable (as long as you're not being forced to compare her). Even if she's marginalized by the indominable presence of Adrianne Palicki, her presence is enough to dominate the memory Adrianne Palicki's presence. The writers, the casting directors know this. They know that in a show that has Adrianne Palicki in it, this one -- this person here -- is allowed to be "the ugly one."

"Hi, I'm the ugly one. I'm so ugly and gross and geeky! Want me to make you a mixtape?!" It's sort of like how, in an Ethiopian prison camp, Kate Moss is the fat one. Or like how, in the commercials for The Lost Boys 2: The Tribe, Corey Feldman was the one who wasn't that annoying. It's all relative.

People like me, watching this show because we absolutely love football but also have (unrelated) tiny brain-orgasms every time we meet a pretty girl who has opinions about sub-genres of heavy metal, will keel over and have a wistful aneurism when this startlingly gorgeous, four-foot-nothing creature with the blonde semi-dredlocks says, "My vinyl basically has two sections. Metal and non-metal," even though, in the last episode, she was talking about, like, Elvis Costello or something, because she has to be all things to all geeks, and goddamnit, she is everything to me. She mentions, probably for the first time in the history of network telvision, Carcass, Napalm Death, and, like, Agoraphobic Nosebleed or somebdoy, in a single sentence, while interrogating Landry about the influences of his grindcore / extreme-thrash band Crucifictorius. It's one of those moments that is calculated to be cherished by nerdlingers like me, and simultaneously digestable as a code for everyone else, signifying clearly enough that she is "in the know" about something Landry is "in the know" about, and that nobody else could possibly care about, and that they are probably the only two people who are attractive enough to put on television, and "and in the know" about this particular subject, in a 500 mile radius. It's sorta like that scene in the David Cronenberg Crash where James Spader and Holly Hunter both come to understand that they'll both really get their rocks off if they do it during a car wreck.

(Incidentally, FNL is the only long-form fictional motion picture I've ever seen that does a credible job of representing what it's like to be at a shitty rock and roll show. This, to me, is an accomplishment on par with setting water on fire.)

You know what she, Jean, the girl of my dreams does to flirt with Landry? Ok, he's like, ragging on power metal, so she makes him a power metal mix cd. Imagine you're this loser, right? And you're hanging out with this girl who is way out of your league. With me? Then, she prostrates herself and gives you a mix cd that has this on it.

You know what happens? You instantly melt into a puddle of goo that spreads out on the pavement and spells out "I love you." I'm so in love with this girl, it's embarrassing. I mean, every guy who watches this show probably finds himself seeing her and uttering, in the cramped quarters of his inner monologue, my single favorite sentence in the history of the world -- "I could love her." But more than that, it's because, from the moment she appeared, I knew I was destined to lose her.

She -- Jean -- the girl of my dreams -- my dream girl -- shows up spontaneously enough, and with so little exposition, that it is at no point in question that she is only present so that she can be accepted by Landry to spurn Tyra into a mortifying seizure of jealousy, and then renounced by Landry, in some kind of pathetically ersatz-Christ cartwheel of martyrdom, in order to win Tyra back. There is no question. And it happens, all in all, in a 3-episode arc that takes a total of maybe 12 minutes of screen time. And in this screen-time, she, Jean, the girl who is inevitably to be spurned and thrown into the metaphorical toilet like so much metaphorically used metaphorical tampon, becomes my dream girl. The girl of my dreams. She appears in the season finale of season 2, only to look crushed, disheartened, ashamed and alone when she sees Landry and Tyra walking along, holding hands blissfully and aloofly. Then, she disappears.

According to imdb, the character, Jean, the girl of my dreams, appears in 3 episodes of the series Friday Night Lights. So she's never coming back. This one selfish gesture of Landry Clark's managed not only to crush her and discourage her, to wound her and traumatize her; it also stole her away from me.

This means she's gone forever. In the immortal words of Jacques Lacan -- who I'm pretty sure was talking about something much different -- "the Woman does not exist."

This is only the most extreme example, though. Friday Night Lights has this remarkable way of casting remarkable people who, for one reason or another, haven't been snatched up to let their unfathomable gifts shine on another stage already, and then presenting them, in a way that is only barely believable, as, like, people with normal problems. Like, "Oh, no, the guy who looks like he could be cast in a TV show as the star quarterback, who is, on this TV show, the star quarterback, gets paralyzed... in a game of football!" Or, "the girl who looks like she could make Hugh Hefner's leg crank like Thumper Rabbit's is, get this, deeply religious and sleeping with her paralyzed boyfriend's best friend!" It is a show that is almost entirely made up of conventional commonplace tropes that somehow just manage to avoid being cliches and become, by some ineffable act of movie magic grace, absolutely fucking breathtaking. I don't get it.

I love this show, even as every fiber of my being is screaming at me, "this show is trying to make you love it!" It doesn't matter. I love it through my shame of loving it, the shame of my own tedious predictability, and I even love my tedious predictability.

Watching Friday Night Lights has done things to me like make me lie in bed and think about how much I think I secretly would have been good at football if I'd gone out for football in high school. I rationalize: in 5th grade, I came in 2nd in the 40 yard dash. In 6th grade, the soccer coach told me I was the quickest player on the team. Surely, then, I could have played high school football, been unspectacular but solid enough. I could have walked on at a Division 1 FBS college, proven my mettle and given a scholarship in my senior season. I could have made a play in a third-tier bowl game, been drafted in the 4th round by a hungry but rebuilding perennially second-class NFC team, impressed with my tenacity and work-ethic on the practice squad, moved to reserves, been put in the game because of an unfortunate injury to a defensive stalwart and team captain, and then impressed so much with my tenacity, good instincts, sticktoitiveness, and raw athleticism that I quickly erased so much as the last vestiges of his memory, then made the Pro Bowl as a third alternate. I'm pretty sure, at some point while I'm telling myself this story, in my head, which is on a pillow because I'm too lazy to get up, I actually believe it.

In my fantasy, I'm a cornerback.

*

Also, Kyle Chandler, holy shit. Why have I not seen this man in anything between Early Edition -- the show that guest starred Fisher Stevens (the guy who played The Plague in Hackers) and prominently featured a pet cat and was based on the idea that a guy got a newspaper from some mystical ghost-deliveryman and was able to solve the crimes that happened tomoorow today -- and Friday Night Lights? The motherfucker just oozes charisma. But more importantly -- when they cast him, why didn't they change the concept of the show?

Hear me out -- Early Edition 2: Saturday Morning Post. A high-school football coach gets the paper a day early, Friday morning, and discovers the outcome of the game he coaches that night! He has a mere 12 hours to game-plan a victory, or his team might miss the state tournament! Fisher Stevens guest-stars!

Gag gift

2008-12-08T14:10:00.005-06:00

I don't have to be back in class for like 40 days and 40 nights and, as in the film of that name, I will count the break a success only if (if only) I can avoid having sex with Shannyn Sossamon.

(Here she is praying I don't go through with it.)

The fleshy part

2008-11-20T21:40:00.006-06:00

(The 10th, and possibly the most harrowing google image result for "fleshy part.")

I am currently regretting the fact that I went with the 14" cheese-steak for the price of a 7" cheese-steak at a sports-bar called Bert's at lunch. It raises at least one interesting question -- what, legally, is the definition of "steak"? If you wanted to, say, level a lawsuit at a restaurant -- how far would their "steak" have to be from that normative legal standard "steak"? Because the first thing that pops up in my dictionary is, "A slice of meat cut from the fleshy part of an animal or large fish." Which doesn't carry with it any of the quality control that is, to my mind, implicit in and conveyed by the word. Can you imagine if they'd just decided not to invent the word steak and just gone with fleshy part? Going to a the local fleshy part house for a sirloin fleshy part? Firing up the grill and throwing down some t-bone fleshy parts? Groaning about having to watch those awful, awful hot men hock for Taco Bell's Triple Fleshy Part Burrito during every commercial break? Having the classic Simpsons' line instead be "Money's too tight for fleshy parts"? I can tell you one thing, and I will tell you that one thing -- if the special had been a 14" fleshy part sandwich for the price of just 7" of fleshy part, I'm pretty sure that's a sandwich I wouldn't be regretting.

Also -- Last week, I sat in on a lecture, and the lecturer said that "mutton" was a kind of cow meat. I wasn't so sure, so I went to the lecturer afterward and I said, "are you sure mutton is a kind of cow meat?" She was absolutely sure. Now, having thoroughly searched the surprisingly extensive wikipedia page for "mutton" for such phrases as "cow," "beef," "steak," "fleshy part," and "any other animal that's not a sheep or goat or lamb or something like that," it is becoming more and more clear that mutton can, under no circumstances, be a cow. Not even in Britain, where, it was intimated by the lecturer, it was more likely to be a cow. I know that because there's a "Britain" section to the wikipedia entry for mutton, no shit.

So now, I'm trying to find a way to reveal that I'm right about mutton, without it coming off as gloating. I'm thinking about wearing a t-shirt that says, "Mutton Can Under No Circumstances Be Cow," and explaining to everyone that it's the hot new fashion the kids are wearing, like No Fear and Shemalé in their day. I'm thinking I could organize a campus even called Mutton Week under the auspices of some shadow corporation called NoCow or Cows AREN'T Us (a limited liability corporation), with a mission of getting out the facts about mutton and ending all the pernicious misconceptions. I could get a bunch of freshman to stand on the quad and hand out literature and do something theme-appropriate like, I dunno, wail on some cowbells or something. I could dress up like the gypsy from Jane Eyre and go into her office hours eating some mutton, and then deliver a seemingly mad, yet curiously precise disquisition on the nature and history of mutton, and then jump out the window to evade campus security. I could revive the old theanonymouspervert@gmail.com gmail account and send her an anonmyous tip from the anonymous pervert, on the preconception that, as long as my name isn't attached, she won't know it's from me -- the only problem would be finding a way to say something perverted about mutton that's still actually about mutton, sort of like how I imagine it was sometimes difficult for Bill Nye the Science Guy or Beakman (either of the Beakmans) from Beakman's world to simultaneously follow every standard of scientific rigor and falsifiability and remain accessible, you know, for the kids. But I'll probably have to just go on letting her believe that mutton is cow, and infecting whole new generations of readers with this damned lie. The needle and the damage done. I just hope she doesn't get to you, or anyone you know.

Etopian upiphany

2008-11-20T00:10:00.003-06:00

There's nothing like standing over the dirty counter eating expired olives off a dirty spoon during a bout of stress-induced insomnia to make you think, "really? this is what my life is like? really?"

It's like that scene in Mrs. Doubtfire where... ah hell, what's the point...

The 23 skin tones of Law & Order

2008-11-18T19:44:00.006-06:00

I have a crush this big
(--------------||--------------)
on Mariska Hargitay.

But watch out Mariska, cus here comes Alana de la Garza.

It's like Angie Harmon was some kind of weak, broken prototype, like an Apple II or something, and then the Law and Order people were thought Hey, why don't we just invent new, faster, sleeker, slimmer quasi-cultural, powerful, vulnerable women who navigate positions of authority while still keeping in check ungovernable torrents of unsheathed, raw emotion? Aren't ethical undecidables always more affecting when they're being agonized over by attractive people? What sweetens the bitter rhubarb of a gristly murder or a toxic rape like a dip of nearly white, but not quite white sugar? Kid lost both parents, will never be the same? Who better to agonize over it, but ultimately not be able to help and be wrenched by the agony of impotence, like a butched-up whisp of cotton-down cloud blown in from the Big Rock Candy Mountain? When someone looks into your eyes and reads your very soul, who better to do it than somebody with gigantic eyes? They're like Bambi's mom all dolled up in formfitting polycotton blouses -- that old Law and Order staple that, try as it might, never gets old -- for Maxim's annual Hottest Jurisprudence issue.

The job gets to them, you know -- but they need it. They need the job.

"Why do you do it? What keeps you going?" asks one minor character per season.

"I have to," she responds, eyes glistening with Vaseline, lips trembling like jelly on a trampoline. "It keeps me single."

Law and Order, I have the biggest crush on your formula. It's like Doctor Pepper. All around the world, plug it in, and it just works.

People who weigh 100 pounds: an ode to preying on the weak

2008-11-17T10:20:00.004-06:00

Here's a poem I composed mentally this morning in the bathtub.

I'm fond of folks who weigh 100 pounds
Because to them, you're just unstoppable.
You can pick them up
Against their will
And throw them in a lake,
And there's nothing they can do.

Sometimes they surprise you
With their craftiness --
They slip out of a
Less than vicelike hold --
But on offense,
They're for shit.

She'll be coming round the mountain when she etc. (An unbecoming becoming)

2008-11-11T18:58:00.005-06:00

You really ought to go here and let this guy scare the shit out of you.

Yesterday I finished Ulysses, always an apocalyptic, if not to say apoplectic moment, a bit bittersweet because you realize you're done and that's all? but really you're not done because you can never finish. Finishing the book is worth about the same as knocking out Mike Tyson in 2003 -- impressive as to bragging rights, but short on actual accomplishment. You can't even go back in time and fight him in 1991, and even if you could he'd break your face.

Speaking of accomplishment, though -- I did get to read this passage aloud in a room full of awkward people.

"I feel all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he made me spend the 2nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all only not to look ugly or those lines from the strain who knows the way hed take it you want to feel your way with a man"

Who saw that obscenity trial coming, eh?

And it's not to say that this was a pertinent passage given the context of the conversation. Apropos of what you might call nothing; but there was no way I was going to read that passage whilst scrambling to finish that fucking book at One AM and not repeat it nine hours later, in the heat of the moment, as it were. If I don't get to read that out loud, what am I in grad school for?

Now: watch the room cast their eyes straight down as if a homeless guy, reeking of piss and wine, came in and sat with an instructor's copy of Gifford's Annotated, pulled his spectacles low onto his nose, and said "let's begin," with what look earily like the professor's bloodily dismembered ears strung on a string round his neck.

Disclaimer: this reflects only my own carefully dissembled feeling of exhilarating awkwardness after reading the passage in question, and in no way reflects on the awkward feelings of any of the other awkward people in the awkward class.

Disclaimer 2: That might have been a reference to Universal Soldier, but you'll never catch me.

I am now plowing, or piledriving if you prefer and I do, my way through Walden, one of the million-billion foundational works of literature which I cannot do what I do without having read, and which I have not read. I am on a photo-tour of the Grand Canyon, strafing through in an Apache helicopter, shooting at anything that looks like it might have once been alive, vomiting into the Colorado River from 300 feet in the air, just to leave my mark. It is not the most sensitive reading strategy, but sensitivity will not change the fact that time is of the essence. (Does it ever? Isn't it always?). The upshot of this is, it's pretty hard to read Walden right now and not think, Obamamania would have made this motherfucker sick. And that's kind of funny.

Worst thing today: I read this sentence -- "As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure" -- and it sort of stuck in my craw, because earlier I met with a student who got Frank Churchill and Mr. Martin confused in Emma. Not just one time, though. In general. This is basically an impossible mistake to make. I carefully explained, "Frank Churchill is the gay guy in Clueless. Mr. Martin is Breckin Meyer, the skeezy skater stoner."

"Ah!" she said, with a blaze of inspiration. "Christian and Travis!"

My fingers, heart, and birdlike soul flutter with anticipation for her final paper.

Quoth McNulty: I am a leader of men.

I put it to you, Thandie Newton

2008-11-08T23:53:00.005-06:00

If you're having sex with a guy, and the guy dies, but you don't realize it, how long does it take before it turns out that you have to drink when you're playing a game of "I've Never" and somebody says, "I've never had sex with a dead guy"?

Edit: if you google the phrase "I've Never," one of the first hits is this.

Plus: Tupac and Tim Roth in Gridlock'd. How fucking cute is this?

Tan, cankerous, cantankerous

2008-11-07T00:04:00.001-06:00

I wonder how often a body gets sick because it gets germs on it -- say, by making grazing hand-to-hand contact with its Chinese food delivery dude -- and then engaging in a thorough-going round of nose-picking.

Of course, I insist to the death that this is a purely hypothetical consideration.

Disclosurebot on the fritz again

2008-11-05T20:42:00.009-06:00

I wrote this last year, and I just found it, and it made me feel better, because apparently I used to feel worse.

Improvement -> Progress -> Enlightenment.

Crawl -> Walk -> Fly.

Drawl <- Squawk <- Cry.

----

I refrain from writing about school, because I don't anymore often think it wise to give in to my inner disclosurebot, the part of me that relishes using rhetorical jazz hands to just barely cover up the inner horror of what the fuck? I always tend towards drama queenery in these situations. I always tends towards hyperbole.

I am mentally exhausted. I feel like I'm having my brain broken into by a gang of croupiers to whom I owe everything and can't pay. Grad school feels like gambling to me. Like searching for food. You poke a stick in a hole and wiggle it around for a while and hope there's a snake in there that's good eating. We call those "arguments." Pockets inside out like a hobo with a lipstick clown mask. Intuition on hook, on pole, over shoulder. Catch me a whopper. Or a crappie.

I have a presentation paper due at noon today about Edmund Spenser. I have to read it in front of all of the prospective students, coming here to visit, to see if they want to come here, for good, for ever, and never ever leave like me. I can never ever leave. Don't be like me! They're coming to get a taste of grad school, and I have to parrot this paper that couldn't be farther out of my period of specialization -- especially true since I have no period of specialization -- to them. The paper is about rape, something about which I know nothing. This fact does not make me refrain from making grandiose statements like, "if the rape is pleasurable, that only makes it all the more horrible." Because that's true, right?

Let's see that one in slow motion.

I'm caught between the poles of feeling incapable of doing what is required of me, because I would prefer not to, and feeling like a gyrating, breakdancing wind-up monkey who has been wound up for some reason to dance a dance it's never danced before in front of a Carnegie Mellon audience.

I don't even feel inadequate, is the thing -- not in the way you'd expect, not from me. I'm just pissed off that so much has to be done so fast and I move too slow. It's like indignation, directed at abstractions. I tried to work ahead this week. I did. I read Agamben, and I read Henry James, and they took so long to read. I started ahead, and I was already behind. That shit is demoralizing. Now I'm tired, and it's 7 am, but I can't go to sleep, because I have to finish this paper by noon, and then I have a meeting at 2:45. I'm supposed to tell a professor which classes I want to take next semester. I'm not actually supposed to sign up for the classes. Just a meeting, to tell the professor which classes.

And what's terrible about it is, the internal clock is ticking, and every time the clock ticks, the battery hooked to it drains a little. Brain drain. 100 pages of Agamben to go by 24 hours from now. Pain/gain. 145 pages of Henry James to go by 48 hours from now. Train in vain.

Stop writing blog post, go write presentation paper. It's not yet impossible to do what I have to do, but I feel it slipping away, and the question, "when am I going to have to have time to sleep?" sounds less and less like the kind of question you ask when you want your predicament to sound important, and more and more like the kind of question you ask when you really don't know when the next time you're going to be able to sleep is. Or maybe I just want it to sound importanter. All I want to do is watch the next episode of Dexter. Sleep is the enemy, not because it's the cousin of death, but because I want it and I can't have it. It's the enemy like you're the enemy, so long as you're a person I want and can't have. The less I sleep the longer it takes, and the more I sleep the less I can do. No matter what I do I end the week on a wing and a prayer.

I feel. Like a stupid monkey in a crucible having its stupid monkey metal burned down into ore and its stupid monkey mettle tested. I feel like there's a team of tenured machinists staring down at my jaws-of-lifed open corpse nodding at each other, "We can rebuild him." Everybody's looking at you and your ribs are spread open and your nose is wide open. Do something funny! Dance!

Nobody blame the monkey for he knows not what he do. First things first, you dig the hole you fill it up you dig the hole you fill it up you dig the hole you fill it up. When you're done with that, you dig the hole you fill it up you dig the hole you fill it up you dig the hole you fill it up. Finally, you...

Etc.

Don't mess aound with the Demolition Man

2008-11-03T13:04:00.006-06:00

I assume it will be relatively uncontroversial when I say that Demolition Man is the greatest movie ever made. Oh, sure, there will be some Bordwells and Eberts and other buffoons piping up from the back of the class, concealing their yells of “Citizen Kane!” and “The Godfather!” with faux coughs, and maybe even some turtlenecked europhiles in sharp black glasses and shapeless brown pants sniffing “Rules of the Game” or “8 ½.” But these people are easily dealt with. How, you ask? How do we know that Demolition Man is the greatest movie ever made? I'll show you, in 48 seconds or less.

That's how we know, motherfucker.

It's a scruffy puppy of a movie, automatically and by definition more adorable – more worthy of adoration – than any of a thousand born and bred showdogs with million dollar pedigrees. Film school be damned; I just want to love you.

It's the movie that singlehandedly makes Brave New World a good book. In class the other day, I was trying to defend the aesthetic merit of Brave New World, but ended up coming clean that my enthusiasm for the book is mostly predicated on a love of Demolition Man. But since basically nobody in the class had seen Demolition Man, and since those who had seen it dismissed it out of hand, it sort of fell flat. I rhapsodized for a minute on the joys and pleasures of Wesley Snipes with a platinum-blonde hightop fade. Then somebody said, “I'd hate for you to pick the movies I had to watch.” Fortunately I was wearing a Spielberg Hook shirt at the time, and I was able to deflect with, “yeah, well, I'm wearing a Hook shirt.”

Now, I actually think Hook is a pretty fucking badass movie, but I had to let it go. It turns out, enthusiasm and disdain make worse bedfellows than Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon with an industrial tub of tractor grease and matching gag balls. Sure, I got sniped at for thinking the movies I like are bad movies, and sure, that could make me furious.

But goddamn it, my enthusiasm for Demolition Man will not be tainted by rage!

So, you may be thinking, Ye Great Unwashed Uninitiated, aside from this abstract word-sculpture about the Greatness of the film, what are its particular virtues. I refer you, in the first case, to Wesley Snipes's aforementioned platinum blonde hightop fade.

Snipes plays his sinister comic genius thing to the hilt, never deigning to ham it up, even when he's hamming it up. Even when he's unfreezing a load of “cryo-cons” and he yells, “Jefferey Dahmer?! I love this guy!” In this future – the alternate future of Demolition Man – Jefferey Dahmer was cryogenically frozen to undergo behavioral modification and rehabilitation. Which, it could be argued, is a step up in the romance department from being beaten to death, in prison, with a mop handle.

With the right scripts – and far be it from me to suggest that Demolition Man was not one of the right scripts – Snipes could have been gigantic. A fat flaming supernova of stardom. Instead, he's in prison for tax evasion and financing a black militant separatist group / kung fu retreat. Nice going, Wesley Snipes's agent. May the Lord bless him and keep him from being beaten to death with a mop handle.

At one point, Snipes lifts a futuristic manhole to the futuristic sewer and ejaculates: “Oooooh, shit! I love that smell. Reminds me of biscuits and gravy.” Talk about the right script. The future-sewer reminds Simon Phoenix of soul-food.

But if you need more – oh, there's plenty more. Take, for instance, the mid-90s dream team cast.

Courtney Cox's inept underling from Ace Ventura, Roger Pedacter, plays an inept cop who greets Stallone by saying, “I formally convey my presence!”

The warden from The Shawshank Redemption, rocking an immaculately shorn and ice-shiny dome, plays the inept police commissioner. Sample dialog: “Caveman! Let's finish with all the Rip Van Winkle!”

A pre-insufferable Rob Schneider -- if there ever was such a thing -- in his first teaming with Stallone (Judge Dredd anyone?), plays an inept cop. “We're police officers! We're not trained to handle this kind of violence!”

Benjamin Bratt plays an inept cop who becomes an inept bandito. Quoth Stallone: “a bump on the head and you think you're Pancho Villa?”
Bratt: “Who?”

("Hi, I'm Benjamin Bratt, and I'm not that famous, somehow.")

A pre-"I'll do the voice-over for a thousand commercials for products I would have told you I'd kill myself before endorsing a decade and a half ago" Dennis Leary plays Edgar Friendly, the leader of the resistance movement.

And he clearly writes his own dialog. It's weird, and it's fantastic, and it's fantastical. It would be like... like, if Shakespeare was working on a play, and he wrote a part for Emily Dickinson, and then let her write her own soliloquy, that's what it's like.

[Enter Emilia]
Bornitholio: But soft! Hark Emilia anon! What news from the Duke?
Emilia: It is a balmy ray of weight –
That circumscribes the spider door
And falls – sirroco'd – in a chain
That – not – is slanted paramour
Bornitholio: Whaaaaaa?!

Leary delivers a rant that, while being perfectly and representatively Dennis Leary-esque, also sums up every criticism I have of Kant's moral philosophy. And I'm not even joking. This movie's that good.

Edgar Friendly: You see, according to Cocteau's plan I'm the enemy, cuz I like to think; I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech, and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder, "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-o all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal? I've seen the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener."

MOTHERFUCKER! WOOOOOOOOO!

Shortly before this, this magical movie moment, Stallone buys a rat burger in the underworld from a monobrowed Mexican vagabond. A RAT BURGER!

Stallone: “Que es este carne?”

Monobrowed Mexican vagabond: “Este carne es de rata!”

Stallone: “Rat? This is a rat burger? Not bad! Matter of fact, it's the best burger I've had in years. Prego... see you later.”

He chokes down the last bite of rat burger brilliantly.

But that's all topical triviality. You want message? Demolition Man has message. It's a Message Movie. It's actually a perfectly orchestrated allegory of the Dionysian vs. the Apollonian, and the impossibility of mediating between order and chaos. It's rife with aporia and undecideability. But you know what the upshot is? A little bit of Bacchus isn't such a bad thing.

Stallone: “This isn't the wild west – the wild west wasn't even the wild west! Hurting people's not a good thing... well, sometimes it is... but not when it's a bunch of people looking for something to eat!”

It turns out, according to this movie, you're supposed to have sex! You're supposed to blow shit up! But you're also supposed to honor thy neighbor and give peace a chance! This movie's fucking awesome!!!

When you finish the movie, and the lights fade, and the credits roll, and you're sitting there bathed in and beaming with a positively orgiastic afterglow, you think there are no treats left in this Halloween bucket. But then, a racket kicks up. Not just any racket. It's Sting. Sting from the Police! Performing a song called “Demolition Man,” complete with lots of falsetto gospel wailing! A little deep searching in the credits reveals that Sting released an ep called Demolition Man.

Are you fucking serious?! Sting!! “Demolition Man” by Sting!!!

Right now I bet you don't believe me. I bet you think I'm making shit up about Demolition Man, because you buy that it's great, but there's no way it's that great. But you're wrong, sucka!!!

What a fucking great song! What a fucking great Sting! How do you not have tantric sex with that guy? Plucking his bass with his thumb, trying to look all tough... just adorable.

I first saw Demolition Man in the theater, on a road trip with my mom, as a nine year old. We were on our way to WWF Summer Slam in Detroit. It was the epochal Summer Slam in which Lex Lugar body slammed the formidably hefty Yokozuna to assert, in symbolic terms, America's socioeconomic and cultural dominance over Japan. After he did it, red white and blue balloons fell from the rafters and everyone chanted “USA! USA!” as large groups of congregated rednecks are wont to do when sweaty men in skin-tights hug each other sweatily. Sadly, I didn't see any of this, because my mom was falling asleep, and badly wanted to beat the traffic before the main event. I had to read about it the next month in the WWF Magazine.

(I was THERE! Right before this...)

It seemed, at the time, like a lost opportunity. Like THE lost opportunity. But what I lost that day, I more than gained. It was like losing your penis and finding the lord. Like dropping a slice of pizza cheese-down in New Jersey, bending to pick it up, and suddenly finding $20 in anywhere other than New Jersey. Like drinking poison Kool-Aid only to be taken by space aliens to another, wonderful world.

I kept coming back to Demolition Man.

I bought the novel. Not, you understand, the novel upon which the film is based. The novel which is based on the film. There's a gag in the movie – the three seashells. There's no toilet paper in the future. Instead, on the shelf where they're supposed to have the toilet paper, they got these three seashells. Stallone can't figure out how to use the three seashells. Rob Schneider mocks him -- “he doesn't know how to use the three seashells! Heheheheheh!” The last line of the movie is, “How's that damn three seashells thing work?”

This was, in the immortal words of Michael Cera, an awesome mind puzzle for me as a child. How does the damn three seashells thing work? I think I am, in some respects and for all my skepticism, hopelessly naïve. Now I understand that the three seashells thing probably does not work. It is merely there to sucker rubes like myself. And I can accept that, the same what that I accept that there is probably not something called The Force, which is stronger in some than in others. But the book, Demolition Man: The Novel? The book is even more infuriating. After John Spartan has kicked Simon Phoenix's cryogenically frozen head off (“Heads up!” which is a genius callback to a line from the first scene in the movie – Phoenix: “I swear I'd lose my head if it wasn't attached.” Spartan: “I'll keep that in mind.” Then Phoenix flicks a cigarette into some gas and all this C4 blows up, and I'm like, dude, C4 only blows up when an electrical charge passes through it and fire is not electrical, and why is all this C4 in motherfucking barrels? Who has barrels of C4?), and everything is in chaos, Spartan is walking away with Lenina Huxley. And, like in the movie, he asks how the damn three seashells thing works. But this time, the novel tells us, she leans in and whispers in his ear. She WHISPERS in his EAR, says the omniscient narrator, and we are not told what she says. And he says, “Well, I'll be damned.”

I was so pissed.

I still get a little riled up when I think about it. Suffice it to say, I only read Demolition Man the book once. Which was for the best, because when it came out on VHS, it was mine – the same copy I own to this very day. It's one of those nebulous VHS tapes. I have no idea how I got it, where it came from, if I stole it, if it was bought for me, if I bought it with paper route money. No idea. All I know is, that for as long as I can properly remember anything like an itemized list of my possessions, this copy of Demolition Man has been my constant companion. (And lord willing, will be for many years hence.)

In high school, an entire summer went by wherein I watched at least part of Demolition Man every day. First Leno, then Conan, then Carson Daley, then an hour cop drama the specs of which I've totally forgotten, then The Hughleys, then an hour of Bernie Mac. Good TV trailed off at about 4:30 a.m. Then, every morning, without fail, I'd pop in Demolition Man and drift off to the most beautiful, beatific sleep you can imagine. This is undoubtedly why – or at least part of why, though it might not be crazy to go the whole way – I am the well-rounded, fully functional member of society you behold today.

The genius of the movie is that at no point can you tell whom the joke is on. It fulfills every requirement of the Great Terrible Movie. The strange thing about it – and the truly, unprecedentedly great thing – is that, I'm pretty sure it knows it. Normally, that's grounds for immediate dismissal from the Great Terrible Movie sweepstakes. You can't try to make a bad movie, and make a bad movie, and have it be a good movie. The reason Breakin', or Bloodsport, or Mighty Ducks is so great is, you get a pretty solid sense that the people making the movie were absolutely sure that they were on to something. Any bad movie that underachieves is just a bad movie. It takes talent, to paraphrase Ebert, to make a titanically bad film.

But just as sure I am that Demolition Man knows it's a terrible movie... I'm pretty sure it thinks it's pretty great. It resides in the same anti-genre of affection-parody as Hot Fuzz, but is, at the end of the day, vastly superior, for all Hot Fuzz's greatness. Because Hot Fuzz is knowing. Demolition man isn't even thinking. It's the filmic equivalent to getting hit in that spot in your knee that makes your leg kick, and having your leg kick, where Hot Fuzz is getting hit in that spot in your knee, realizing your leg hasn't kicked, and then kicking your leg because your leg hasn't kicked. I appeal directly to the court: which evinces a healthier nervous system?

Plus, it's got one of the Top 5 weirdest sex scenes in movie history, wherein Stallone proposes to have “Bony... the wild mambo... the hunka-chunka...” with Sandra Bullock. “Fluid transfer?!” she squeals.

Fucking Demolition Man rules.

Loving you is easy cuz I'm dead

2008-11-03T09:38:00.001-06:00

I've been watching a lot of Law and Order lately, since, in the deep
of the night, I can't stand to be alone with my thoughts. The two best
quotes, so far, have both been from SVU, both stumbled upon
accidentally in episodes I watched - but which did not run - back to
back. The first is from a 911 operator; the second, a lonesome
necrophiliac.

"Sweet mother of god... It's the carjack rapist!"
(Eat that, Dexter, with yr ice-truck killer!)

"You can't trust a woman with a pulse!"

--
Sent from my mobile device

Working through a Sarah Palin fantasy

2008-10-02T19:54:00.010-06:00

I'm not gonna lie to you, I'm a little bit wine-drunk, and this VP debate is killing me. I really do want to make out with Sarah Palin, though. But I want us to be wasted off shared swigs from a sticky flask, and I want something sharp and hard and preferably plastic to be poking her in the back. I want Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me" to be playing on the stereo of my IROC-Z, and I want us to be sitting in it on a road that runs through a cornfield. And I want her to be really impressed that I have a sweet IROC-Z. I want it to be 1986. I want her to be 17, but look just like she does now, and I want her to be snapping gum and wearing at least one wrist-band, and if we're really telling it like it is, leg-warmers and hotpants and a Depeche Mode t-shirt that's way too big. I want us to share a Newport Medium, and I want her to blow smoke into my mouth because I want her to, and not necessarily because she wants to, although she's certainly curious. I want her to be blind without her glasses, and lose her glasses in the cornfield, and I want to watch her wander, frantic, through the stalks, groping and grasping at straws and stems. I want to laugh under my breath, and I want her to think maybe I'm laughing but not be sure, and not feel self-assured enough to call me on it. I want her older brother to stumble upon us, and threaten my life. I want her to cry and apologize, first to him, and after he leaves, to me. I want to say, "whatever," and screech away in my Camaro, leaving her knock-kneed and sobbing in the dirt.

And I want to have a sweet peach-fuzz mustache.

And I want to be wearing Wranglers.

And I want to have a guitar in the back seat.

And I want her to never run for public office because of this sole traumatic event, and become a failed conceptual artist who makes installations about how much she hates me, and then, when she runs out of money and her parents won't help her anymore, a hot, mean kindergarten teacher.

It's important to have priorities

2008-09-30T15:29:00.004-06:00

In the last 24 hours, I've written 800 words on Emerson's "Self-Reliance," for a paper due tomorrow at 8 a.m., and 4,500 words on how and why Demolition Man is the greatest movie ever made.

It was so worth it.

PS -- if anybody buys me this for Christmas, I will be their humble and grateful serf for life, and they will be my liege lord, and I will work their fief, and plant and tend to their soy crop, and just generally be good merry company and a shining, loyal sidekick.

Hey... I'm back!

2008-09-27T15:56:00.006-06:00

I was pissed off at first when I found out that Paul Newman died. Then I thought about it, and I tried to think of anybody who's ever lived who was or is cooler than Paul Newman was, and continues to be. And I couldn't think of anybody. He was, and is, the coolest person I've ever heard tell of. And I just couldn't stop thinking about how cool Paul Newman was, and is. And I wasn't mad anymore. I was just kind of in awe of how amazingly cool Paul Newman was, and is. What a cool guy.

Vorpal sword

2008-09-25T21:26:00.002-06:00

One time, my friend was hitting on a girl with a glass eye at a bar. I came up to them and spanked her with a ten dollar bill. She was kind of offended. I said, "I'm really sorry I just did that, and the fact that I'm apologizing means, I need another beer." She had a glass eye.

MOTHER FUCKER!!!!!!!!!!!

2008-09-23T11:45:00.002-06:00

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks:

10-23 Calgary, Alberta - The Warehouse *
10-24 Edmonton, Alberta - Starlite Room *
10-25 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan - Amigo's *
10-27 Winnipeg, Manitoba - Pyramid Cabinet *
10-30 Madison, WI - High Noon Saloon *
10-31 Iowa City, IA - The Picador *
11-02 Columbia, MO - The Blue Note *
11-04 Omaha, NE - Slowdown *
11-05 Lawrence, KS - Liberty Hall *
11-06 Denver, CO - Gothic Theatre *
11-08 Salt Lake City, UT - Urban Lounge *

* with Blitzen Trapper

Very, Very Jones - bundled with - Maximum Buddhism

2008-09-22T14:06:00.005-06:00

I've invented a new religion. I call it Maximum Buddhism. It's for Buddhists who like to party. Tenets of this religion will be forthcoming.

I'm in a seminar with Terribly Important Critic A. I mentioned a passing interest in the life of a colorful character named Jones Very, a 19th Century poet who thought himself, at various points, to have achieved a total correspondence to Shakespeare, and then to Christ, as in "I stand here before you today the greatest of poets and the son of God." He would go to meetings and such, and argue with people, and when they argued back, he would say, "your argument cannot be correct, because I am Jesus Christ, and everything I say is ordained by God." Once, when a manuscript of his was returned with a spelling error pointed out, he insisted that the error could not be corrected, and was not an error, for it was dictated to his hand by the Divine Muse.

Jones Very had one of my favorite sentences ever written about him, by A. Bronson Alcott: "I received a letter on Monday of this week from Jones Very of Salem, formerly Tutor in Greek at Harvard College — which institution he left, a few weeks since, being deemed insane by the Faculty." Jones Very was swept off to an asylum, but no one was able to clinically diagnose him as a madman. So, they let him go, and when they did, the inmates thanked him profusely.

So this guy's pretty awesome, and there's a touch of the ghost story about his life. But the upshot is, Terribly Important Critic A sent an email to Dreadfully Significant Critic B, and recommendations were doled out, in case I want to delve further into the life of this slipshod prophet of Concord; and not only that, but Terribly Important Critic A wants to know what I think. On the one hand, this is more work for me, and I loathe doing work. On the other, I am either 1 degree -- or 15 years of backbreaking reading, writing, and toil, more than a dollop o' remarkable luck, and a renewed ideological interest and financial commitment from the upper echelons of the US Gov. in higher education in the field of the humanities -- away from the inner sanctum. I feel more or less the same way I did opening for bands that opened for the Dismemberment Plan and Built to Spill. Right on the fringes of something that some people care about, and are impressed with. And even though nobody thinks I'm important, or is particularly impressed with me, I'm closer to the people that they're impressed with than they are. This is the part of my personality that badly wants to become a limo driver, or a Hollywood assistant. I believe this aspect is also known as shameful self-aggrandizement. I ride swanker coattails than you!

Worship me, tiny men of the world, for I am your Lord God!

Valedicktardian

2008-09-16T16:03:00.005-06:00

Think about everyone you know.

Got it? Good.

Now think of the person who has the highest, evenest ratio of smarts : terrible personness.

Say you have a friend called Nancy Smalls. She's a lovely woman, not too bright. She can read without moving her lips, but she has to concentrate. She drives her kids to the mall, and she enjoys M&Ms. She loves her husband, and while she gets exasperated sometimes, she's never dour. She gave money to the Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina, and then again when the Tsunami hit. If you eyeballed Nancy Smalls, she might have a smartness in the .55s (out of a possible 1), and a terrible personness of .13 (again, out of a possible 1).

Nancy Smalls -- .55 : .13

Not that good.

Now let's say you have a friend called Flowbear. He's faking his way (with flying colors!) through a prestigious humanities department's graduate program. He loves to put plastic bags full of shattered bottles in baby carriages, and then wait across the park so he can relish the screams. He pokes holes in every condom box he comes across with a needle he found in an uptown alley. He carries discs of frozen piss in a cooler so he can slide them through cracked car windows. He filled every washing machine in a Laundromat with smashed-up packing peanuts and barbecue sauce, and then ran loads with stolen quarters. He once epoxied a sleeping guy's nuts to his comforter, epoxied the comforter to the radiator, turned the thermostat up all the way, and stole the poor bastard's every pair of scissors. He would love to throw up in your freezer. Say Flowbear's got a smarts rating of .79 (out of a possible 1) and a terrible person rating of .83 (again, out of a possible 1). He would have a pretty solid, though indubitably improvable smarts : terrible personness ratio.

Flowbear -- .79 : .83

Not bad.

Now think of the person you know who has the highest, evenest ratio. The ratio most closely approaching the holy 1:1.

That person is your Valedicktardian.

That's the punchline? Yeah, that's the punchline.

Congratulations, Valedicktardians!

Future of the Left is the best band in the world, and fuck you

2008-09-15T16:20:00.010-06:00

This year in music, for me, has mostly been characterized by sissy whiteboys with acoustic guitars crooning about their pain pithily and with aspirations to literariness. It makes me feel like I'm getting old. So it's some small consolation that I'm still able to reca'nize that the greatest thing in the world is Future of the Left's album, Curses.

"I don't need a point! I don't need objectives! I don't need a purpose! I don't need a prison!"

People tend to complain when artists browbeat them. I read this all the time re: Nabokov. People can't stand it when artists are assholes to them. Me, I can't get enough. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing I loathe more than idle provocateurism in art. I hate it when somebody does something a schizophrenic diva might do just because people are watching (or, even worse, just to make them look), and screams "free speech and boundary-pushing!!!" as a authenticity signifiers. This mentality, if I might be allowed to sound pretentious, still toils away under the auspices of progress, and who needs progress? I just want catharsis. So did this Greeks. This is time-honored shit, right here, and nobody since Medea has been more cathartic than these insufferable Welsh hard-ons. I imagine it's sort of analogous to how I can't stand it when people make scenes, but I love it when people fucking fight. Not to call attention to themselves, just because they want to fucking fight. I love it when my best friend is looking me right in the eyes and poking me in the ribs with a sharp stick just to make my face flush so much I want to choke him out, and I go for his throat, and he pokes me in the eyes, and we hate each other intensely for three-hundred seconds and then share a handshake and split a milkshake, still wearing each other's sweat and rug-burned from glancing-blow headbutts.

"Ran out of limbs on our big day! We left our thumbs in the hotel!"

It's indicative of something in human nature -- or at least the degenerate substrate of human nature which I inhabit -- that the greatest band in the world, to me, is not one that makes me want to donate a bunch of money to UNICEF or put a few coats of fresh paint up in the inner city. It's a band that makes me want to throw a mason jar full of piss, pus, and cum at some dumb cunt's head just for having the bad taste to exist. And then stand over him Ali-Liston style, just so he knows -- I'm a fucking lion, and you're a fucking pussy.

"Colin is a pussy, a very pretty pussy, Colin is a pussy, a very pretty pussycat!"

We're talking about unchecked aggression here, Dude.

There's always been talk of "glee" in anarcho-punk, but I've never seen it before. Not before Future of the Left. Anarcho-punk, sure it tried to seem like it was gleeful, but it was really dour, even when it was yowling "I am the antichrist!" It never enjoyed the fact that it wanted to burn down the system, and it never enjoyed trying to burn down the system, because it was too busy trying to do something. It never had time to play. Even Jack Rotten was a dull boy. Trying to blow up Parliament with a powder-keg isn't nearly as much fun as shooting a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

"Why put the body where the body don't wanna go?!"

Which is why Future of the Left's is such a brilliant gambit. It loves the system, because it can revel in hating it so much. They are, if you'll forgive me for it, the most Zizekian band in the world. If they got rid of everything they loathed, they'd have absolutely no reason to exist. If utopianism wasn't as empty an impulse as ever breathed into man by God -- if Zion neared completion, if everybody was invited to rollerskate around the hallowed halls of Xanadu, these motherfuckers would get into such a funk. When they're happy, they're bored, and when they're bored, they need to fuck something up. So destroying stuff is really the only option. Not for any reason. Just because whatever. Happiness and agony are the same thing. As long as you have something outside yourself to hate, you don't have to think about hating yourself.

"Tories! Tories! Thanks for the Tories!"

The Future of the Left is the only name this band could possibly have. The future of the left, it turns out, is risibility, misanthropy, and hatefuckery. You need help? Well, fuck you. I sympathize. Only Future of the Left matters! Except they don't even really matter that much. Fuck this band! The logical conclusion of socialism is hating everybody equally. That's the only way to be really honest.

"Violence solved everything!"

Future of the Left used to be, more or less, mclusky. At least insofar as Andy Falkous occupies the frontman position of the bulk of both groups. And what's weird is, mclusky was a better band. They were even more pissed off. They were less tired. They buzzed more viciously, like a hot-pink chainsaw assfucking primetime-era Pixies songs. They had catchier songs with less fat, better bridges on more fire, sharper hooks, scathinger one-liners. ("All of your friends are cunts, your mother is a ballpoint pen thief," indubitably my favorite couplet in the history of lyric poetry.) There is absolutely no question that mclusky Do Dallas is a much, much better album than Curses, in any proper sense, like where you give an album some bullshit letter grade or numerical ranking, put it in your "best albums of the decade" list that never means anything, except insofar as it can fuel people to spit spite at you, whatever. But I've listened to Curses maybe three times as much. I don't understand it. And I don't want to. It's an ugly, messy thing, and it's overly ornamented, and it's overthought, and it's agonized and precise and it ought to be depressing. But it's the most exhilarating music, man. They're like the fucking Music Man.

"Open wide for sudden folk song."

I love Future of the Left so much that I wanted to buy a Future of the Left t-shirt. And I found an awesome one. It's got a guy on it, and all his fingers are thumbs. But it's only available in women's sizes. Fortunately, I know my size in women's sizes, because I'm the kind of guy who knows his size in women's sizes. So I've got a women's shirt coming at me, and I'm like "damn, why couldn't this be a men's shirt? What woman in the world would want to wear this shirt?" But you know what? I wouldn't be at all surprised if they knew no women would buy it, and they just think it's hilarious that fanboys like me will debase ourselves buying women's shirts, and scold us for compromising just to become advertisements for them. Then when we criticize them for exploiting gender norms, they'll kick us in the balls, spit in our Activia, call us cunts, and make out with the girl we're in love with while we wheeze in pain. And we'll love it, like please sir can I have some more.

Foreign crack addiction, ass vs. pachyderm eugenics

2008-09-14T14:17:00.006-06:00

If you had an addiction -- say, an addiction to foreign crack -- and you wanted to kick that addiction, not necessarily because you don't like the feeling you get from having a nice, relaxing smoke of crack, but rather in the interest of furthering the safety and independence of your own sovereign body, and freeing yourself from the depressing, dangerous, and economically lopsided jaunts to 110th street on a Saturday night, it would make a ton of sense to go to your local pharmacy and demand that they give you home-fried crack safely, cheaply, and preferably mined from the Alaskan wilderness, until wind-, solar-, and bio-crack are made available and cost-effective to the general consumer. Right?

In forty years or so, someone will make a movie, and in that movie, a crowd of thousands will start chanting "drill, baby, drill!" like a bunch of Bacchic orgyists. And it will be absolutely fucking chilling.

For the last couple weeks I've wanted to do a sort of controlled physiognomic study wherein I take sample groups of, say, 1,000 Democrats and 1,000 Republicans, and then show them screen-shots selected at random of individuals in the crowds of the respective national conventions. They would then have to answer one question, either in the positive or negative: "Just to look at 'em, does this person creep you the fuck out?" I would be you shotguns to pot-stickers that there would be a noticeable lopsidedness in the results, on both sides. Because Republicans are just fucking creepy.

Infinity minus one (RIP DFW)

2008-09-14T13:10:00.012-06:00

My brain won't stop telling me that David Foster Wallace wasn't supposed to die like this. I've always had something against David Foster Wallace. I think it's because I think of him as having everything I've ever found lacking in myself. Or if not lacking, just not superabundant. I think of him as being me, only moreso. Which I imagine is the way a lot of people feel about him. Us, only moreso; the logical conclusion of a type, an extremity, a limit-case, a Representative Man. Me as me as I could be isn't as me as David Foster Wallace managed to be, only moreso. And being moreso is supposed to be a good thing. But I guess sometimes it's not. Or maybe it is, I don't know. Who am I to say?

Hey you.

You'd be better if you were a better athlete. A prodigy. A virtuoso. Not just with your body. With your brain, too. You'd be better if you were better at math, and philosophy, and where they coincide. You'd be better if you had a head for the witty rejoinder. You'd be better if you would just write a book. You'd be better if you wrote a great book. You'd be better if you wrote a bunch of great books. You'd be better if you had the respect of your peers, and the disdain of those who envied you, just because they envied you. You'd be better if you had all the potential in the world. You'd be better if you'd fulfilled your potential, and still managed to come up with more potential, still gave Them the sense that They had something to wait for from you.

You'd be better if you were constantly under the pressure of following your own headlining act. An anointed genius, baptized with praise, with nothing left to prove, and only life to live. On leave for the semester. And feeling pretty alone.

I'm sorry I didn't like you, David Foster Wallace. I'm especially sorry I didn't like you because you were too much like I wanted to be or wished I were, thought I could be under different circumstances. Now it couldn't seem more absurd. I'm sure it wouldn't have helped just to be liked more unequivocally, less ambivalently by me. I'm sure it would have changed nothing if, whenever your name came up in conversation, I hadn't scoffed a little and compared your writing to a clever riff on a terrible joke, or a pretty good cover of a pretty bad song. I always said that like it was a bad thing, when it was really all I've ever wanted to do, and all I've really ever admired. So why did I say it, about you, like it was a bad thing? Home improvement, self-improvement, taking a chainsaw and painting it pink.

Everything about life is so scary and hard, and a velvet hammer can still break your heart. I guess I feel guilty, but I don't know what I did. I think back and wonder, did I actually try not to like your books when I was reading them? Why would I do that? And then I think, why can't I like more things better, why can't I give up want and ambition and just love? Why can't I be me, only moreso? And then I feel ashamed. Because I'm right back where I started, wanting to be what I thought you were. And you were just like I thought you were, only moreso. God damn it. Maybe I just didn't want to be one of your characters. Maybe you didn't want to be, either. Maybe I have no idea who you were: you were different from anything I can possibly imagine.

We are here on earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different. But it doesn't make any sense when the person you most want to be in the world can't take it anymore. It doesn't make any sense.

Loverdose

2008-09-13T10:27:00.011-06:00

I am what the Belgians call l'overwhelmed.

(I've always wanted to start a synth-pop group called Loverdose, and call the first album L'Overdose. I think this concept has some legs on it. Which gives me ideas for the album art: see below.)

So I went to that shitty party last night that I warned you about, dear reader, and I listened to assholes talk about "Palestinian liberation" and say things like "dude, I've been to Palestine and I've talked to Palestinians" to lend credence to more or less inscrutable statements about the state of the national will. So that was no fun.

(The party-proper actually was pretty fun, but these guys were terrible, and I'm attempting a quasi-literary disjunctive framing device, so just go with me on this.)

So then I was on my way home, and I ran into my ex-stripper friend (meaning, my friend who used to be a stripper), and she said, significantly, "you're coming with us." So I went with them. "Them" being my ex-stripper friend, whom I will call Shamiqua, and her friend, whom, for reasons the hilariousness of which I cannot properly express, I will call Xena.

Some months ago, I had the strangest date of my life, by a good margin, with Xena. It was 72 hours long, and made us kind of hate each other. But not really, because we totally love each other. And it wasn't really a date. But really it was; but then it stopped being after we watched Rookie of the Year, The Mighty Ducks, D2: The Mighty Ducks, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Superbad, and Wedding Crashers consecutively over a 13 hour span. That'll take the motor out of pretty much any structured social engagement.

But this is just back story. The point is, there's nothing quite like walking despondently home from a Party For the Right to Fight (for the Sovereignty of Palestine, If Deemed Ideologically Tenable and Economically Sustainable) and being rescued by two frantic, insane, bafflingly uninhibited women.

Xena takes this sort of retarded Wordsworthian joy in taking off her pants and running around in the street at night. We're talking flesh to sky, as naked as your mama made you. No mediation. A Catholic Christ-cookie on the tongue conveys immediacy no more immediately than do her naked haunches, tromping through the streets of one of the most dangerous cities in America, at 2:30 in the morning. It's fabulous, too, because there's really no more awkward-looking clothing configuration than a hoodie, with the hood up, and a totally bare ass, especially when the person in question is conveying herself in a way that can best be described as a gambol. If you went to a tailor, a haberdasher, a department store, a boutique, and said "dress me in the outfit that will confuse everyone who sees me as much as possible," they could do worse than to take away your pants and drape a hoodie on you. She got about a block before she said, "I wish I had worn panties today so I could just go the rest of the way like this." But she had no panties. Because, you understand, she was naked from the waist down.

What was even stranger, though -- so much stranger than fiction that it's actually stranger than stranger than fiction, so that even if I say it with my word of honor attached, the only response the reader can possibly plausibly have is to say "that's a lie," only except but it's not a lie, it's the truth -- was when Shamiqua, ex-stripper nipples exposed over the top of her tank, asked bare-bottomed Xena to stand stock still. When inquired why, "why stand still?" the response was, "because I'm going to motor-boat your ass."

And then she did. She got on her knees, took a couple of ducksteps forward, and did just what she said she would do.

And then Xena said, "Nobody's ever motor-boated my ass before! Let me do it to you!"

And then she did.

And then we watched The Never Ending Story. The motherfucking Never Ending Story. And argued about whether its resemblance to The Princess Bride were significant or merely superficial. Xena did interpretive dances with blankets, and hooded herself, as if for a little red riding. When you put it all together, it was way too comfortable to be awkward, but way too uncomfortable to be to not weird me out, and possibly scar me for life. But in a good way. It's a dashing scar. Like a 16th-century Spaniard with a rapier injury, and then he's like, "you should see the other guy." Debería ver el otro? Whatever.

More importantly, though. I have no money. I should have moved. My car is dead. I'm starving. I have to grade and read stuff. I'm watching football and not really enjoying it. And if you know me, then you know, that the fact that I'm watching football and not really enjoying it is scaring the shit out of me.

Contrarianism: The Great and Unified Theory of Beer - OR - how to, by claiming not to, act superior to people who like some things better than others

2008-09-12T18:50:00.028-06:00

I just stubbed my fucking toenail clean off my fucking toe. It's really painful. It's my tiny toe, so it was just a tiny toenail. But there are many nerves in the toe. A google search for "how many nerves are there in a toe?" yields results such as, "Many times there is no known cause for lesser toe deformities," and also, "Each toe has three phalanges, except the big toe which only has two."

But moving on.

Have you heard?! I'm a teacher! I teach a class. But I actually mean, I lead a discussion section, which is really a much different kind of thing, but who are you to argue? You're not a teacher. Or if you are, then you know what I'm talking about!

It's weird. I sit there and look at 18 inscrutable 18 year olds and ask them to say things and then they say things and then I ask them what they mean and they tell me something else and I ask other people what they think about what that person just thought and they tell me something else and then I ask them what they mean. It's pretty great, because it's a process that can go on pretty much forever, thank you very much différance. Somebody told me, "A 50 minute discussion section is 1 point and 2 jokes." I made a joke about crack, and a joke about a Jesus, and told them narrators are unreliable. It took 50 minutes! I'm a teacher!

I threw a party at my apartment last night, and if the greatness of a party can be judged by the drunkenness of the three drunkest people at the party, I had one of the greatest parties in the history of parties. Somebody told me to punch him in the face and, when I demurred, began to punch himself in the face -- and he has no memory of it. Somebody physically threatened me for a reason I wasn't clear about, locked himself in the bathroom for many hours, vomited many many times, and wouldn't come out -- and he has no memory of it. A backpack was lost, and never recovered (seems to have fallen into the black hole of Narnia or equivalent). A purse was left on the lawn outside for 18 hours, and went mysteriously unstolen! I bought a tiny Hieneken keg, with the intention of doing the world's tiniest keg-stand, but the logistics boggled the mind, and the tiny kegstand went unstood.

Grad school people and townie intellectuals are funny, and this I say with the warmest fondness and greatest admiration. But they truly are a ridiculous breed. They play on the affections of the mind as does the Welsh Corgi, nature's most baffling, yet truly and easily its most lovable mistake.

We grad students have, for instance, arbitrarily provincial -- but knowingly and smirkingly provincial -- tastes in things. I bought a 30 pack of Miller Light, and right at the beginning of the party, before any of the Miller Light had been drunk, several fellow grad students and townie intellectuals went on a beer run. They came back with a 12 pack of Stella Artois, which I swear to god tastes indistinguishable from PBR but is more expensive and has a swank, expensive-seeming filmy covering on its bottleneck, and a 12 back of National Bohemian, which is exactly like PBR except cheaper and without the sophisticated can design and award-winning pedigree of Milwaukee's Pabst company. This morning, there remained in the fridge 22 Miller Lights, 1 Natty Bo, and 0 Stellas. There was a full Natty Bo in the freezer for some reason, but I threw that away. So call it 24 leftover beers.

So, quantitatively, the overall need for a beer run comes through the mathematical ringer thus:
30 Miller Lights
-8 Miller Lights
+12 Stellas
-12 Stellas
+12 Natty Bos
-10 Natty Bos
=24 beers left over.

Which, for those keeping track, is, minus the one wasted beer, exactly the amount of beer that is left over due to the largess of the beer run. But all the beer that was left over is Miller Light. Which, despite tasting more or less indistinguishable from all other kinds of lager, isn't made in Europe or Baltimore, and is brewed by an ostensibly More Evil Corporation that runs lots of commercials during shows that grad students don't watch, and therefore tastes much, much worse, though indistinguishably so.

(This is, naturally, leading up to my Great and Unified Theory of Beer, which I feel will ultimately be remembered, by those who deign to remember me, as my greatest contribution to the field of aesthetics, and the theoretical discipline of the gustatory arts. The Great and Unified Theory of Beer runs roughly thus: people who claim to like expensive beer are vainglorious assholes and liars and particularly self-deceivers (cf. the Calvinist Elect), and those who like certain kinds of bad beers over others are charlatans or under the sway or charlatans (cf. Scientologists), and should be liberated into the fundamental fact of beer: it all tastes pretty much the same, and none of it tastes any good, but it happens to get you fucking drunk (cf. miserable, sad-sack, bad faith-addled, existentialist, morally crippled, and otherwise ineffectual atheists who pretty much have things right about the world and just want to get fucking drunk (cf. me)).)

I do love hip young Baltimoreans, because they, in general, skew Baltimorean in their purchase and appreciation of things (Yuengling and Natty Bo over Miller Light and PBR, The Wire over Deadwood, Dan Deacon and Beach House over any other music that's better than Dan Deacon and Beach House, Spiro Agnew over Walter Mondale, David Hasselhoff over Lorenzo Llamas, Montel Williams over Ricki Lake, etc.). You'll often find people walking down the street humming the lesser known tone-poems of Francis Scott Key while robbing each other and smoking crack. I'm sure it's the same in most other places. I'm sure Portlanders mutter about rain while ironically chopping down trees in ironic t-shirts and ironically nuthugging jeans. But most places have better stuff than Baltimore, such as irony.

Except we have The Wire. That's pretty sweet.

Since somebody was locked in my bathroom for 7 hours, I had to pee in a wine bottle and then wash it down the sink. I contemplated pouring it out the window, but being on the 15th floor, there were just too many gravitational and dynamical, sheer-force related x-factors. I couldn't calculate such things as the yaw, tilt, and roll of half a bottle of wine's worth of piss as it falls 200 feet, and so couldn't come up with anything like a definitive final resting place. I was, as such, forced to assume, in the great spirit of Occam, that the final resting place would ultimately be the worst possible resting place (for example, the water dish of a Welsh Corgi), and decided on the kitchen sink. I ran the garbage disposal afterwards, but I'm really not sure what I thought that would do. In retrospect, I probably just should have re-corked the bottle and waited for the bathroom to open back up, right? But who can look that far ahead. There were pills in there. It could have been days, and who remembers a bottle full of pee when you've got an overdosed corpse behind a door to which you don't have the key to deal with?

I'm going to another party tonight. It's not going to be nearly as good as my party, because my party was amazing. But you know what? I'm going to go to this party tonight, and I'm going to drink beer from Mexico, and listen to Detroit techno, and wear shapeless and ill-fitting clothes, and take all corporate advertisements at face value, and also take them very, very seriously. Because, you understand, I'm such a free spirit.

Chicanery

2008-07-24T21:24:00.005-06:00

Shit has been bananas even as it creeps along at a narcoleptic snail's pace.

I am back from my yearly sojourn to Chicago's Pitchfork Music Festival, and its attendant 5-day bender. Here's my stolen press pass.

It scored me exactly 1 (one) free Fuze. I had to walk up to the press tent, wearing my stolen press pass, and walk up to the tables full of press-type people, and reach under the table into a bucket full of ice. I was just loaded enough to have the requisite bravery, but I also crept past that point of loadedness into the jittery, delusionally hyperselfconscious loadedness that makes you think every time you do something wrong SWAT is going to crash in through the windows and Mace you in the nuts. It's the first thing I've stolen in a while -- since I didn't actually steal the press pass, somebody else stole it and then gave it to me, and that shit don't count -- and, all things considered, a Fuze was the perfect choice. I got my heartrate up -- especially when I made eye contact with the pretty girl in a staff shirt who I thought was going to bust me, which brought back blood-curdling memories of the time I spray-painted "Center School Sucks" on the brick facade of my elementary school, and then was caught by a lady teacher because I wore cowboy boots and skidded on some gravel during my getaway -- and then I soothed myself with an icy, fruity, absolutely free beverage. Why am I not sorry? Because they stopped selling three-day passes, which "sold out," so I had to buy passes for all three days separately, which came all connected, almost as if they were a single, three-day ticket. So, if you want to get technical, that Fuze ended up costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $40, which means Pitchfork should get down on its knees and kiss my Mace-burned balls. Though, a photographer friend did steal me quite a bit of beer from the backstage area. So maybe it's a wash. After drinking said beer, I was drunk, which caused me to do things like try to take candid shots of unsuspecting girls who I thought may or may not have been pretty and were walking ahead of me towards the train. The result is a surprisingly realistic depiction of what I felt like after seeing Animal Collective (and drinking free beer).

This is the only one I took, because an overpowering wave of creepiness washes over you when you take a picture like this. You look at yourself, and you say "Really? Really?"

I'm going to try to start writing more short posts. I've been psyching myself out with the blog lately, looking at it as a commitment. And the thing in the world I least like to perform are commitments. So I am artificially cutting this one short, with the best intentions.

Meat Howitzer

2008-07-08T14:20:00.004-06:00

Sweet Jesus, I really, really, really want a cheeseburger.

The fast food in this city is epochally, apocalyptically terrible, though. If I had to guess, I'd say they only make new food on Tuesdays, and they only serve you the stuff from last Tuesday, which they have left to rest on top of a dehumidifier to make sure that, if bacteria is going to fester, it's not so much bacteria. I always feel like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, when he goes into the fast food place with the Mac-10 and complains that his burger doesn't look like the one in the picture. Except I don't have that haircut, and I'm not being directed by Joel Schumacher (thank Christ).

Otherwise, I'm more or less just like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, and Robert Duvall won't stop stalking me.

The only place that's given me a halfway decent dead animal is Burger King, and I've only gone there once. I tried to go there again, but some bastard in a '79 Granada was taking up both lanes of the drive through entrance, and then I thought I though the next street was one-way but it actually wasn't, and before you know it, just like that, I was on the interstate like whoa, how did I end up on the interstate? And I'm fiddling with my GPS thing, trying to turn it on and program it to take me to "Points of Interest: Burger King" with 94% of my attention span, the rest being devoted to not sideswiping yourself or someone like you. (Shoutout to Matchbox 20!) But somehow, in the twists and turns of the streets of this city -- which I swear to God was laid out by an autistic monkey with a broken copy of Sim City DS -- I ended up in the parking lot of a grocery store, and left with, like, romaine lettuce and sprouts and made a salad with expired bleu cheese and a small army of those fake soy bacon bits. Which is so fucking disappointing when you're looking to get a hot injection of concentrated fats and salts in your mouth from a patty-shaped fleshcannon, a regular meat howitzer. I don't want to be the asshole who walks into Ruby Tuesday's alone and sits down at a booth and doesn't even act like he's waiting for somebody before finally breaking down and ordering a Triple Prime Burger (three different kinds of cow!). So there's really no alternative to shitty fast food, and none of it's even within walking distance.

But you know what? I'm going to fix up, look sharp, and go get myself a wad of pounded flesh that's been ripped from the corpse of a soft-eyed, headless beast while it hangs by its ankle from the ceiling of a death-factory that takes up a whole city block, then fed through a machine with teeth and gears that pulverize it into a lumpy paste, before being frozen and driven across the country and fried by a teenager who probably hasn't washed his hands since getting his girlfriend pregnant earlier this afternoon while trying out that new KY his 'n' hers.

Fuck me. The things I'm willing to do for a cheeseburger. And I don't even really want one anymore.

Under Siege 2 and tennis. The perfect day? You decide.

2008-07-06T21:20:00.007-06:00

(I don't want anyone to ever know how long this took me to make.)

I woke up this morning at around 6:30, because my body knew I had something to do today. (Breakfast at Wimbledon! Watch Wimbledon!). I finished watching Under Siege 2: Dark Territory for the third time in two days. This movie features a seventeen-ish Katherine Hiegl, baby fat included, getting hit on relentlessly by a a twentysomething Morris Chestnut, who still had a geeky rap-star high top fade.

(Note: photo may not accurately represent the geeky high-top fade of Morris Chestnut.)

It's rare for a movie to feature two actors (Hiegl and Chestnut) who would become so much more attractive when they rounded the 30s.

("Hi, I'm Morris Chestnut, and I'm hot as balls.")

Throughout the movie, Steven Segall does that deadpan cocksure snark delivery that only he can do. It's a strange effect. He takes a trad, uninteresting line of dialogue and delivers it in such a way that it seems he's enormously satisfied with himself and absolutely demolished the other conversant in a game of one-upsmanship, but trying hard not to let you in on the fact that he's enormously satisfied with himself. He single-handedly ensures that any chemistry that threatens to burgeon between the (so-called) professional actors falls flatter and limper than a drag queen in a Shirley MacLaine wig after three hours at Comic-Con. It's so wonderful.

There are, like, three things in my life that I love unequivocally: televised athletics, pop music, and bad movies. (Good movies suck so hard compared to bad movies, I don't even know where to start.) But god damn if I didn't hit all three of my sweet spots today.

So I tune in to Wimbledon, and I watch two incredible but heartbreaking sets get carried by Rafa Nadal, who is a possessed evil demon of athleticism, against Federer, who I'm convinced is some kind of seraph avatar implanted on earth by God to make us remember that everybody else is comparatively pathetic and needs some help if they want to get saved. Except Federer looks so humble and mortal, and he's clanging unforced errors into the net and past the baseline and I'm starting to get frustrated.

Then, I fall asleep.

I wake up furious at having fallen asleep, and am startled to learn that the angelic light of Federer has smiled upon me, in the form of a rain delay, and they're just now coming to the end of the fifth set. A mad dash to the tv that results in a bruised shin yields up five more minutes of agony, as Rafa, in all his damnable good humor and warm, humble competitiveness, aww-shuckses his way to his first Wimbledon final. Federer, in the post-match interview, calls him "the worst opponent," cracks a melancholically classy Swiss smile, and manages to convince me that I want to take one for the team and jump his bones to console him.

It's been a tough year for me as a casual tennis fan, because I've had to pick between my all-encompassing Underdog Complex, and my hatred of presumptuous "you heard it here first" bandwagon croneyism. I liked Rafa, when he was still my little well-kept secret, the Roland Garros juggernaut who turned into a bumbling, Clark Kentishly inept misadventurer on grass and hard courts. But now everybody's jumped all over his hot Spanish tip in that way that is most infuriating. He's still "the underdog." But everybody is so fucking quick to point out, it won't be a surprise if he wins. What good is that? So I've decided that I heart Roger Federer, because there's nothing more infuriating, on a human-interest level, than somebody slipping past his prime in the public eye. It is, in a way, the ultimate underdoggedness. This is, of course, presumptuous, because he's still the best all-around player in the world. But it really hurt to watch him get ripped up on his turf. It was like watching a peace-loving Athenian statesman get speared through the thorax by a rampaging Visigoth usurper, all the while intoning philosophical maxims about democracy and beauty. It was like watching the temple burn against a backdrop of mass cattle rape. Federer walks on water, but Nadal runs through concrete. If Bruegel the Elder had painted a war-torn tennis-scape about the triumph of evil, it would have looked like this.

Also: Why is it that the good people at Campbell's, in their infinite wisdom, deign to release oodles of soups with one hundred calories and eight hundred thousand percent of your daily sodium requirement? I wonder what grocery store soup would taste like with no added salt. But that's sort of like aspiring to do a line of blow off your own tit -- food for thought, sure, but odds are nobody's going to be around to be impressed.

Disco Rick and the Dogs - I Know a Bitch

2008-07-03T19:14:00.010-06:00

I strongly advise you to download and listen to Disco Rick and the Dogs - I Know a Bitch

When I was ten years old, I bought one of the worst albums ever made.

Having earlier that year been freshly enchanted by the sultry spell of Snoop Dogg's debut album, which prominently featured a more-or-less unknown quantity/entity known as "The Dogg Pound," I could have perhaps been forgiven, in my enthusiastic adolescent idiocy, for being taken in by The Dogs... featuring Disco Rick.

My dad, who had days before passed on an ultra-fast Mazda RX-7 convertible in favor of a sensible, hunter green 626 sedan (four doors for two kids), was these days feeling himself gracelessly sliding into the throes of the kind of middle-age that is no longer questionable. (You're no longer a "young 39." You're just an old guy.) Here's a man who can't even put his mid-level hospital executive opulence to work for himself the way he wants to. I may have used this psychological spike in my favor when I asked the man, in the parking lot of Sam Goody, whether I could buy a cd with the dreaded sticker on the cover. With his money.

I'm pretty sure he said yes right away, but, not wanting to waste a good thing, I mounted a tightly-wound soliloquy in defense of profanity in art -- the first of many to come. I actually bemoaned the state of the music industry. The fact is, dad, they just don't make 'em like they used to. Sure, there's music without swearing, but it's cut-rate, made by hacks just looking to make a buck since so many children out there don't have uber-hip young fathers who divvy their disposable incomes to sons for albums with that sticker. Fascists!

I told him -- and I remember this sentence almost word for word -- "sometimes I love Maria Carey, but sometimes I just need something else." Something that says fuck. We walked through the record store, and I spotted the ugly orange packaging with the familiar canine appellative, and I was drawn in, inexorably, inevitably. Like a needle into a diabetic after a whole thing of candy beans. When he bought it for me, I hugged him, just like I hugged him after he bought me my first Playboy. I suppose I reserved the most awkward and touching means of conveying my appreciation for the things that he did to corrupt me.

Having learned my lesson from shredding the wrapping and popping an Ice-T album into the car stereo on the way home from the same record store with my mom months earlier (she bought the album for me, then bought it away from me for $20, to preserve my aural virginity), I gripped the tiny Goody bag in my sweaty fist and waited, breath bated, to get home. Safely shored up in my room, I put the cd into a the carousel tray of that great lost piece of novelty-arcana, the three-disc changer, and waited for its gears to grind and whir the disc into place. I pushed play, volume low, my head pressed up against the speaker, and tried to relish in the cursing. But the fact was -- and I knew it already -- this was garbage.

I didn't have "Miami booty bass" in my vocabulary yet. I couldn't have told you that it was "a ninth-rate 2 Live Crew cheap rip." I couldn't thrown critspeak at you -- "rote Roland 808 polybreaks, mangled by wack rappers." I didn't even have hipster dismissals like "epic fail" at my disposal. But the instinct was there, and I remember thinking -- what a waste of great song titles.

Seriously. Pretend you're ten, and check out this motherfucking track list!
1. Intro
2. Talking True Shit
3. Radio
4. Get Down
5. Fuck All Night
6. Life About Crack
7. Sexy's Got Beef
8. Nasty Dance
9. Work That Ass Baby
10. Got That Spirit
11. I Know a Bitch
12. Hyped Up
13. Dogga Mix
14. Fuck You All III

Fuck You All...... THREE?!?! What could that possibly mean?

But, as I say, the album was largely a disappointing experience. I would listen to it at night, song blurring into undifferentiated song. But there was always a glimmer that I couldn't put my finger on. A diamond in so much dogshit. It took a while to discover why.

By outlandish chance, this album happens to hide, buried as a deep cut at track 11, one of the greatest songs ever written.

It's called "I Know a Bitch."

The song is this call-and-response thing that turns itself inside-out when it turns out the guy with the Flava Flav voice is the lead, and the guy with the Chuck D voice is the hype man, even though the low-voiced guy kicks off the song. It's essentially a three-minute, semi-rhymed heart-to-heart conversation between these two guys.

And it's about how these two guys know a bitch named Charlotte.

It starts with one of the most shocking exchanges I've ever heard in a pop song. The hype-dude barks, "I know a bitch!" and we're rolling.

(I know a bitch!)
What bitch?!
(She's number one!)
Number one?!
(I told the bitch to lick my ass with her tongue!)
Did she do it?
(Yes she did it!)
God damn!

Now, on paper -- and on record -- this'll throw you off. (Was it really so ambiguous that he needed to specify which organ he told the bitch to lick his ass with?) But let me assure you. The best metafiction in the world can't fuck with the bizarre, uncontrived, honest-to-god bullshit genius that spills out of this song's ears. And you realize it right when the riff enters. Buried under waves of shifty, corny, boom-bap drums, there is discernible an eight-dollar guitar plucking out a one-bar, Special Ed. version of the Sanford & Son theme through a rickety old chorus pedal. Our hero takes over. Things start happening. Everything's happening!

Here's the breakdown: the song's an absolutely tortured, virtually cubist narrative that folds itself in half like a man fellating himself, then spins his head around like the Exorcist girl and spits it at you. It ping-pongs from wanton sexual braggadocio to homicidal cautionary tale with an almost Twainian flair.

So this guy got this girl to lick his ass with her tongue, and he's pretty excited about it. He wants to tell his buddy. He's bragging, talking Big Willy talk, and his friend is impressed. "God damn!" But then it turns out, shock of shocks, the other guy knows that bitch too!

Mannnnnn, I know that bitch!
(You do?!)
Her name is Charlotte!
(That's right!)
She sucked my dick and licked my balls last night!

And the only information the narrator needed to make this Holmesian deduction was 1) the aforementioned rimjob and 2) that his sidekick "grabbed that stupid bitch and started slamming." The "ming" becomes "Mannnnnn" and the perspective shifts, like a fucking virtuoso Altman one-shot, and we're swept magically away to the Projects, where the narrator had taken Charlotte the night before -- "I took her home... but not my house." And, he laments, "Just lookin' at her house just broke my heart." To which his companion replies, "Oh shit!"

I went inside!
(Man you crazy?!)
I didn't care!
(You didn't care?!)
I got all tangled up in them spiderwebs!
(God damn!)

And then the story turns, brilliantly, from wretched griot pathos to Laurel & Hardy hijinks.

I sat down!
(Where you set?!)
On the couch!
(On the couch?!)
Somethin' bit me in my ass and I said ouch!
(Oh shit!)

So the braggadocio of the sidekick has been swept away, and we're fully inhabiting the narrator's, our hero's strange yarn. He's recounting last night, when Charlotte, we recall, "sucked [his] dick and licked [his] balls." But the tale, my dears, is about to take a hard left into experimental fiction, atemporality, and what Frederic Jameson would call "the Absolute."

Charlotte, telling our hero to "sit tight," retires to her bedroom. The sidekick has grown concerned by the shoddiness of the place, and, fearing the worst, he urges the hero to "leave that room!" But it's too late. Well, it's gotta be too late, because this is last night, when Charlotte "sucked [our hero's] dick and licked [his] balls," remember? But the claustrophobic feeling of looming danger is becoming too much to bear, and soon it's not just schoolmarm worrying anymore -- it's prophecy fulfilled.

She came out!
(What she had?!)
She had a knife!
(That's your ass!)
I grabbed my hat and my keys and I ran fast!
(Haul ass!)
I ran fast!
(How fast?!)
I didn't stop!
(You didn't stop?!)
When I got to the door, the shit was locked!

Notice how the narrative subverts itself, turning and slipping, like an eel contorting itself into a Mobius Strip. We've been set up to expect a relatively standard romantic dalliance. A little dick sucking, a little balls licking. But what the fuck? The bitch they know... she has a knife! So, like any sane man, our hero does what you'd expect. He runs. He runs fast. He doesn't stop. He runs and runs. He calls a good deal of attention to his running. How far does he run? All the way to the front door. Which is locked! Curse that vile woman, that tricksy spirit! But we don't know, yet, how tricksy she is. We don't know anything!

I looked around!
(Where's that bitch?!)
The bitch was there!
(Oh yeah?!)
She was so damn bald she had no hair!
(God damn!)
I said god damn!

This is what our one-night stand has come to! It was just two men, civil, mutually appreciative, having an intimate conversation. They brag, they strut, they relish their (in some ways shared, in some ways even homosocial) conquest of Charlotte, the woman each of them "knows," and each has known in the biblical sense. But the confessions have taken water, now. Charlotte is crazy. Not only is Charlotte crazy, Charlotte is "so damn bald she [has] no hair." The men have let their guard down and fessed up to the fact that they have both been serviced by a variously wigged black widow spider of a woman who seduces only so that she can kill. They had both represented themselves, like rounders bluffing aces with deuces, to have annexed a piece of prime real estate. But it turns out, "just looking at her house just broke my heart," and all that heartbreak and property entails. So, in this situation, what is a player to do? That's what the sidekick wants to know.

(What you do?!)
I tried to fight!
(Alright!)
She grabbed me by my neck and the bitch tried to bite!
(Oh shit!)
I pushed her back!
(Ok!)
Bust her in her eye!
(My, my!)
Knock the bitch down on her back and said goodbye!
(Bye bitch!)
Bust down the door!
(God damn!)
Break out in the street!
(Yo, aye! What you should have done was called the police!)
Fuck you!
(Fuck you!)

A lovers' quarrel has turned into a brothers' quarrel, as the two men relish the ass-whupping our hero has administered to Charlotte. But then the sidekick, perhaps fearing for his friend's safety, perhaps even touched by a patina of guilt over the potentially excessive brutality of our hero's savage attack, endorses a less vigilante justice. Though he is vigorously rebuked by his friend, he stands his ground. "Fuck you!" The story, you may have noticed, has changed tenses. It's now operating primarily in the present. It's a colloquial device, of course. It lends immediacy and urgency to the happenings, it heightens the feeling of imminence, it makes the flesh crawl. And it is the avenue through which the story takes its strangest turn yet.

I know what!
(Yeah, what?!)
Ummmm... I just turn and kick the bitch in her butt!
(Good luck!)
And if I win!
(What if you don't?!)
Just help me out!
(Fuck that shit!)
I just beat the bitch down with my dick!
(That's it!)

We've gone through a wormhole! Our hero is back. It's last night! He's improvising! His fight with his friend has thrown him back into the fracas! It's a 'Nam flashback with the added ontological heft of Doc Brown's Delorean! He's running, experiencing fight or flight, and second-guessing himself. "Ummmm," he ejaculates, as a placeholder to make way for extemporization. Perhaps run is the wrong response! Perhaps I should fight this bitch! I should "turn and kick the bitch in her butt!" His friend is supportive, but not entirely convinced. "Good luck!" he snarls, equally supportive and dismissive of his friend's chances. He plays the voice of reason, almost pleading -- What if you don't beat the bitch? What if you don't?! His friend, our hero, pleads in turn -- help me out! I need your support in this most trying of times. But his sidekick is having none of it. Fuck that shit! But then, in an inspired burst of confidence, our hero decides to apply a basically indisputable fighting tactic. The ol' junk beatdown. Now his friend is starting to come around! And we're there! They're there, together! Our hero, fighting Charlotte, calling out to his friend from the ether for advice, for an arm to lean on. Be the wind beneath my wings, he almost cries! None of this happened last night -- now it's all happening tonight! Judgment night! It's all happening! And out of this night flashes the pursuing Charlotte, presumably still hairless and wielding her knife with the spastic, flailing limbs of a Mel Brooks vampire.

Oh, here she comes!
(You better run!)
Fuck you! I ain't the one! I'll just turn and shoot the bitch with my gun.
(What gun?!)
I got a gun!
(What kind of gun?!)
A Mac-10!
(A Mac-10?!)
I'll just shoot the bitch once and once again!

I don't think I've ever heard this part of the song without laughing. "I'll just shoot the bitch once and once again!" It's just a really funny line. But for a long time the yucks obscured the metafictional gambit. We're back! We're there again, and Charlotte is hot on the trail. So what to do? Like Eddie Valiant, our hero digs through boxes of Acme products and comes up with, not a crooning sword, but a Mac-10! And he knows what to do! Ratatat! And his sidekick has come through the wormhole with him! He didn't even know he had that gun! He's Neo in the Matrix, and he needs the programming to fly a helicopter! He's talked the world into being, and now he's got to live with it! Bang bang shoot shoot.

We'll jump that bitch and then we'll bail!
(We goin' to jail!)

A phallocentric Thelma and Louise! On the run for the murder of a vile, villainous woman! No doubt scarved and sunglassed, our heroes make off in a drop-top Bonneville, persecuted for the very act that lends them empowerment! Ahhh, but our hero, while not having passed the Bar, knows a little bit.

No we're not!
(Why not?!)
It's self-defense!
(Yeah, bet!)
If she die, that bitch will never come back!
(B'leedat, b'leedat!)
And if she do?!
(What do to?!)
Run fast!
(Run fast?!)
Pack all our shit and let's haul ass!

Our men, clearly rattled by the paranormal happenings that have so wrenched the joints of their lives in just a few moments, are willing to doubt even the certitude of the corpse of a bitch that has been shot "once and once again." Look. Did they shoot Charlotte? Did they not? Was it last night? Was it tonight? Are they going to shoot Charlotte? How did our hero get away? Was his sidekick with him? Did Charlotte suck his dick and lick his balls? Did she not? Did she not suck anybody's balls, not even the sidekick's? And here's the real curveball... does Charlotte even exist?! Charlotte, the French feminine of Charles, meaning "free man." She's a free woman, unbridled, unmoored, unkillable, so free she's not there, so free she's everywhere at once. Is Charlotte Kobayashe? Kevin Spacey playing cripple, the devil who convinces the world he doesn't exist? Were they blown by a ghost? Did they manage to shoot the devil in the back? What if they missed? It all evinces the Cold War paranoia of an arms race. If we've gone this far, how far is too far? Once a hail of gunfire has solved a problem, who's to say you won't become the problem to solve? Riddle me this, I'll riddle you with bullets, motherfucker! You never bring a knife to a gunfight, that much is clear -- but is it really any better to bring a gun to a knife fight? These men have clearly violated an ethical imperative, but they know that the universe -- perhaps Charlotte herself, the free woman who is evil through and through, the fabric of whose freedom seems to be constituted by her aggressive and liberated ("free") female sexuality, which clearly intimidates our heroes, and is perhaps the very reason she signifies evil to them -- Charlotte is the great equalizer. They've shared her, and now they'll both meet their fate at her hands. Even if they win, they lose, and they lose by winning. These men will always be haunted, not only by their journey through the Stargate to a new past-present-future, and the all-to-real possibility of this deadly living woman becoming the living dead, but also by what she symbolizes: The kneeling proletariat, the femme on her knees, an endless sea arranged on each other's backs in a pyramid, making a staircase for the socially mobile -- those with the cars, the guns, and the butter. You look over your shoulder, climbing this great wall of limbs and minds and souls, and you see nothing, you're in the cave of the open air, an omnipresent, Lacanian manifestation of the vagina dentata, just waiting to chomp down on you. They're all beneath you, slipping out of view even as it parallaxes. But they are there, always ready and waiting to rise up in a tide and swallow you beneath them, to even the ground and trample you with their bootsoles -- to take your boots, the very boots you've been trampling them with, and to return the favor. You reach the top of the pyramid, and you stare off the plateau into the canyon below, and you realize that escape is exile and freedom is irrelevance. To "haul ass" is to evaporate. You -- like Thelma and Louise -- have only one choice.

You have to hold hands and jump. Only then can you end the song with satisfaction.

*note: I've never been clear if the concluding vignette -- "I was fuckin' this hoe, she was suckin' my dick" -- is about the same bitch, Charlotte the free woman, or a new bitch. I can't help but feel, though, that if this song were a performance by Marceau, or a film by Godard, or a story by Artaud, or a piece by Duchamp, one would be roundly scorned for asking such insignificant, sophomoric questions about the exegesis. Either way, it significantly alters the moral content of the story, perhaps simply reflecting the irreversible, unstoppable, even mechanical repetition of bourgeois domination in the age of late capitalism. Plus, it's hilarious. "He kicked in the door and shit on the floor and I shot him in his ass with a .44!"

The return of automatic writing

2008-04-25T00:49:00.005-06:00

The idea is stolen from Sisyphus, who totally came up with it for the first time ever it ever got came up with ever, but I don't have the readership to make it a quiz, so I just thought I would see what happened, and what happened was weird. Diagnoses: 1) God is telling me something 2) I need some music that departs from a peculiar, particular couple of themes.

The first lines of 25 random songs.

1. Girls don't want to play like that, just want to talk to the boys
Talking Heads - Girls want to be with the girls

2. Last night I dreamed that I was dreaming of you
Tom Waits - Watch her disappear

3. Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth
David Bowie - Rock 'n' roll suicide

4. This overgrown boy in a paper crown
Burning Airlines - Paper crowns

5. Got a spirit in my house and I know it ain't no mess
Joey Ramone - Spirit in my house

6. Locked inside the bedroom looking at the pictures at the wall
Angry Samoans - My old man's a fatso

7. I am the only one searching for you, and if I get caught then the search is through
Pavement - Frontwards

8. Caught up in a repeat, you think I oughtta know how it goes
Bluetip - Anti-bloom

9. Sitting in the morning sun, I'll be sitting when the evening comes
Otis Redding - Sitting on the dock of the bay

10. All I need is a little time
Air - All I need

11. Thank you very much, I've got to blow my nose
John Fahey - Fahey blows his nose

12. Gettin' on my nerves
Organized Konfusion - Interior car night

13. Come with me, wading in the sea
Apples in Stereo - High tide

14. I got my coat, I got my keys, I got my head down to my lungs and move my feet
Devo - Clockout

15. That'd be cool if you could eat good food with the bad food and the good food would cover for the bad food
Mitch Hedberg - Lynn

16. I can't seem to make you mine
Ramones - Can't seem to make you mine

17. Spanish songs in Andalucia, the shooting sites in the days of '39
The Clash - Spanish bombs

18. You can do what you wanna do, you can say what you wanna say, you can think what you think you want, it doesn't matter anyway
Husker Du - It's not funny anymore

19. I was burned in the heat of the moment, though it couldn't have been the heat of the day
Led Zeppelin - Hots on for nowhere

20. Here's room 546, it's enough to make you sick
Nico - Chelsea girls

21. Can we control this dream? Make amends with lovers' constructs?
Doug Marsch - Dream

22. Narrowing his eyes, god only knows what she'd try
Jawbox - LS_MFT

23. I was hanging with my friends and they said I looked peaked
Mustard Plug - Mendoza

24. Motorbikin'! 1-2-3-4. Motorbikin'!
Dee Dee Ramone - Motorbikin'

25. I never felt magic crazy as this
Nick Drake - Northern sky

Don't push me cuz I'm close to the edge, push a Push-Pop, OR I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!!!!!!!

2008-04-01T05:07:00.001-06:00

I don't really have anything to say. I just wanted to post that as a subject line. I'm really busy!!!

And that's why it really hurts

2008-03-27T01:31:00.005-06:00

The Wednesday / Thursday workload vortex is pelting me with hail-hard, cigarette-sized words like "ontophenomenological." They screech in, do their gnatty-needly damage, and retreat back into the obscurity from which they came. This is, I suppose, what one gets for saving Aristotle, and Derrida's magisterially impenetrable commentary on Aristotle, for the last minute. Can you die from ten-thousand mosquito bites? A bird is chirping.

A nationally-ranked procrastinator who refuses not to get everything done, I find myself in this situation almost every Thursday morning. (That's totally how I'm going to start my first WM seeking WW light BDSM personal.) I have to be on campus in four hours, and I have a little more than four hours worth of work to do between now and then. Green tea + ginseng bounces off me like bees off a bullet proof vest. All four of my classes -- nine hours in all -- are concentrated within a 27-hour span, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. the next day. I'm pretty sure my teachers think I'm high. But I'm just really tired, is all.

I think of Friday as me-time. Time to decompress, relax, unwind -- shake off my usual rail gin hangover. Lose all the luggage I shoved into my short-term memory's overhead compartment. The weekend? It's the weekend. Nobody works on the weekend. Work for the weekend, dummy. That's how the Loverboy song goes, and Loverboy is never wrong. This leaves me, every week, with two days to prepare, at my leisure, for three classes -- and then the sturm und drang blitzkrieg of Wednesday night, which is so abrasive it can only be described in German. Or possibly Japanese, but I don't know any. Sing it.

Hey, you know what's awesome? I live on the 15th floor. And I'm a holy cow! Thanks, boys.

Fuck you, bird.

That don't make no sense

2008-03-25T23:14:00.011-06:00

Don't get excited. We'll get to Total Recall in a moment.

I've had a trouble concentrating for the last month or so. I blamed a dopamine deficiency. I blamed cabin fever. I blamed a sedentary lifestyle, a bad diet, ill-fitting shoes, barometric pressure, antisemitism, the Jews, the disconcerting worldwide indifference in contemporary discourse to the possibility of the religious correctness of Orthodox Judaism -- what if they really are God's chosen people? -- and my abject lack of a Posturepedic bed.

But I'm done blaming my problems on other people. Because who's to blame? Henry James is to blame.

Late-period Henry James comes at my brain like a scurvy dervish and pelts it into submission. I am infrequently, literally driven into a fetal position on the bed while I piss and moan and wail softly to myself about the prospect of trying to read a few hundred more three-page paragraphs that are about as sequitur as a Monty Python skit. Henry James makes me piss the bed. Good thing it's not a Sealy.

His books have the same effect on my interpretive faculties as this picture, minus the giddiness.

Which is to say, they pummel them into submission. What the fuck, WHAT THE FUCK. This can't be happening!

In a desperate bid to concentrate harder, better, faster, stronger, I have been driven to read articles on the internet about brain enhancement. Memory enhancement. Concentration exercises. Breast implants. Did you know that there was a study wherein people were directed to think about exercising their biceps for 15 minutes a day, and, 3 months later, their arms were 13% stronger, sans exercise? I didn't, but then I did, because I read an article about it that sapped me of 10 valuable minutes that I could have spent reading two pages of Henry James. All in the service, you understand, of reading Henry James more efficiently. I've smoked 9 cigarettes in my non-smoking apartment because smoke-breaks are, in a very real sense, a way not to read Henry James.

Here's how bad it's gotten. I've romantically reminisced about the times I've watched Total Recall. Sat there, thinking, I remember watching Total Recall.

I want so badly to watch Total Recall, but I can't, because that's valuable time I could be spending in more active pursuit of avoiding my responsibility to read Henry James.

I tried to fall asleep to Total Recall last night, but I couldn't because I was too captivated by it. I had to turn it off. Henry James cost me even that. My last shred of dignity? Perhaps.

Total Recall is one of the more impressive movies ever made, says I, because there's not a single sequence that goes by without the least plausible thing that could possibly happen, happening. "We've got another schizoid embolism!" screams a lady doctor. Schwarzenegger tries to smuggle himself onto Mars in an old lady fat-suit, but it can, for no reason that could possibly be justified by the plot or anything else, only say "two weeks," so it has a seizure and reveals this hysterically unpassable animatronic version likeness of Arnie.

It's like somebody left the wax dummy in the back seat on a SoCal summer day and it melted and flowed four inches downhill before an intern found it. Probably cost the poor bastard his job. But that's might not even be as bad as it gets. Total Recall features some of the all-time worst movie magic, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Do you see what Henry James is keeping me from? I have six (6) pages of The Ambassadors to go. Before I'm finished. If it were any other book I hated this much, I would be ecstatic. I would be standing on my hands in front of the Washington Monument, which is what I always do to celebrate -- as seen here.

But I'm not. I'm not standing on my hands in front of the Washington Monument. Because I'm the longest half-hour of my life away from having stared the devil in the face and come away. Oh, sure, I'll come away. But you don't come away from something like that without something in your soul twisting, corrugating, turning green and septic. I am killing myself to live. I am killing myself back to life. My brain is dying so that my body can be free of this unutterable burden. My heart is being gnawed away like so much fox leg caught in a bear trap. I want to live! I am the resurrection, and I prove only the horror of that which is to come. To come, to come, l'avenir -- The Golden Bowl and Wings of the Dove. I must away, I must piss the bed and gnaw off my leg.

Henry James is Keith Olbermann's Worst Person Ever. He fucking should be anyway. If he were still alive, I'd burn his house down.

A mouthful of cheese

2008-03-23T22:24:00.009-06:00

Today, my paper clip came alive. It flew to me and alighted on my desk. We instantly fell in love.

We had a baby, and named him Jean-Wayne Chikatilo Flowbear.

When Jean-Wayne got older, he became arrogant and spoiled. He felt himself entitled to our undivided attention. He began to take us for granted. We couldn't get a moment's peace, much less a single word of appreciation for all the sacrifices we made for him. So we had another baby to spite him.

We don't quite know where Jean-Wayne spends his time anymore, but we have reason to suspect he's killing neighborhood pets burning the bodies in firing barrels.

The end.

I went shopping today for the first time in forever, and then I made one of those salads. The kind where the balance is a little off, you know, so you get in there with the fork without looking down and you end up with a mouthful of cheese, three olives, and a firecracker. But I'm eating salad, lately, because I'm feeling tugged by this vague but nagging urge to self-improve, which manifests itself in eating greens and fruits and roughage, and working out with half my heart and half my ass. Drinking sickly-sugary green tea instead of pop, which, for the fourth time in my life, I have to learn to call "soda" again.

I want I want I want a cigarette. I don't even really smoke, but I want to squash this trajectory or I might actually start feeling good, and could anything be more dangerous? From the first time I heard the Sebadoh, I started associating contentment with adequacy, adequacy with selling out, selling out with middle age, and middle age with irrelevance, which is tantamount to death. But, the intractable aging process continues, and I now own a potato masher, an apple corer, and a "Euro peeler," which is like a normal peeler, but more expensive.

I bought my first rug last week. I bought a fucking rug. From Target. I'm 99% of the way to being halfway to 50 years old. Body by Stouffer's. Rug by Target. The bourgeoisie is calling me, and I'm starting to resent poverty. Like the first time you think of somebody you used to be in love with and you realize, not only are you not in love with her anymore -- you don't even care how she's doing. "Wow, you went to Siberia? How'd that go? Welp, see ya later!" That's how I feel about being poor. I could be making 28 Gs and tucking my Oxford in every day. Wearing sock-suspenders and shit. But instead I make slightly less than that, wear whatever I want, and wake up at 2 in the afternoon. Misery, thy name is Flowbear.

We found out, recently -- us grad students -- that we don't get summer funding in our first year. This is the difference, for me, between a cartoony, Kanye West-esque break full of video hoes and summer-fun snow cones on the one hand, and grinding it out on my fucking leather ass, to quote Worm from Rounders, on the other. This news hit me two days before the lady who manages my building told me the garage fee isn't included in my rent, which is exactly the opposite of what she told me eight months ago, which means I owe garage fees for the last -- let me do the math real fast in my head -- eight months. I'd never before wanted so badly to fight such a powerful-looking woman. I was furious, but summoning all the c'est la vie I could, I said, "what are you gonna do." One thing that happens when I say this -- and it always blows my mind -- is that people actually think I'm asking them what they're going to do, and not just saying, you know, fuggedaboudit.

"The question is," she says, "what are you gonna do?"

She didn't really say that. I can't remember what she said, but whatever it was pissed me off. If she had said that, though, I'd be force feeding her spinach soufflé somewhere where they'd never find her, poking holes in her moles to see if they'd bleed. Running up and pushing the button on a dunk tank and, when she floats -- because, you understand, she's so fat -- yelling "She's a witch! Burn her!" over and over for eternity.

Not really. Is this mean-spirited? I don't pretend to have the answers to these questions.

I'm going to write a novel with an old wise man-type character named Phantom Smokeballs in it. He's going to dole out sententious, unhelpful advice to people just like me. "Roll with the blows, young'un. One day pain will make you a man." Then, one day, somebody's going to stab him, and when he doesn't bleed, a thousand ravenous English majors are going to set him on fire.

I keep having these daydreams. I'm talking to faceless professors, and I'm telling them, "I've hit a bit of a wall, mentally." They don't care. They stare at me, nonplussed but unimpressed. "I'm fatigued," I explain. Their black-hole eyes burrow into my heart and lay eggs. "I don't care at all about this shit I have to read." They gyrate against their wall-to-wall bookshelves, each filled floor-to-ceiling with broke-backed volumes, each cover-to-cover with blank pages. "I've memorized them," they say. They dip cotton-wrapped clubs in oil and light torches, like the mob in Frankenstein. The movie, not the book. "I fucking hate books," I say. They put the torches to me, and I go up like an inky paper doll. Burn words burn.

It's kind of amazing how mental fatigue can turn into emotional and even physical fatigue. I'm generally hyperemotional and spastic, one minute raving like a tazered monkey, the next a sulking, taciturn, grudging tool. But lately, I just feel kind of... withdrawn. And I think it's because I feel persecuted -- literally, persecuted -- by the workload of graduate studentry. At the risk of calling privilege poison, there's a certain irony one feels whilst feverishly and compulsorily studying the ethics of oppression.

Read Foucault! I SAID NOW, FISH! FISH! FISH! FISH! FISH! FISH! FISH!

To misquote that great author Stephen King: "I wish I could tell you that [Flowbear] fought the good fight, and the [Professors] let him be. I wish I could tell you that. But [graduate school] is no fairy-tale world. He never said who did it, but we all knew. Things went on like that for awhile. [Graduate school] life consists of routine, and then more routine. Every so often, [Flowbear] would show up with fresh bruises. The [Professors] kept at him -- sometimes he was able to fight 'em off, sometimes not. And that's how it went for [Flowbear]. That was his routine. I do believe those first two years were the worst for him, and I also believe that if things had gone on that way, this place would have got the best of him. "

Every Wednesday, I feel this deathcold wave hovering over me, threatening to break and crash on me like it crashed on Swayze at the end of Point Break, minus the Christlike undercurrent of self-sacrificial redemption. It's almost impossible for me to like any Henry James novels when I have to read 10 of them in 13 weeks. It's impossible for me to like books, period. And I was already on the fence. But it's not like they didn't warn me. Kids, don't go to grad school in English unless you really, really like to read.

"There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who [applied to graduate school]. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone and this old man is all that's left. I got to live with that. [Educated]? It's just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, [Professor], and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don't give a shit."

Oh, of course, I'm being self-indulgent, and pathetically self-regarding. In six weeks, I'll be free as the wind blows-slash-grass grows, and it'll be fantastic, and I'll be glad. I'll marvel at how much I learned. I'll joice at my treasure-stuffed brain as it leaks its overflowing wisdom onto everyone that rubs it, and the queue to touch my throbbing noodle will be long, indeed (TWSS). The gauntlet will be run. The crucible will hang fire. The alembic will have made gold. The carcass bubbling in its own fat will have turned, not unlike Cindarella, into a delicious fried chicken.

But right now, goddammit, I'm exhausted.

10 or so people I like better than Henry James:

2008-03-22T23:21:00.007-06:00

1) James "Buster" Douglas
2) Buster Keaton
3) Michael Keaton
4) Michael Douglas
5) Kirk Douglas
6) James Douglas Morrison
6.5) James T. Kirk
7) William James
8) James Jamerson
9) every famous Jim Jones, including the poison Kool-Aid one
10) Jim Jarmusch
11) O. Henry
12) Jim Henson
13) Yoda

Ten things I like better Henry James novels:

2008-03-21T23:51:00.002-06:00

1) dandruff
2) dandruff shampoo
3) dandruff shampoo commercials
4) dust made of dead skin
5) that James Spader movie where James Spader gets in car accidents and has sex that's called Crash that's way better than that piece of shit Crash that came out a decade later and won a bunch of Oscars
6) that James Marshall movie where James Marshall is a boxer in high school who has to box Brian Dennehy to avenge Cuba Gooding Jr's ambiguous brain injury that's called Gladiator that's way better than that piece of shit Gladiator that came out a decade later and won a bunch of Oscars
7) the piece of shit Crash that came out a couple years ago and won a bunch of Oscars
8) the piece of shit Gladiator etc. etc. etc.
9) bacci ball
10) ethnic humor

These are just the first ten things that came to mind. I could go on. For years, probably.

That depends on how you say 'ménage à trois' in French

2008-03-19T12:33:00.004-06:00

Courtesy of the Smithsonian:

Check out the bosoms on Our Lady Freedom, too, as she grips the sword and the flag in the milky clouds over wine country. Somebody knew exactly what they were doing. Well, that, or Lacan was right. Can't it be both?

Note: I received no permission of any kind from the Smithsonian. That's what makes it funny.

Et tu, Tucci?

2008-03-14T21:57:00.005-06:00

When you think of the Lincoln Memorial, you think: historic craftsmanship, inspiring oratory, distinctively handsome features, a fine turn as the cantankerous airport manager in the Tom Hanks vehicle The Terminal.

Funnily enough, these same terms describe two time Golden Globe Award-winning actor Stanley Tucci, whom I saw at the Memorial the other day. I was leaning up against a pillar, reading the second inaugural address, and, after losing interest about halfway through, I looked over at the other pillar. Who should be leaning against it, squinting to maintain concentration long enough to honor the legacy of America but not having any more success than I, but Stanley Tucci. I said to my friend, "Hey, that's Stanley Tucci!"

To which my friend replied, "Who?"

I tried to explain under my breath that Tucci is the actor who (irony?) plays the spook in The Pelican Brief who assassinates a powerful man in a theater. Granted, it's a porno theater, and he strangles the dude with a piece of rope that he's wearing as a belt -- (then he feels himself up really creepily, in one of the first moments of pathological eroticism to ever freak me out as a child) -- instead of, say, leaping off a balcony and yelling "Thus ever to tyrants!" But it's hard to explain such things when time is of the essence. The Tuccis had had enough -- they were leaving! My friend badgered me to talk to him, to tell him hello, to ask for a picture in front of the statue, arms over shoulders like we knew each other from 'Nam or something. But I didn't want to confront him, because most of what I know of the man is that (1) he killed John Heard and then tried to trick Julia Roberts into thinking that he was John Heard by wearing a red ball cap and stuffing a pillow down his shirt, (2) that he tried to keep the Soviet Tom Hanks from achieving his dream of meeting every great jazz musician in a photo, and (3) that he ought to play Philip Roth in a straight-to-cable biopic.

Also, I know that I must have been really high when I watched Road to Perdition, because apparently he's in it. And what do you say to a guy like that?

I knew what I had to do. I beat a path to the entrance of the shrine, and, shrouded in shadow, I framed up the Tuccis in the least conspicuous manner -- bottom right, trying to signify that obviously all I wanted was a snapshot of the 13th President doing his memorial marble thang from a distance. I was sure it would be inconspicuous, that I would have a souvenir of the time I recognized a minor celebrity in the throng of a national landmark at sundown. But I was caught. I was caught by the burning eyes of Kate Tucci -- burning like the devil's own sulphur itself -- which radiated through my camera lens, through the viewfinder, and into my everliving soul where it burned a bubbling open-sore brand that will never heal over.

Eyes that scream but one thing, projecting as loudly and passionately as her husband must have projected in his Tony-nominated turn on Broadway in Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune. They scream, "Damn you Paparazzo!"

Or that was Mr. Burns. I forget.

Spitzer on a stranger

2008-03-12T19:48:00.009-06:00

With respect to ex-governor Spitzer, have truer words ever been spoken?

In honor of the first ever google search for '"that's what she said" "henry james"' (so far as I know), the first ever HJ single page twofer. Sorta.

Get rich quick scheme 1a: I'm going to start handing out otherwise-blank businesses cards that say,

Your House + Your Tits + My Mouth = $3
(my phone number)

Except it will actually be my phone number. And then I'm just going to let the current carry me. Like Jimmy Buffett, except famous.

The pressure is getting to me.

Depends on what you mean by "better"

2008-03-12T16:43:00.002-06:00

Little donkey

2008-03-10T17:24:00.004-06:00

I got id'ed today
Buying a burrito.
I gave him my credit card --
This little guy with enormous braces
Who minced like a miniature Q-Tip
(The rapper, not the cotton swob) --
And he was like, "Can I see some id."
And I was like, are you serious.
I couldn't find my id
So I had to give him my debit card
Because it has my picture on it.
He pretended to trust me,
Swiped it,
And then glanced down
Surreptitiously
At the photo, to make sure it was me,
The real me, who was
Buying a burrito.
Reassured, he showed me
A face full of glinting blue metal.
Who steals a credit card
To buy a burrito?
"That's strike three.
"Three felony counts.
"You're going down for life.
"Hope it was worth it.
"It did look pretty tasty."
Who can pass up a deal,
Even with somebody else's money?

Sorry, Goose, but it's time to buzz the tower.

2008-03-05T01:56:00.007-06:00

So I'm taking a shower and I'm thinking, man, you know how in Top Gun Maverick is always talkin bout, "It's time to buzz the tower?" That's really what people should call trimming their pubes. "Sorry, Goose, but it's time to buzz the tower." And then I started thinking, you know what's great? When you don't buzz the tower for a while and then you conditioner your pubes for some reason and they get all poofy and feathered and Hasselhoffian, so the only thing they need is some big-rock reverb drums and they'll get a record deal and a super-slow-mo jog along the beach.

And not long after this, I was laughing so hard in the shower that I couldn't breathe. It was really embarrassing. But I wouldn't have traded it for anything in the world.

I REFUSE TO BELIEVE THAT I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO'S CRAZY.

Yes

2008-03-02T20:55:00.002-06:00

This, to me, seems like a particularly good find.

Then again, I'm fond of all of my babies.

Bradley Cooper in the role of a lifetime

2008-02-27T10:35:00.002-06:00

Seriously, just watch this. Don't click on it, though. Because the surprise will be spoiled. Don't spoil the surprise!

You crazy for this one, Henry

2008-02-26T18:59:00.006-06:00

I'm going to hell.

One of my best friends is coming to visit me over spring break. I can only convey my excitement over this prospect by quoting the entirety of the message that he sent with his flight itinerary.

"Here it is. Lets smoke pcp."

Holy moly.

I did $9 worth of laundry today. Three loads in, like, industrial strength washing machines. I am the filthiest boy in town. I would bemoan the fact that I seem to be the only person who ever cleans out the lint catchers in the dryers if it weren't for the fact that I only clean out the lint catchers because there is always noticeably more lint after I am done with the dryers than was in them before I began, and, despite what you would think to be the relative anonymity that comes with such an ignominy, this makes me feel ashamed. I don't want to be judged, even if the judger hasn't got a face to put with the name -- which will inevitably be something like "lint boy" or "Linty McLinterson." I would call such a person "Master Lintinand Lintington, Esquire, of Lintingham Village, Lintshire, just outside Linton, Englint." I have never considered myself an especially linty person, especially because I only very rarely have to dig it out of my bellybutton with a ballpoint pen cap after vainly fishing for a while with my stubby little fingers. But I may after all have to reconsider. I don't know exactly where lint comes from. Nor do I know why people get the hiccups, which I do not have, but in which I am nevertheless mildly interested. The mysteries are killing me.

(I actually have fabulous fingers.)

Salt bomb

2008-02-25T20:40:00.005-06:00

I'm reading this novel with a character named Olive in it, and every time I read the name Olive, I instantly want to eat some olives. The problem is, Olive plays a pretty significant role in the novel, and I have the willpower of a slobbering dog in the refrigeration facilities of a third-world morgue during a brownout.

Me : olives :: ravening dog : putrefied corpses

This one's almost too easy. Almost. Shooting fish, but, as the man said, I don't see nothing wrong with a little bump and grind. Click to embiggen.

Double chiasmatic invagination of edges

2008-02-24T17:37:00.010-06:00

An instance of superhuman biblio-crate digging led my friend Robert to stumble upon "this little gem" in a used book store.

I can't tell you how glad this makes me feel.

Nor can I tell you how much I want this confluence of royals -- the King of R&B and the Prince of slacker pop -- to be something more -- either on purpose, or by a cosmic flux or divine intervention -- than a mere coincidence.

Stephen Malkmus : barber :: R. Kelly : hoes

The happy upshot of embedding being disabled for the "I'm a Flirt" video is that I can now post this unaccountably compelling mashup of that song and Broken Social Scene's "7/4 Shoreline."

It doesn't quite work when the harmonies kick in (stupid modalities), but I'm not complaining. It's the delicious confluence of chocolate and peanut butter. By which I mean, black people and Canadians.

Yes, I ought to be working. Especially considering I've got it in my head that the Oscars might be a beautiful, terrifying train wreck to watch after 8 days of prep. It's been a slow year for me, cinematically. Of the movies up for awards, I've only seen There Will Be Blood, about which I generally agree with the more dismissive, less orgasmic side of the critical discourse -- fine movie, sublime individual performance by Danny Day. And let's be straight here, the score would get about 10% of the attention it has if it weren't by Johnny Greenwood. Though I am grateful for the fact that it was, in the grand tradition of Ennio M., confrontational, which is something arthouse cinema hasn't been enough of since it slid into a complacent funk after France and Sweden gave us the depressing half of the 60s, and we realized that life is a game that can't be won.

Speaking of foreign countries, here's my favorite-ever LastFM comment.

I've been on LastFM for about a year now, and all it's really done for me is make me more self-conscious and affected when I listen to music. It tracks everything you listen to, so I get it in my head that I want the public facade of my taste to accurately reflect my taste. Except my taste is a good deal worse than I want it to be, so I find myself listening to way more Tom Waits than I would otherwise care to, because he's one of the most popular artists for people like myself to pretend to like. But that's only half the story, since I pirated the man's entire discography from bittorrent, and if I'm going to disrespect him like that, I might as well, you know, try to appreciate him, too.

So LastFM has been good to me, insofar as it's been one more public profile to hawk-watch, even as nobody cares what it looks like. It's the online equivalent of a garden of plant-sculptures, carefully cultivated with lawnsheers but behind impregnable estate walls. (In this case, estate walls of indifference). So the question now becomes, why did I sign up for MOG the other day? MOG does exactly the same thing as LastFM. Exactly. But now I have both. And that, my friends, is unnecessary. I sometimes yearn for the days when I had 5 TV channels and a computer that went "bing bong skreeeeeeeee" when it connected to the internet. But then I reconsider when I realize that I've been lucky enough to experience all the benefits and perks of aging, like getting an oil-change in the ghetto, and standing in front of a vast trough of white onions in the grocery store and trying to figure out which one to buy, with precisely no criteria, for a recipe I don't know how to make.

I was sautéing garlic at 9:30 this morning, and I had the heat too high, and when I poked in the spatula to stir the rapidly blackening, horribly stinking bits, the pool of oil exploded into a tiny yellow geyser and burned my face and my hands. Fortunately, my glasses took the brunt of the blast, or I'd be blinder than shit. I've never been so lucky to be... uh... blind. Every 8 months or so I make a 3-week self-taught Master Course stab at learning how to cook chicken, and it always ends in near disaster. But that's ok, because it will give a body something useful and interesting to learn once I get a PhD in literature, which, it's more apparent than ever, is a more egregious racket than the Irish mob.

To wit: Jacques Derrida makes a stab at most baroque "that's what she said" moment of the year with this doozy of a dandy of a meaningless clause.

What's that you say? You don't understand what that could possibly mean? Well, you're in luck, because he includes an enlightening graphical representation of the phenomenon, "double chiasmatic invagination of edges," which consists of, as near as I can tell, a stick-figure bajingo with an eye ("I"?!) in the center.

This is what I do all day. We call it "hermeneutics." Hermeneutics is Greek for "a federally subsidized system of spousal hiring which allows aggrandizing bullshit artists to self-mythologize to the point that they're convinced they're doing vital work." Welcome to the fold, brothers.

Biopederasty

2008-02-20T08:12:00.002-06:00

The New Adventures of Hylas and Philonous: Still Dialoguein' (A Philosophical Investigation)

2008-02-19T03:41:00.000-06:00

Hylas: Everybody calls him Pants.
Philonous: Everybody calls him Pants?
Hylas: Everybody who's anybody calls him Pants.
Philonous: Why do they call him Pants?
Hylas: Because everybody else calls him Pants.
Philonous: Except the people who don't call him Pants.
Hylas: Nobodies don't call him Pants.
Philonous: Nobody doesn't call him Pants.
Hylas: Right.
Philonous: So everybody calls him Pants.
Hylas: Everybody calls him Pants.

Pronounced Lie-Nerd Sky-Nerd

2008-02-18T01:38:00.004-06:00

I got this Lynyrd Skynyrd sweatshirt at Wal-Mart for $7.

People don't seem to react to me the same way when I'm wearing it. There's a glaze of automatic dismissal in their eyes. Point of fact, they react to me exactly the way I would react to you if you were wearing a $7 Lynyrd Skynyrd sweatshirt from Wal-Mart. But I can't think of any way to signal the fact that, even though I think Lynyrd Skynyrd is awesome and I'm not wearing the shirt in any way ironically because I totally think wearing this Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt that I got for $7 at Wal-Mart is awesome, neither am I the kind of person who would buy a $7 Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt from Wal-Mart and then wear it because I think that's an awesome thing to do. I'm a complicated kind of man.

I ain't the one.

I'm not generally a Wal-Mart person. But I had to go somewhere. I had to go somewhere because I had to recharge my car battery. It's been dead for over a month – since I got back from Christmas, essentially. I didn't feel like calling Triple-to-the-A, so instead I waited for about three weeks, and then ordered a jump-starter from Amazon.com for $90.

What's that you ask? How could I have possibly justified doing this when I have AAA and the whole point of AAA is that they do things like this for free so you don't have to do things like buy a $90 car jumpstarter over the internets?

The answer to this question will, for now, remain shrouded in mystery. I don't want to give away too much of my aura.

I picked Wal-Mart because I didn't know how to get there, and my mom bought me a little GPS thing for my car. So I clicked "search" on the little doohickey and typed "Wal-Mart," and it located the nearest Wal-Mart. It told me to "turn left here" and I turned left. It said "merge right" and I merged right, onto the interstate, which was jammed with cars going seventeen thousand miles per hour. It said "put the pedal to the metal" and at first I thought it said "put the petal to the medal" and I didn't get it, because I only infrequently polish war memorials with roses while I'm driving, but then I got it, and then I burned rubber. When you go for a few months without driving, the circuits in your brain start to re-sensitize to just how dangerous driving is -- to just how little has to go wrong for everything to go wrong. I'm pretty convinced that when Karl Benz invented the car, he was looking for a way to consolidate the bullet and the coffin into one convenient package. I mean, he was German.

(Fun fact: the Daimler-Benz company was eventually renamed after a guy who sold Benzes. He had a daughter named Mercedes, so he called the cars he sold Mercedeses. So every time you think somebody is preposterously and self-aggrandizingly named after a luxury car, just remember – it's really no more outlandish than naming your daughter after a hamburger. My daughter is getting named Mercedes Wendy's, with the apostrophe-s and everything.)

What I've found about this GPS thing is that it always gets you where you need to go, but it always gives you different directions to get there. I went to Target -- I'm a Target person (ie, low-rent yuppie for whom the helvetica font represents the height of modern luxury) -- and it took me there one way, and back another way, and neither was the way with which I actually already know how to get to Target. At 11 o'clock at night, it told me to turn down a one-way sidestreet that was lit up with 10,000 watt police floodlights. I turned down the street. Then, I saw that it was next to a fast food restaurant with no drive through, and I turned around. The fast food restaurant sans drive-through is the thing, for me, that signals that I've stepped into a new kind of economy. That I have, in effect, gone beyond thunderdome. Does this make me a racist? No. But something else probably does. Maybe I'm wearing it right now.

2008-02-09T04:29:00.001-06:00

They're called pigtails because the more accurate ugly, hateful, sinful, dreadful, thankless little girl who doesn't love her mother even though her mother does everything for her and who will grow up and never be happy because she's a whore who can't even rinse a glass when she's done drinking her milk that her mother buys for her even though her mother is lactose intolerant and you better not walk those fat little feet down those stairs tonight because your mother is entertaining a gentleman caller who might be your new daddy and let's hope you don't drive this one away tootails was too hard to remember, and Whoretails was the name of the club my mom worked at, which led to confusion.

Click to enlarge (you know where this is going)

2008-02-04T23:15:00.000-06:00

I've got a whole backlogged cache of these things.

They are, at this point, the only thing keeping me interested in my academic work.

And I'm taking a course exclusively devoted to the slavishly cryptosexual writings of Henry James.

So...

Plenty more to come.

That's what she said.

Also, it's almost impossible for me to imagine any scenario wherein I'd want to be this guy. I think you're safe, bro.

coup de grace (the blow that kills (that's what she said))

2008-01-29T08:25:00.001-06:00

Hurtling through space in a cable-knit sweater

2008-01-25T11:17:00.000-06:00

I did "I Want It That Way" karaoke last night at a bowling alley as a duet with a friend of mine, and let me tell, you ladies and germs, I killed. Like an Ebola-infected Milton Berle in a gymnasium full of refugees.

So one thing that Maryland has, and you don't, is duckpin bowling. It's just like regular bowling, but with a tiny ball without holes that you can wing down the lane.

Fun fact: Maryland's official state drink is milk.

More to the point, Maryland's official state sport is jousting. Motherfucking jousting.

But some time ago, there was an underground, revolutionary movement to change the official sport to duckpin bowling. But it didn't get enough traction. The man wasn't having it, and he crushed the hopes and dreams of little girls all over the world. Like this one.

photo credit

Or would have, if you could duckpin bowl somewhere else in the world. But you can't. Because Maryland's got it, and you don't. Unless you live in New England or Quebec, which apparently also have it.

One thing about bowling is, you get drunk while you're doing it. So now I have to shake off this hangover and go see the Fiery Furnaces tonight, which I'm less excited to do than I wish I were, notwithstanding my crush on Eleanor Friedberger, #3 on my list of top 10 hip rock chicks.

My blog just turned a year old, by the way. That post was one of my favorites, and happily, it was my most popular post. Or it would have, were it not for the late night rally sadly staged by something I wrote about watching movies with your parents. I took it down, but it still gets like 15 hits a day. Check out these search results from last Thursday and see if you can get the gist.

Porn-hunting preteens and dyslexic janitors with geysers of oedipal anxiety constitute the bulk of my audience, I think. I guess #8 thought that by repeating the real important words he's be more likely to get the good stuff. And I totally love the superfluous "y" on #10.

Good nature

2008-01-24T07:40:00.000-06:00

More than anything else, I hate people who are obviously better than you are -- better in every way, really -- but still treat you like you're equals.

The myth of fingerprince

2008-01-23T08:37:00.000-06:00

A short state of the union, mostly about things eaten and seen recently:

I made risotto for breakfast at like 5:30 this morning, but I don't really know how to make risotto since I've never made it before. But now I know that undercooked risotto tastes almost exactly like undercooked popcorn. Like I needed another reason to think the gourmet industry is a sham. I did eat my first truffle last week. But I couldn't taste it. Plus, I consistently find that colby cheese is the most underrated of all cheeses.

I watched the entire first season of Dexter in a straight shot the other day. It's only about ten hours, so it could have been worse, as far as pathetic ways to spend a day go. Could have been, if there weren't two football games on afterwards. But that's not the point. It's a pretty good show. On the one hand, Michael C. Hall, who plays David on Six Feet Under, is so much more doable with his hair done all disheveled that it's crazy.

<- Less doable

<- More doable

Plus, check out his triceps. They're amazing. On the other hand, the show's big mid-season plot twist is so predictable it's even crazier, and the end-of-season twist of the knife that they try to tack on is, if it's possible, even more predictable. But that doesn't really mean it's bad, because what's fun about the show is how doable Michael C. Hall is in it, and, more especially, how much I want Dexter's sister to make me feel like an idiot.

One of the cooler things about the show, in terms of my response to it, was my relationship, as a viewer, with said sister. She's written as this foul-mouthed romantic, and they cast this nine foot tall amazon athlete woman with seemingly no sense of shame to play her. Needless to say, I fell in love with her in pretty much her first scene onscreen. But what's cool is, a quarter of the way through the season she turns into the demonic diva harpy. But then, just like always happens, it turns she's wounded and vulnerable and she needs help, and she can't quite get enough of it and that damages her even more, but when anybody tries to help her, the that just ends up damaging her even more – effectively creating a microcosm for every relationship I've ever had. Pretty cool. Then, in the second to last episode, you get to hear her voicemail prompt, and it's “It's Deb. Do it.” And they play it a few times during high-drama, high-tension scenes, and it made me laugh every time.

I watched Hard Candy last week at five in the morning, by myself, with nobody else. Best poster ever?

Ellen Page, in this movie, reminds me of an ex of mine, mostly by merit of this particular look she has – she'll stare somebody down like he's a fucking idiot, but at the same time like she's completely enchanted. It's irritatingly endearing, and I was continually making the connection, because there are just these intertwined airs of gravitas and flippancy that pop up and run parallel over and over, and it's just a very familiar sort of thing. But then, the movie gets to this – and this is a minor spoiler for the movie, so if you want to see Hard Candy fresh, and I recommend it, I guess don't read this? – this half-hour long castration sequence where Ellen Page ties Patrick Wilson to a table and taunts him while she cuts off his junk. Seriously, like a half-hour. And it was just harrowing to watch. It would have been harrowing anyway, but I had all this extra Freud baggage to go with it. A chunk into it, I had to take a break because it was too taxing to watch. So I went down to the laundry room in my building, where there's a pop machine, and bought a Pepsi. And then, on my way back to the elevator, I accidentally sneaked up behind a maintenance guy in a Fat Albert parka and scared the shit out of him. It was kind of wonderful.

I wrote two of the worst papers imaginable after I got back comments for my first one that threw around the P word (rhymes with "mublishable"). Also: I think I hate grad school.

My brain doesn't understand the fact that Heath Ledger is dead, and I understand now that my love-hate thing with him is the biggest compliment I could've paid him. I do wish I could have paid him a bigger one.

Be well, friends.