Ain’t like that

Just in case anyone was wondering, I haven’t stopped posting on this shit because I got a tumblr blog or nothin’.  Back soon.  

The Race and Politics speech

An utter triumph for the campaign and for American political discourse — finally, a credible public persona gets it right.  Brother gets up there and says, w/r/t racism and its devastating legacy of persisting injustice, that that shit is real.  But. . . the story can’t end there, and we’ll never move forward, whether as individuals or or families or congregations or as a society, without acknowledging not only that shit is real but that shit comes in different stripes, and afflicts all of us, and so can only be comprehensively overcome in efforts of unity and transformation.  Or, well, maybe you should just watch it yourself. Oh, and try to ignore the appallingly dull-witted CNN summary points at the bottom of the screen.  Full text here.  

The Logic of Hillary ‘08

I like these videos:  

Pros, in different area codes

Something about this Eliot Spitzer thing is just off.  Spitzer was governor of the whole state of New York, but never moved out of Manhattan.  Yet the only place he could get his rocks off was a hotel room in D.C., in a painstakingly negotiated transaction? In Nick Paumgarten’s profile piece on Spitzer in the New Yorker late last year, he wrote that Spitzer bristled at the suggestion of drinks at the Carlyle Hotel, because it was “not his scene.”  Perhaps some of his discomfort with the lack of sexual ardor in the Upper East Side world he inhabited peaked through there.  It was an absence he could never transcend.  His whole life lacked for human curves; all he knew were sharp edges–the suspenders, the predawn wakeup to jog in the Park–all the rigors of merit and moral asceticism (he told Paumgarten that his first thought every morning was to wish for two hours more of sleep).  No wonder his lapse into venality seems so amateurish, so boneheaded, so boring and small of him.    The sex at issue is utterly flat and joyless–no dashing around downtown with a mistress, like even Giuliani did, for god’s sake; just a few appointments here and there, tucked in between wide swaths of effort on behalf of the Empire State.  It’s a scandal more befitting the part-time mayor of some unthrilling place like Three Bridges, New Jersey. One of the most powerful men in the city, yet how very un-New York of him indeed to throw it all away for such an ultimately dull show.  Is he really one of us?                 

h/t

This is fuckin’ great.  Here’s just hoping that the California sunshine won’t make Jack Roy quit smoking, lose his righteous indignation and go all soft after he picks up and moves there this summer, for a girl. (What a fag.)  

Well, THESE are nice

Last night, I went to the legendary Herald Square Macy’s to use up some Christmas gift cards on much-needed work clothes.  How about these for a pair of pants, huh?

 

While pants-shopping was tolerable enough, I became disheartened when I shifted gears and tried to pick out some work socks.  In fact, I would submit that it is impossible to shop for socks at a place like Macy’s and not swell with sadness.  You’re looking at all those socks, and they’re so bright, clean and taut, and their novel designs and crisp folds make them all seem so fresh and creative and fun. You think that if you would just buy these socks — only $21 for three pairs! — suddenly sock-wearing itself would become an interesting thing about you.  The new socks whisper a promise that they will give you a source of personal pride; that they will add color to your personality; that they will be Exhibit A in the Case of the New You; that those those silver and navy argyles would be a quirky affectation that you could make your own, like a cane or cigarette case.  

But then you catch yourself, and you realize that you know these socks are just going to let you down.  Like anything else in life, there’s no trick, no shortcut — these socks are just like the socks you have at home, that have been through the laundry a thousand times, that become threadbare and faded with time.  And the abruptness of that realization, how it rushes in so forcefully and knocks you from your absurd and dizzy visions of what new socks could mean, hardens you against what is in front of you.

Then all you see is the “Made in China” label, half-elegantly framed by a perimeter of gold-colored thread.  A claim of dubious merit; sweatshop provenance.   You cannot understand why the packaging so proudly announces the socks’ ingredients — Cotton Merino Blend; Cotton with Lycra.  As if that were the answer we’ve too long been looking for.  

All you feel is emptiness, and so, to claw yourself out of it, you probe deeper into the significance of these objects, which beguiled you just moments ago.  You begin to think of them not as fresh-born matter, all potential and ideal, but rather as things with history, a story to tell.  You imagine where they have been before: the dry, tired, wage slave hands they passed through briefly six weeks ago before being sealed up in a cardboard box and shipped all the way to a stuffy inventory room, invisible but just a few yards away.  Or you consider that perhaps no human hands ever graced them at all: that maybe the closest they ever came was when the gloved hand of a factory worker (in some city I’ve never heard of with more people in it than Brooklyn but which doesn’t even have its own airport) pressed the button on a machine that spat them out into existence.  A tired hand, pressing a jelly-refracted button — its three or four pockmarks from some long-forgotten dinging being smoothed away and erased, impression after impression, day after month after year — encased in a thin aluminum cylinder all the way around, so no errant bumps, but only a human depression, could cause the machine to groan, grudgingly, and shudder with anger as it cycles through its creative process once more.

You start to hate the socks, for what they are, for the meaninglessness of what they’ve accepted for themselves.  With disgust you just grab the cheapest ones you can find that don’t look utterly god-awful.  And, after defending to the cashier your choice not to take advantage of the nearly-irrational savings the store is offering and buy just a little bit more, you walk out onto 34th Street and try to grasp back at reality, passing Burger King and K-Mart and the World’s Most Famous Arena on your way to the C train at the corner of 8th Avenue.               

Tips

• Even if your wife is gracious enough to accompany you to your second (and her first) viewing of There Will Be Blood, and even if you have a wonderfully engaging discussion with her afterward on the walk back home from BAM, during which she raises several points about the movie that you had not considered before, she will eventually grow tired of you doing your Daniel Plainview voice while saying mundane things like “I would be happy to unload the dishwasher.”  If you persist, and trot out the Daniel Plainview voice unexpectedly while in flagrante delicto, you are truly pushing it.  
• Trying to learn about new music through clicking on the iTunes “Listeners Also Bought” link will prove frustrating and take at least 2 hours before you come away with five good new songs.  Just because you like “Superstar” by Lupe Fiasco does not suddenly make you an expert hip-hop aficionado.
• If you’re going to enlist Jack Nicholson’s help to salvage your quickly downward-spiraling presidential campaign, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into first.
• If you want to have a viral music video just as cool as that of your rival in order to try to breathe new life into your quickly downward-spiraling presidential campaign, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into first.  (Reminds me of the theme music for “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, or every terrible evangelical praise chorus ever.)

Rematch (overwrought prose edition!)

My esteemed associate Will Smallman has agreed once again to join me in opening the running season this imminent spring in the spirit of deadly competition.  As with last year, Will and I will, on the morning of this coming 13th of April, race each other through the dales, hills and treacherous ghettoes of Central Park and, in doing so, play our pawnish parts as insurgents in humanity’s rebellious beatback against the arrogant intransigence of cancer.

We will exert ourselves as such for a distance never before attempted by adult humans: Four miles, ladies and gentleman — four unpredictable, sweaty and yes, unimaginably dangerous miles.  They say that, after even two miles, a man starts to hallucinate, seeing demons and becoming filled with the desire to gnaw on his own flesh.  I pay these rumors no mind, and am prepared to put myself through any such peril.  Last year my brimming pre-raceal confidence was unequivocally vindicated.

This year the stakes are even higher: we have disinherited our wives (and, in Will’s case, child), and named each other as sole beneficiaries on our respective life insurance policies.  Thus, if one of us should stumble and pay the ultimate price in attempting to secure, but falling eternally short of, the tawny sweetness of victory, the other shall not be left unconsoled in the ironic solitude of triumph for lack of a big pile of cash to spend on bitches and boats.            

Flaps down

I have become addicted to the Google Earth Flight Simulator.  (If you have a Mac, just hit apple-alt-A to get in; the rest of the world you know where to find it if you’re interested.)  The past few nights I have been sitting in front of the computer, having taken off in an F-16 from fake JFK and trying to land at fake LaGuardia, or taking off from fake Meigs Field and trying to find fake O’Hare, without crashing.  I need to get back to reading books.          

Apparently, sometimes I think my life is a Wes (or is it P.T.?) Anderson movie

I went out to New Jersey to spend the day with my dad, who, at 79 and living alone, is quite a bit slowed down from his fiery days when he was in his fifties, during my childhood.  We sat at his dining room table for three hours, where, on his new (and first–a Christmas gift from his older children) laptop, I showed him some things about how to use his gmail, helped him get his credit report and gave him a few other basic pointers on using the internet.  For dinner he bought me a steak at T.G.I. Friday’s.  Afterwards, we reparked the car and killed a few minutes in the Barnes & Noble in the same shopping center as the restaurant, and then he drove me to the train station and we said goodbye.

I typically dread the return travel from the ‘burbs, especially now that we live in Brooklyn. From Somerville, New Jersey to Brooklyn, New York — a mere 46 miles, according to mapquest, it will take two commuter trains, two subway lines and at least two hours to get home.  Most distastefully, the midpoint of my journey is the empty Nothing-in-Being that is Penn Station–a charmless basement which perpetually smells, nauseatingly, like stale cotton candy, and is filled on a Sunday evening with weekend tourist transients — who look like refugees from the theoretical idea of “fun” — from points north, east and west constantly accumulating in preparation for their return home.  My annoyance at having to pass through all of this was abated slightly when the A train pulled up quickly, and I got a seat.

As I’ve groused before, I hate it when people sit down next to me on the train in a space between me and another person that, while technically wide enough to fit their ass, will not do so without infringing on the meager elbow freedom that made sitting down look so attractive to me two stops ago, before they got on.  At West Fourth, a man got on and sat down on the end of the bench, leaving exactly that kind of space between me and him.  He made a motion that signaled “sit in that space” to the person who followed him onto the train, who haltingly obliged the invitation.   I knew right away I didn’t like this kid, and I tried to send subtle psychological messages by mildly scowling in another direction, and keeping my weight shifted to my left, towards him, so that he would have to realize that he’s pushing me while trying to find a comfortable position for himself.  He picked his folded wet umbrella up towards his lap a few times, and, in doing so dripped rainwater on my knees.  I flared my eyes and jerked my head towards him, without attempting eye contact but just enough to convey “Try that aGAIN, motherfucker.”  For breaking the simple rules of urban decorum, I anonymously hated this anonymous boy.  Within a minute, he seemed to have relented from his wiggling and was listening to his iPod.

And then his father, a late forties-ish man, balding, tan-skinned, with a build that was fit but with a middle-age-earned heft, started laying into him, out of nowhere, and forcefully.  ”You need to start having passion for something in your life other than just movies and music.  If you would only approach other things in your life with the same enthusiasm as those two things, you would be much better off.”  The kid–about 13 or 14, pale, chunky, ugly in the face in an Augustus Gloop sort of way, responded by whispering something to his father that I couldn’t hear.  In fact, I’m not sure that he just wasn’t mouthing the lyrics of what he was listening to directly into the man’s ear.  I could see that “Shoop” by Salt-n-Pepa was displayed on his iPod screen.

The father, to allay slightly his own irritation, pulled out a thick dog-eared paperback, which resembled the compact mystery paperbacks that my own father fills his capaciously solitary days devouring, and quickly forgetting, such that he has told me that several times he gets halfway through a book before it occurs to him that he has read it before.  I was simultaneously astounded by the comically unreasonable position this man seemed to have vis-a-vis his teenage son’s interest in popular entertainment and intrigued about what the father of a kid listening to an old Salt-n-Pepa song is reading, so I strained my eyes to try to see the title.  I couldn’t make it out, as the man’s metal bookmark, which seemed like a tieclip, was pressed directly down the middle of the page and across the title header above the text. He moved just briefly enough for me to see from the back cover that he was (and is still now, judging how far he was into it just an hour ago) reading Little Children.  The son was definitely singing into his father’s ear now.

Then, suddenly, sforzando, violence and explosions, the man laid into his son again.   “I swear to you, Scott*, you’re driving me fucking insane.  You have got to have something in your life other than this fucking music and movies. . . . ” He continued on like this for about thirty seconds.  It was not a warm exchange.  It was not a tender fatherly moment of wise concerned guidance.  He kept saying “fucking” to the kid out of emphasis and anger. It seemed like a nightmarishly mean boss ripping into a subordinate.  Hushed, hoarse, shamefully: “. . . .Fucking ridiculous, Scott — you need to develop the resolve to have something in your life instead of this focus on just two things — music and movies — either that, or develop some abilities along either line.  But you’re not doing that — you’re not developing any abilities.  You need to have something else in your life.  I swear to fucking God, Scott.” 

I was sad and angry.  I anonymously loved this anonymous boy.  I couldn’t, in the comfort of my own skin, where I sit now, fathom how empty and lost and confusing and wrong that must feel to be that boy and to have your father be that way to you.  Maybe the kid does just listen to music and watch movies all the time.  Maybe not even good music or movies! It doesn’t matter — he’s   just     a      kid.  And maybe he’s taking it all in right now, and he’ll someday be a genius director or a sad, troubled troubadour who stabs us with poignant, painful beauty or maybe a PA on American Pie 11: Health Class or a producer of ebullient nonsense pop with no lasting cultural value but which does lift the spirits, however fleetingly, of the contractors and hotel maids and and hairstylists and short-order cooks who hear it played on their portable worksite radios in the rotation on the shitty corporate radio stations we love to openly scorn.  Or maybe he’ll just work at Wal-Mart and hang out with his underachieving friends in their parents’ basements playing video games and smoking pot through every weekend until he’s 38.  Or maybe he’ll grow up into something that will make the father ball-splittingly proud.   It doesn’t matter.  Right now he’s  just     a      kid.  It made me immensely sad that a father would give his son shit about being fixated on things that he finds beautiful and interesting and compelling–when he could just as easily be trapped too early in drugs, or filled with hatred towards himself, or lost so many other ways.  But there’s just no reason for him to be berated the way he was.  

I wanted to turn my head and tell the kid that he shouldn’t listen to his father; that he was wrong.  But that wouldn’t really work, obviously, since it would focus the issue on the impropriety of my meddling, rather than what the boy needed to hear.  After all, maybe there is some objective validity to the father’s advice that the son should apply his enthusiasm for music and movies more broadly throughout his life–my point is that the father had no business tearing into his son the way he did.  Plus I’m a non-confrontational pussy, so it would summon the wrong kind of fuck-all emotional courage for me to actually make my point to the two of them explicitly.    So I decided to write something down.  In my coat pocket, I always carry around a pen and elegant little notebook, for jotting down ideas, errand reminders, or anything at all.

I held it open in my lap for what seemed like an excruciatingly long time–about four stops.  I wanted him to see it so that he’d know that it’s ok that he listens to “Shoop” on repeat, that it’s ok for him to watch Harold & Kumar or god-knows-whatever-it-is over and over.  I wanted him to know that he’s not a fuckup–that his father doesn’t know what he’s talking about and doesn’t have any right to treat him like that or say those things to him if he’s not willing to love him and accept him for who he is first.  That he doesn’t have to grow up confused about the difference between affection and rage.

I kept it flat on my lap until my stop, my heart racing, afraid that at any moment the father was going to be distracted from his Little Children long enough to notice that I was trying to send encoded messages to his son that he’s full of shit.  I started to prepare an alibi–negotiating within my subconscious what answer I could give that would avoid an ugly confrontation but still maintain some integrity for my message — “I’m just reading something I think is true” was the weak, but serviceable response I settled upon.  

One stop before mine, two guys got on the train with conga drums.  Normally I’m annoyed by the interruption, but this time I was immensely pleased that these two guys were plopped right at Scott’s father’s feet, audaciously and loudly doing something that made them happy, in the hopes that some, or just one, would find the same thing beautiful and reward them for their efforts.  I wanted to dramatically give them a dollar and make an arrogantly dead face at the father while doing so, but they didn’t finish their first song before my stop, and I chickened out.

I can’t tell if Scott ever actually read what I wrote–his head seemed to bop in my direction for a second or two, but it wasn’t clear that he digested or even noticed it, and our eyes never met.      



*I don’t really remember if his name was Scott, and obviously some of the father’s rant is paraphrased, although I guarantee you he said “fucking” a lot.  In case you’re wondering, I have considered the possibility that the man is not Scott’s father, but is just some guy dating his mom, in which case fuck him too.