Some Reservations

Moved to Another Sphere

2010-04-12T15:17:00.000-07:00

Don't expect anything more here.
Go here instead.

All the Women I Have Ever Loved

2010-02-04T17:25:00.000-08:00

A photographer I know sent me the link to a gallery I had never heard of before, but I never got past the home page—the video of one painted woman melting into another, from Da Vinci's to Renoir's to Matisse's, was too enthralling and disturbing to continue. It may be intended as a lesson in art history but I think it says more about the constancy of our desires.

The Horrors of Bushwick

2010-01-30T11:05:00.001-08:00

Stewart St., Brooklyn.

The Fruits of the Earth

2009-12-30T18:44:00.000-08:00

If you're interested in organic farming, the bohemian cachet of unpaid labor, rattlesnake cuisine, local meat, fresh vegetables, hippies, hillbillies, or beagles—or just in what I did this summer, read my piece on the n+1 website.

The Year in: Colorful Thrashing Sacks

2009-12-30T18:38:00.000-08:00

Austin, TX.

The Year in: Cats I Dig

2009-12-30T18:01:00.001-08:00

Mark Twain and cat.

Henry Cowell and cat.

Vincent Price and cat(s).

Marlon Brando and cat.

Clark Gable and cat.

Balthus and cat.

Charles Olson (printed) and cat.

The Decade in: Rhyme

2009-12-30T18:01:00.000-08:00

popped collar rolled dollar old shoes nu blues pink shirt striped skirt ray bans no tans japanese cats vampire bats vegetarian laundromat green sheen lean teen antique drum machine superstition attrition inhibition exhibition diorama melodrama hot fission prohibition cold war cold sore truck stop hip hop taxidermy tax attorney ritual pitbull pre-law coke jaw tight pants necromance straw hat beer fat yoga mat rich rat food stamp farm tramp bed bug man hug shag rug white thug swedish chair swedish hair swedish bed swedish head black prez red fez new pez some rez

The Year in: Holy Rollers

2009-12-30T18:00:00.000-08:00

Knoxville, TN.

The Year in: Bottled Venom

2009-12-30T17:50:00.000-08:00

The Year in: Celebrated Writers and Young Women

2009-12-28T09:47:00.000-08:00

Host of Radio Lab: Please welcome the studly Malcolm Gladwell...

The Year in: Vampires

2009-11-26T10:59:00.001-08:00

Part VI

By the spring, things were getting out of hand. Vampires started showing up in my non-vampire reading, always bringing with them a whiff of foreign places—from Emily Brontë’s dark little visitor to the Earnshaws, to Walter Pater’s travels among the relics of the Italian Renaissance, to James Merrill’s account of a dinner party full of vaguely European guests. I took each new sighting as a sign that I was on the path of something grave and monstrous.

But it should have been clear that my thinking had become corrupted when vampires began to infiltrate texts that featured no vampires before I picked them up. I came across a copy of Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which I had been meaning to read ever since it was assigned to me in a college class years earlier, and got through the first ten pages or so. Here is an excerpt from my notes:

The movement to the Christian secret of responsibility, the self that responds, is not a full break with the pre-Christian demonic secret. Rather, it is a secret that rises on the back of the old mystery, “repressing what remains its foundation” (p. 7). The vampire is a demon who inverts this position, feeding on the subverted subject of Christian responsibility. Thus the vampire embodies that “infinite alterity” that “regards without being seen,” while at the same time distorting it. Divorced from the passage of time, he gains an exterior position to history, and feels no obligation to respond to the Other, who is trapped in history’s flow. Thus the vampire inverts his relation to the history of Christian responsibility and the pre-Christian demonic mystery, or rather inverts within himself the relationship between…

It continues in this vein for a frightening length.

[to be continued]

Musical Oddities IV

2009-11-04T16:25:00.001-08:00

I saw part of a TV interview with the jazz pianist Bill Evans from about 1971 in which the interviewer, who I think was Swedish, asked Evans if he had a favorite classical composer. Evans said J.S. Bach. That's what all the jazz musicians say, the interviewer said.

It's easy to dismiss Evans's answer, as the interviewer did, for being too obvious. But far from doing that, I'd like to offer it as a piece of evidence for a theory I've been developing: that the deceased jazz pianist Bill Evans is actually the same person as the deceased classical pianist Glenn Gould. At the least, I see them as two sides of the same coin. There are the superficial resemblances: the severe profiles, the dark slicked-back hair, the studied elusiveness. Evans was born three years before Gould, and died two years before him.

But something about their playing unites them too. Bach was of course the most important composer to Gould. Though their sounds were radically different from one another, Gould and Evans were both committed to a kind of lucid polyphony that mirrored one another while setting them apart from other musicians of their time. Gould said that he was only interested in contrapuntal music; Evans, for his part, solved the limitations of bop by creating a contrapuntal style of group improvisation. Later he went a step further by recording an album in which he by himself was all the multiple voices—breaking the jazz taboo against overdubbing by making a whole album of overdubs—and he recorded it on Gould's favorite piano.

Gould was notoriously indifferent to contemporary music, but public about his admiration for Evans. And I think what happened between Gould's first and last recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations—the bookends of his career—was jazz phrasing; in 1981 he stretched time and hid or hit notes in a way that would not have made sense in 1955. It might not be a stretch to say that what made Gould himself was Evans, and what made Evans himself was Gould.

The Year in: Vampires

2009-10-27T17:15:00.000-07:00

Part V

In April I went to London, where my younger brother was studying abroad. We had been in touch throughout the semester, but when we spoke it was always a little hard to gauge how he was doing.

Me: How’s your reading going?

My brother: I’m growing out my fangs and adam’s apple. Those are my main goals for the semester.

Me: That’s good. Who needs books when you’ve got elongated canines?

On the plane, I watched a movie in which Will Smith hunts zombies in an overgrown and abandoned New York City. When I arrived, newspapers reported that a man who claimed to be 101 years old had run the London marathon. According to several sources, he drank no water during the race. In the meantime, an inquest was being held on the deaths of three people whose boat had capsized in extremely bad weather off the coast near the town of Whitby.

A few people in their late twenties who shared a house in Whitechapel were gracious enough to host me for the week. At night I slept there on a couch, on a sort of mezzanine floor with big French doors that opened onto a terrace, during the day I visited the British Museum and historic houses in Chelsea and tried not to get caught in the chronic rain showers that cast a disquieting pall over the city. Girls passed me on the street in pairs, speaking in unison. No use waiting on the waking dead, I thought I heard them chant. Before going to sleep I lay on the couch, trying to take notes on a Bram Stoker biography, but the terrace door blew open again and again, invading my thoughts.

On my last day in London, my brother and I visited Highgate Cemetery in the north part of the city. As the burial place of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Karl Marx, among many other notables, it has become a bit of a tourist destination. But I wanted to visit because Stoker used the cemetery as the setting for the scene in Dracula in which the un-dead Lucy Westenra is staked in her tomb by her former fiancé, thus preventing her from becoming an accomplice to Count Dracula’s plans to take over London. It also became the nexus of a bizarre vampire craze that gripped London in the 1970s. By the late 1960s, the cemetery had become fantastically overgrown and vandalized, and was a favorite gathering place for young occultists. In February of 1970, one of them claimed to have seen a supernatural figure while he spent the night in the cemetery. Soon, rumors were running rampant, with rival groups of occultists offering various theories, one of the more popular being that a 'a King Vampire of the Undead' from Wallachia, a region adjacent to Transylvania, inhabited the cemetery. Before expiring, the affair climaxed in claims of exorcisms, vampire slayings, and a mass, televised vampire hunt on Friday, the 13th of March. Somehow, I hoped, this would all find a place in my article.

I thought my brother would be interested in Highgate, but it had been difficult to convince him to come with me to the cemetery. My brother ran track and cross-country throughout college, covering dozens of miles every week, and is in much better shape than I am, but on that day he seemed drained and listless, and as we climbed the hill to the cemetery entrance I had to stop again and again to let him catch up with me.

“I feel like shit,” he said. “What are we doing here?”

“Did you not sleep enough?” I asked.

“No, I did. You’re just exhausting me. This entire week.” He stopped walking. “Why are we walking up this hill?”

“That’s where the cemetery entrance is.”

“Oh yeah. Why are we going there?”

“Because that’s where all the vampire stuff happened in the ‘70s, remember? I told you.” Behind an iron fence to our right, the cemetery's tombstones drooped, choking under the weight of a century's worth of ivy.

“Oh yeah…” He sat down on a bench. “Can we rest first? You’re exhausting me.”

By the end of the week I was glad to leave London. On the plane back to New York I drank Mr. & Mrs. T’s Bloody Mary mix and watched On the Town.

[to be continued]

An Issue of Good Living

2009-10-27T16:22:00.000-07:00

Hearing about the demise of Gourmet magazine felt almost like losing my grandmother again. I never really read the magazine, but in my mind it was inextricable linked to her. She was a dedicated gourmand, for whom Christmas was not so much a holiday or even a family gathering as it was a series of meals—turkey, asparagus, and mashed potatoes like mounds of snow for Christmas Eve dinner; Hungarian coffee cake, sausages, and fruit salad for Christmas breakfast; and for dessert on both days, a tin full of sour-cream twists, butter balls, miniature linzer tortes, and toasted almonds and pecans, all homemade. Appropriately enough, Gourmet's inaugural release, in 1941, was a holiday issue.) Visiting her house, where she lived alone for my entire life, was a glimpse through a window to another generation, a very quiet one full of detective novels and Ella Fitzgerald's voice, the lingering perfume of cigarette smoke, and, as I recall, stacks of Gourmet in a wicker basket in the living room. My grandmother passed away when I was in high school. Luckily, she raised her four daughters to be exceptional cooks, and one of them is my mother. Any of my own knowledge of, or interest in, food emanates from her, and so in a way from Gourmet. It’s strange to realize I was emotionally attached to a magazine I barely ever opened, and now probably never will.

The Year in: Vampires

2009-10-05T08:56:00.000-07:00

[Sometime this spring, despairing that my article on vampires and tourists would ever be published, I gave up this thread. Now that the article is appearing in this month's Believer, I've decided to revive it.]

Part IV
In early 2008, a few weeks after I got the advance copy of the Vampire Weekend album, the band began to emerge from the shadows, but as they got closer the scent increasingly repulsed me. First I found a music video online. It featured a lot Ray-Ban sunglasses, sailboats and deck shoes, and so many swirling scarves and pastel sweaters it could have been a Gap commercial. Suddenly, the album’s reggae beats and West African guitar parts gained a more sinister aspect. Then I started to see the posters, hung around Chelsea and Williamsburg. The image seemed innocuous at first glance: a Polaroid of a chandelier, the very tops of a few youthful heads, and the band’s name in white block letters. But something about the poster gave me a shudder. The chic pallor of the photo; the kitschy, faux-gothic chandelier; and the creeping feeling that the haircuts just below it belonged to a swarm of pale, pretty young Columbia students writhing to fashionably tribal sounds.

My picture of a good-humored, harmless little pop band contorted into one of lurking, ironic cultural predators—weekend vampires behind designer shades. The lyrics about the college green and summers on Cape Cod only deepened my feeling that these Columbia-educated world-music fans hid a dark side. Wasn’t the Cape where Norman Mailer had planned to set that novel about crazed rich-kid hippy-bikers who murdered vacationers in the dunes? The devil did the backstroke/all the way from France…the kids don’t stand a chance, indeed. And that line about Peter Gabriel—“it feels so unnatural”—conjured scenes of Patrick Bateman lecturing his hapless victims about Genesis in American Psycho.

And what was that specter looming behind the young band? Each time I listened to the opening of “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”—there’s a young girl, Louis Vuitton—I heard, lurking just behind it, an older song with a similar beat—she’s a rich girl, she don’t try to hide it, diamonds on the souls of her shoes. The long shadow of Paul Simon on vacation in South Africa stretched over this band, reaching out of its two decade-old grave—the specter of Paul Simon in 1985, pale aristocrat of pop, forced out of the tower of his crumbling fame to find something fresh, descending on Capetown to draw on the healthy pulse of township rhythms. Like any good vacation, Graceland revived Simon's career. Twenty years later, Vampire Weekend was transfusing some vigor into their songs of ivy league travails through a kind of abstracted musical tourism.
[to be continued]

Aphorisms (on vampires, on tourists)

2009-10-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

"Everywhere has vampires."

"Every tourist is a traveler visiting a place for something that isn't there."

For these and similarly grand statements on the connections between vampires and tourists, read my article, "The Undead Travel," in the October issue of The Believer.

Thoughts on Walt Whitman, Pt. III

2009-10-01T06:28:00.000-07:00

Whitman in Class

When people ask me if I've considered going to graduate school for writing, I think about Walt Whitman. I try to imagine him going to grad school for writing. I try to picture a world without the nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman, in which a graduate student at NYU named Walt Whitman walks into a classroom where his fellow graduate students are about to workshop one of his pieces.

What constructive criticism would they offer him about this passage, for instance?

The cloth laps a first sweet eating and drinking,
Laps life-swelling yolks . . . . laps ear of rose-corn, milky and just ripened:
The white teeth stay, and the boss-tooth advances in darkness,
And liquor is spilled on lips and bosoms by touching glasses, and the best liquor afterward.

Stiff Lower Lip

2009-09-30T18:25:00.000-07:00

This is the face of public shame in America. The New York Times' homepage featured this picture today:

I recognized it immediately, but not as the face of Ken Lewis, who announced his resignation as chief executive of the troubled Bank of America, my bank. I recognized it from last spring, and the picture that suddenly blanketed New York media:

Governor Eliot Spitzer's grimace was usually accompanied by shots of a frank prostitute from New Jersey.

But Spitzer must have got it from somewhere, right? A few years prior saw this fine example across the Hudson:

Then again, we probably shouldn't give Governor McGreevey too much credit. I'm sure you could find plenty of other examples. There's also this notable forebear:

Jack Johnson v. Jack Johnson

2009-08-04T14:34:00.000-07:00

Miles Davis is one of those artists for whom, no matter how much of their work I listen to, there will always be more. I finally started listening to Davis's album A Tribute to Jack Johnson a few weeks ago.

It reminded me of a time last summer, when I was working for Vice. There was a guy at the company who worked as an all-around music consultant. He seemed to be friends with every band, hip-hop outfit, DJ, and club owner with indie cred in New York. He was a walking encyclopedia of pop music history. He was in touch the trendiest music circles in every important city in the world. One day that summer, he was reading a magazine in the lobby and called out to no one in particular, "Hey, who the fuck is this guy Jack Johnson who's headlining All Points West with Radiohead?"

"Have you not been listening to the radio for the past five years?" I asked.

"No man, I don't listen to the radio," he said.

At the time, this seemed like the ultimate confirmation of the singer Jack Johnson's utter irrelevance. But now it makes me wonder, where does this guy get off performing as Jack Johnson (even if that is his birth name)? He's a tepid white guy who mumbles totally forgettable songs accompanied by an acoustic guitar and flip-flops. The original Jack Johnson became the world's first black heavyweight champion in 1908 (and, incidentally, was born Arthur John Johnson). Miles Davis, who boxed himself, put out the Jack Johnson album in 1970, the same year Black Panther membership reached its height. As the liner notes Davis wrote for the album put it, "Johnson portrayed Freedom—it rang just as loud as the bell proclaiming him Champion." How can you share a stage name with someone like that?

This is Bad, Real Bad, Kanye West

2009-07-18T14:48:00.001-07:00

The icons of the twentieth century are dropping like flies. A single month has seen the demises of the King of Pop, the King of Policy Analysis, and now the King of Primetime News.
The worst part is that we don't even have John Updike around anymore to tell us what it all means.

Musical Oddities III: Dream of Electric Meat

2009-07-18T14:22:00.000-07:00

While staying at a friend's house, I dozed off in front of the TV, only to wake up to the sight of a man punching an enormous slab of raw meat in front of a microphone as a baritone voice warbled about Benito Mussolini.

If you want to learn about one of pop music's most committed weirdos, watch the documentary 30th Century Man.

Musical Oddities II: Angling in the Badlands

2009-07-18T13:35:00.000-07:00

From a review of Bonnaroo 2009 in Blank Newspaper, a free Knoxville arts rag:

At the end of Phish's set, "Trey Anastasio paused for a moment to give a brief monologue, explaining that the first concert he ever went to was three hours of nonstop action and fun...The next moment [Anastasio said] 'I'd like to bring out my boyhood idol, Bruce Springsteen.' "

What?? How do you get from E Street to a watered-down version of Shakedown Street? Then again, if you had asked me to pick the one thing that would top off the jack-tastic "three hours of nonstop action and fun" that I imagine a Phish concert to be, it may very well have been a quickie from The Boss.

Street Art

2009-06-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

Front St., D.U.M.B.O.

Musical Oddities I: Give Me Back My Name

2009-06-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

Rock and roll was simple and clear.

-Paul Davis, " '65 Love Affair" (1981)

Rock and roll was never simple and clear. Whatever he was listening to, if it was simple and clear, it wasn't rock and roll.

What They Meant When They Said Repent

2009-05-20T16:32:00.000-07:00

I walked into a store where the TV was playing a sports channel. For a second the sportscaster looked like Mel Gibson.

I dreamed of a future in which Mel Gibson was sentenced to spend the rest of his life as a sportscaster.

Thoughts on Walt Whitman, Pt. II

2009-05-07T16:53:00.000-07:00

Walt Whitman Talked a Lot of Shit

This is the guy who wrote "I am a habitan of Vienna"; who wrote "I hear the cry of the Cossack, and the sailor's voice putting to sea at Okotsk" and "I see the giant pinnacles of Elbruz, Kazbek, Bazardjusi"; who wrote "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors." Dude never left the continent. The farthest he ever got from his hometown of Huntington, Long Island, was a trip to Canada in 1879. The rest of the time he stuck to New York, D.C., and Jersey.

Insult Your Fanbase

2009-05-07T16:46:00.000-07:00

The point of this Arby's commercial is that eating Arby's makes you a sloppy fatso who never gets girls.

Thoughts on Walt Whitman, Pt. I

2009-05-07T10:57:00.000-07:00

Walt Whitman Sold Out

The first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) is also the sexiest, the boldest, the weirdest. Most people didn't like it. It did not bring WW the fame and popularity he longed for. Through successive editions and decades he tempered his barbaric yawp and his image and his "deviant" sexuality so that by the final version (1891-2) his status as the "Good Grey Poet" was secure and they put his face on cigar boxes.

Censorship Code as Hipster Manifesto?

2009-04-20T13:58:00.000-07:00

"A man may be judged by his standard of entertainment as easily as by the standard of his work."

-from the "General Principles" of the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930

The Stinker

2009-04-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

My cat has something of the Gollum to her. Maybe this is true of all indoor cats that live apart from other cats. She used to be a normal cat, when she lived in a litter with other kitties, but then she turned away from the company of her kind and her mind became corrupted. Now she keeps to herself, distrustful, seized by alternating fits of violent rage and ingratiating grovelling.

I was reminded of this the other day when I saw part of The Return of the King at a friend's house. I hadn't seen the movie since it first came out, and I had forgotten how racist it is. I remember thinking this when I first saw it in the theater, but now I was still surprised that no one ever made a big deal out of this. Something to do with 9/11, the Iraq War, I thought. As I was falling asleep during a particularly long and boring speech from someone dressed as a viking, I realized—how had I never realized it before?—that in The Lord of the Rings, there's only one Jewish character: Gollum, whose real name, you'll remember, is Schmiegel.

Think About Your Blue Blood

2009-03-17T20:28:00.000-07:00

Last night I saw the new documentary Examined Life. What most people don't realize is that the movie, which consists entirely of conversations with some of the luminaries of contemporary philosophy, is actually an extended commentary on the Rolling Stones' album Let It Bleed (1969). I discovered this quite by accident. When the movie let out it was getting close to midnight but I felt like having a cup of tea so I stopped into a cafe where they happened to be in the middle of playing "Midnight Rambler." In the film, the philosopher Avital Ronnell paraphrased Jacques Derrida at length to explain how we must maintain a buffer of mis-understanding and un-knowing with our fellow humans, because as soon as we think we understand another person completely completely, we are making a presumption—and it is always a dangerous presumption, as it gives us the power to discount and discredit them. "As soon as you feel you know the Other, you want to kill the Other," as she put it.

At first that sounded like a lot of philosophical jargon. Then I realized it was really just an extended post-structuralist meditation on the song I was hearing in the cafe:
Did you hear about the Midnight Rambler,
The one you never seen before?...
And if you ever catch the Midnight Rambler,
I'll stick my knife right down your throat.
The Midnight Rambler is a reflection, par excellence, of the Other, because you've never seen him, and everything you presume to know about him is mediated. And as soon as you know him —and he knows you—you're dead.

I noticed that many of the philosophers in the film talked a lot about human interdependency and how important it is, and how we can’t really live independently, despite what we’d like to think sometimes. Yes, I thought as I watched the film. I agree. We need one another. But do I need Avital Ronnell, Peter Singer, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah to tell me this? Aren’t there more complicated philosophical questions they could untangle—nettling topics I haven’t even thought of?

Then again, interdependence also turns out to be a major theme of the Rolling Stones' album, so maybe it was unavoidable. It’s clear as soon as you hear the man-woman harmonies of the first track, “Gimme Shelter.” Then there's "Live with Me." And of course the title track asserts "we all need someone we can bleed on," and offers that "if you want it, you can bleed on me." So you could even say that the importance of human interdependence is in fact the central theme of the album.

One of the film's most powerful moments came during the conversation between Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor, who described living with arthrogryposis, a muscular disease that forces her to use a wheelchair. "Growing up, while I could still walk," she said, "people used to say I walked like a monkey...I guess this really illustrates one of the reasons people feel uncomfortable around the disabled." Here she paused, and you could tell her thoughts had considerable emotional force behind them. "We force people to confront the limits of being human."

Taylor was no doubt thinking—perhaps unconsciously—of Mick Jagger’s most forced vocal line of the album:
I’m a monkeeeeeeeeey. Man.
There you have it—confronting the challenges of human animality, in just four words.

At first, the film’s title perplexed me. What could Socrates’ maxim—“the unexamined life is not worth living”—have to do with the Rolling Stones? But then I realized it was just another reading of the phrase “let it bleed.” After all, you have to let it bleed if you want to examine life. Bleed, and you’re forced to take a hard look at what allows you to live. Let life bleed, examine it.

The most impressive oral performance of the film belonged to Cornel West: “I’m a blues man. Blues is personal catastrophe lyrically expressed. The blues starts with the heap of fragments that is history—the heaps upon heaps—and creates elegance from that. It is not predicated on a fall from a state of unity, as with Romanticism, and so it does not get hung up on that disunity; rather, the blues begins from a moment of dissonance. That’s the stink of life, the decay—what I call the funk.” Wow, I thought, he’s drawing together all these tropes from African-American music, Walter Benjamin, the Christian reading of the Bible—but what exactly is he getting at?

Then it hit me: all of Let it Bleed is based on the blues. In fact, so is all of the Rolling Stones’ music. So West was just leveraging his prodigious philosophical knowledge in order to remind us that we need to understand the blues, so that......so that what? Given that the Rolling Stones are one of the most successful pop groups of the last fifty years, it’s safe to say that people of all ages and nationalities—people with wildly different ideologies—enjoy their music. In other words, people understand (probably unconsciously) the blues’ foundation of dissonance and decay despite the systems of thought and consumption imposed on them. They don’t need philosophy—West’s or someone else’s—to understand it. Indeed, this beginning with fragmentation and dissonance that West is talking about seems to be a basic factor of life in the second half of the 20th century.

So maybe West should have been addressing a different problem: the fact that the Rolling Stones have forgotten their own blues. They are putting their old songs under glass cases even as they deny the decay of their bodies. Ignoring Socrates’ imperative, they are no longer preparing for death in their art.

With Spam Like This, Who Needs Emails?

2009-03-11T16:22:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, Bernard Madoff will plead guilty to running a Ponzi scheme that lasted two decades and raked in nearly $65 million dollars. In his honor, after months of ignoring it, I finally opened the spam folder on my email account, only to find some unforgettable messages.

The first was purportedly from my bank, and informed me that because of numerous failed attempts to sign into my account, the bank (which referred to itself as "we") was enacting additional security measures, so would I please just click this link and enter my username, password, account number, etc. The best thing about this email was that, in addition to the usual grammatical gaffs (missing periods, "their" instead of "they're") the scammers didn't even bother to get the bank's signature colors right.

The next message was from Daisy Rostein, representing Jan's & Company Fine French Antiques, an eBay clearinghouse. In this message, which began "Dear Sir/Ma," I was encouraged to apply for a job as an "Antique Collector /Agent /Cashier / Payment Dispatcher and Payment Coordinator," in which I would work part-time from home mailing payments for purchases made over eBay. And I would make $500 per week. (Corollary scam: when I googled "Daisy Rostein," the first link that came up said "Daisy Rostein is on Facebook." But her profile had no picture, no network, and no friends.)

The third message was the best. From a mister Edward Hassan, an employee of the Labuan branch of Deutsche Bank, this email informed me that some seven million dollars worth of money had been sitting unclaimed since the death of Mr. Sheu Yang-dong, the former Governor of the Taiwan Central Reserve Bank. Mr. Yang-dong and his wife and daughter had been killed in a plane crash on February 16, 1999, and, as ten years had passed without the money being claimed, Edward Hassan was now in a position to name me as the designated next of kin if I decided to enlist his help, give me him my phone number and home address, promise him forty percent of the money, etc. To indicate his good faith, he assured me that he had not, in fact masterminded the death of Yang-dong and his family, and that they had without a doubt died of "natural causes." How a plane crash could be interpreted as a natural cause of death is unclear, but I chalked up this slip to a bad translation from the Malay. Or Arabic or whatever.

Googling "Taiwan Central Reserve Bank" brought up identical emails from Mr. Nicholas Lee (Deutsche Bank London), Mr. Lucas THerbert (Labuan) and Dr. Samailla Nuhu (Ougadougou, Burkina-Faso).

Walt and Walt

2009-03-07T11:02:00.000-08:00

Rereading Pater -
...he found it pleasant to think of the resistless element which left one hardly a foot-space amidst the yielding sand; of the old beds of lost rivers, surviving now only as deeper channels of the sea...("Sebastian van Storck" from Imaginary Portraits)

- I was reminded of Benjamin:
...today...the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction")

Of course, the perceived affinity might also have something to do with the covers of the two books:

Street Meet

2009-03-05T19:14:00.000-08:00

Covert Street, Brooklyn.

The Moving Image

2009-02-23T19:53:00.000-08:00

Last month I went on a road trip through Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee and then back to New York via Baltimore (more on that later, hopefully). As might be expected, I saw a lot of things on cars and other moving objects. Here are some notable examples:

Bathroom cowboys; truckstop on Route 281 north of Austin, Texas, January 17.

The Stockyards, Fort Worth, Texas, January 18.

Dallas, Texas, January 18.

Route 190, near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, January 20.

This guy came out of nowhere at a gas station in southern Alabama, January 23.

Sign of the times; January 28, near Strasburg, Virginia.

It was really funny at the time

2009-02-14T19:02:00.000-08:00

I saw what I thought was a book by William Carlos Williams called An American Dad. In fact, it was a book called William Carlos Williams: An American Dad.

This is the cover illustration:

The Moose in the Coffee Shop

2009-02-07T21:37:00.001-08:00

Sometime around New Year’s I was sitting in a coffee shop in Chelsea when a man who looked to be in his forties walked in wearing calf-high leather lace-up boots, into which his jeans were tucked, a red flannel jacket, and a wool cap. He was dressed as if he had just gotten back from a hunting trip in 1955. He ordered a coffee, sat down at the table next to me, and proceeded to read the New York Times. There was no moose strapped to the trunk of his car: I learned from a conversation I overheard that he intended to spend most of the day in that fashion. What struck me about his outfit was that just the week before I had noticed an identical pair of boots in a J. Crew catalog on a friend’s kitchen counter. They were prominently displayed as part of the new winter collection. "Red Wing Shoes® went back to the archives to find this one for us," the catalog read, "the Classic Irish Setter [$325.00]. They even brought back the old-style Irish Setter label and Red Wing logo just for us. You won't find this version anywhere else—unless you hit the jackpot in a vintage store. Put them on, and you'll feel like you've stepped back in time—1952 to be exact, when the original version of this style was first introduced." Then just this past week, I was passing a vintage store in the Village when I saw an entire row of similar hunting boots on show in the window. Is “fifties hunter” the trendy retro look of the moment?

The “retro” element has been an important part of fashion since at least the mid-1960s, when pop musicians started rummaging through second-hand clothing shops for particularly flashy items. This kind of vintage fashion always had as its purpose the re-appropriation of out-of-fashion objects. Wearing a nineteenth century military coat or a WWII bomber jacket looked jarring precisely because it would be juxtaposed with contemporary pants and shoes, and/or with items from a totally different era. A hodge-podge look often resulted. The point of re-appropriation was not to look like anything that had been seen before.

Hipsterism has killed re-appropriation. Now the point of retro fashion is not to integrate out-of-fashion items into a new look, but to recreate an entire “out-of-fashion” look from one era or another, whether the look is fifties housewife, seventies housewife, eighties housewife, fifties greaser, eighties greaser, eighties punk, eighties metal fan, eighties hip-hop fan, eighties nerd, etc. (Although of course the range of acceptable eras is limited. No one dresses like a twenties flapper or a belle-epoque society woman, for instance.) American Apparel has created a whole industry out of providing hipsters everything they need to look just like the high school students in eighties sitcoms they’ve seen mostly in re-runs—from t-shirt to backpack to gym socks. A truly enviable hipster will make sure to get an entire look down, coordinating clothes, shoes, hair style, and accessories into an easily identifiable whole. Even when clothes from different eras are worn together, the look will be a sum of identifiable parts. The point here is to look exactly like something that has been seen before.

Which brings us back to the man in the hunting boots in the coffee shop. The condition of his boots, coat and beard (he had a too-perfectly trimmed beard intended to denote a rugged outdoorsman) indicated that his outfit had never seen the woods, and had most likely seen very little besides the box they came in. Why does a grown man dress up like he’s going on a hunting trip in 1955 when in fact he’s going to read the paper in a coffee shop in Chelsea? Today, in New York, this is not ridiculous—it’s trendy. It’s supposed to signify creativeness, individuality. But in fact it reduces individuality to choosing your favorite decade. This is hipsterism. This is what it does to people. And now it is powerful enough that it has reached the middle-aged.

The Knows

2009-02-04T18:58:00.000-08:00

I was reading an article about the bonds between memory and smell when suddenly the air in my subway car was filled with the scent of a wood fire and I was instantly and simultaneously transported to this summer and a Fourth of July barbeque in Michigan; to a camp fire in Bryce Canyon seven years ago; to many winter nights by the fireplace when I was young. "The passage of time, which rots and corrodes the content of visual memory, has no measurable impact on the olfactory senses," the article explains. Strangely, while we are very bad at recalling smells, nothing triggers a recollection as surely as the smell to which it is linked. Indeed, "the ability of specific smells to trigger episodic memory," as the article points out, is immortal as well.

Many authors have explored the layers of memory that a sensation can produce. Proust, Faulkner and Sebald, to name a few, have produced famous sentences and paragraphs and pages and novels excavating the mental strata revealed by the fissure a particular taste or sight opens up. But has any author reproduced the instanteity of those recollections - the experience of being in several places and times piled on top of one another, resonating with one another? What would that look like?

I've long thought that we only feel at home in a place when we become accustomed to its smell. It is as if the unconscious says this does not smell like home - I can not feel at home here. I could never quite get comfortable at a friends' houses that didn't smell right to me.

Scent's memories may be immortal, but scents are not. Before I can locate the phantom subway campfire, its odor evaporates from my consciousness. "Smells are fleeting," the article points out; "the smell of violets is famous among perfumers for persisting for only about half the duration of an inhalation." The scent becomes as unnoticeable as the gray of the car or the rumble of the tracks.

Verse on the Tracks

2009-02-03T12:33:00.000-08:00

You know that line in Dylan's "Tangled up in Blue" about the Italian poet from the thirteenth century? Apparently a few other people have wondered who that poet might be, and it seems Bob wasn't too sure either. There's been some intense online debating about it. One guy tried listening to every live version of the song, and somewhere in December 1978 things start getting weird:

ORIGINAL ALBUM RECORDING:

She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe
"I thought you'd never say hello," she said
"You look like the silent type."
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you,
Tangled up in blue.

--

Source: 15 November 1978, Forum, Inglewood, California, USA.

Then she opened up a book of poems
And she started quotin' it to me
It was either written by Charles Baudelaire
Or some poem from the 13 century

--

Source: 23 November 1978, Lloyd Noble Center, Norman, Oklahoma, USA.

It was either written by Charles Baudelaire
Or some Italian poem from the 13th century

--

Source: 2 December 1978, Municipal Auditorium, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

Then she opened up the Bible
And she started quotin' it to me
Jeremiah, (??),
Chapters 1 & 33

--

Source: 9 December 1978, Carolina Coliseum, Columbia, South Carolina, USA.

Then she opened up the Bible
And she started quotin' it to me
Jeremiah, chapters 32,
Verses (21 & 33)

--

Source: 10 December 1978, Charlotte Coliseum, Charlotte, North Carolina,
USA.

"You know, you look like you could be the silent type"
And she opened up the Bible
And she started quoting it to me
Jeremiah, chapter 17,
From verses 21 and 33

--

Source: 12 December 1978, The Omni, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Then she opened up the Bible
And she started quotin' it to me
Jeramiah, chapters 37 (& 38,)
Verses 29 & 33

--

Source: 13 December 1978, The Coliseum, Jacksonville, Florida, USA.

She lit a burner on the stove
She was wearing a housecoat made out of stars and stripes
"Thought you'd forgot how to-know how to say," she said
"You look like the silent type."
Then she opened up the Bible
And she started quotin' it to me
Jeramiah, chapters 10 & 20,
Verses 21 & 33

--

Source: 15 December 1978, Civic Center, Lakeland, Florida, USA.

She was dressed in a dress had stars and stripes
"Thought you'd never say hello," she said
"You know, you look like you could be the silent type."
Then she opened up the Bible
And she started quotin' it to me
Jeremiah, chapters 36,
Verses 21 & 33

--

Source: 16 December 1978, Hollywood Sportatorium, Hollywood, Florida
[=Miami?], USA.
This was the last performance before the "Gospel era".

She was wearing a housecoat made of stars and stripes
"Thought you'd never say hello," she said
"You know, you look like you could be the silent type."
Then she opened up the Bible
And she started quotin' it to me
Jeremiah, chapter 31,
Verses 9 to 33

--

All the following performances omit this verse altogether!

Source: 4 June 1984, Sportpaleis Ahoy, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
This was the first post-Gospel performance.
Source: 9 June 1984, Ullevi Stadion, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Source: 11 June 1984, Stadion Bierberer Berg, Offenbach, West Germany (as
it then was).
Source: 13 June 1984, Waldbuhne, West-Berlin, West Germany (as it then
was).
Source: 19 June 1984, Roma Palaeur, Rome, Italy.
Source: "Real Live", 29 November 1984 (performed 7 July 1984, Wembley
Stadium, London, England).
Source: 8 July 1984, Slane Castle, Slane, Ireland.

Bob weighed in during a 1978 interview:
Dylan:       I like that song. Yeah that poet from the 13th century....
Interviewer: Who was that ?
Dylan:       Plutarch. Is that his name ?
Interviewer: Yeah.

The Year in: Vampires

2009-01-14T21:21:00.000-08:00

Part III

About the time I started listening to the Vampire Weekend album I noticed a red and white mug in my office kitchen. It featured a picture of Vlad Tepes, the fifteenth century Romanian prince who sometimes called himself "Dracula." Next to the picture were the words "Dra-Cula" in a red-and-white design meant to imitate the Coca-Cola logo. On the bottom of the mug was a circular stamp with the words "Marca Inregistrata in Transylvania" encircling a bat. While this mug didn't make any specific reference to vampires, it perfectly illustrated the frequent conflation of Vlad Tepes with the fictional character of Dracula which I had run into again and again in the research for my article on vampires and tourism. Vlad Tepes (whose name means "Vlad the Impaler" but who had nothing to do with vampires) was born in the Transylvania region of Romania. Bram Stoker used his nickname - "Dracula" - for the name of the Transylvanian vampire count in his Victorian novel. Ever since then, westerners have mixed up the historical Vlad Tepes with the fictional Count Dracula. And over the past few decades Romanians have figured it out and started to capitalize on it. Selling red and white Vlad Tepes mugs is just one example.

Aphorism (on Biking)

2009-01-06T19:38:00.000-08:00

The road is always roughest at intersections.

The Year in: Japanese Food Packaging

2009-01-02T12:20:00.001-08:00

On the outside: a golden butterfly. On the inside: foul-tasting brown beans coated in a sticky goo. Some cooking may be necessary. Awaiting translation.

The Year in: Retro Pornography

2009-01-02T12:12:00.000-08:00

On a friend's bedside table, Bushwick.

The Year in: Gay Literature of the Street

2009-01-02T12:10:00.000-08:00

This truck is parked on the same block in Chelsea every day.

The Year in: Vampires

2009-01-02T11:01:00.001-08:00

Part II

The appearance of Vampire Weekend was strange, even disturbing, but simultaneously exciting, because I had just started working on an article about Dracula, tourism, and a trip to a small town in Transylvania. Over the following months, vampires seemed to lurk in every corner. First came the bus-stop ads for a sports drink called "Tru Blood," which turned out to be a subversive marketing campaign for the HBO series "True Blood," about attractive young vampires and telepathics in a fictional Louisiana town.
Then a friend happened to attend a lecture on "Historical Amnesia in Contemporary Russia," in which professor Dina Khapaeva discussed the fantasy novel Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozo), which centers on a war between armies of "light" and "dark" vampires. The book came out in 1998 and was hugely popular. A movie adaptation of Night Watch was made in 2004 and went on to become Russia's highest-grossing film ever. It looks and feels like The Matrix, but with pale, grim-mouthed Russian vampires instead of pale, grim-mouthed American "Agents."

Then these somewhat alarming ads for Remy Martin champagne started popping up amidst the shadows of the subway. It was hard to tell what the intended message was, but there was one I could not rule out: in adequate quantities, champagne induces vampirism.

[to be continued]

The Year in: Bathrooms

2008-12-31T17:11:00.000-08:00

Bathrooms that I know and love, from the East Village and Williamsburg. See if you can match the bathroom to the coffee shop/bar/venue!

The Year in: Vampires

2008-12-31T16:07:00.000-08:00

Part I

It all started in January (years are like that). It was a cold morning and the office was nearly dead. The only other people there when I arrived were a couple marketing types who seem to relish getting in when everyone else is still asleep. Music was coming from one of their desks; something fresh and young-sounding, with a hint of the exotic. "What is it?" I asked.

"The new Vampire Weekend," he said. I had never heard of the band, but chalked that up to the fact that I am not a marketing type.

He lent me the cd. The album hadn't been released yet, so it was just a promo copy - no pictures, no lyrics sheet, no liner notes. Nothing to give me an idea of the band's aesthetic. There was a brief piece of publicity from Rolling Stone on the back cover: “Guaranteed to make you at least forty percent happier than when you put it on”—an ominous promise of renewed life, of resurrection.

I have to admit that without any knowledge of the band, I was briefly seduced by the music. There was something rejuvenating about it - I attributed it to the lively West African guitar riffs and Caribbean rhythms the (very American-sounding) band members drew on. It all seemed innocent enough at first.

[to be continued]

New School Occupied by Students

2008-12-19T06:55:00.000-08:00

Last night, students from the New School and other city colleges occupied the University's library at 5th Avenue and 14th Street in order to protest the policies of president Bob Kerrey, a former senator and governor of Nebraska and Navy SEAL during the Vietnam War. On December 10, Kerrey received a vote of no confidence from the New School faculty because of mismanagement, evidenced by his handling of a recent university budget crisis, and by the fact that he has gone through five provosts during his eight-year tenure.

After a day-long sit-in, police cut off access to the library. While a group of protesting students remained inside, a crowd gathered outside in solidarity. Some received periodic updates from the group inside via textmessage, which they transmitted to the crowd.

At about 11:45 pm, Bob Kerrey exited the library, escorted by police. Students shouted for Kerrey to resign as he made his way to his townhouse on 11th Street, which was also guarded by police.

This morning, the library had re-opened in time for students to continue working on final papers. A maintenance worker began repairing a window on the side of the building that had been broken last night during the occupation.

Jousting Monkey; Post-Box Cinderella

2008-12-16T10:33:00.000-08:00

Tah-Poozie, Greenwich Avenue.

West Village.

Keep on Moving it On

2008-12-03T19:05:00.000-08:00

Last night, after looking over the accumulated notes and drafts for an essay I spent far too long writing, I could not escape the feeling that I had written the same thing over and over again, circling back over the same thoughts page after page and month after month.

I recently started a new job. My employer, a book dealer, is paying me to construct a narrative out of his family's papers - the snapshots, videos, certificates, cards a letters a family piles up during its first hundred years in the United States. At lunch on my first day of work, I was talking to one of the girls who helps run the book dealership when something she said off-hand made me realize that her father is a poet and professor who had interviewed me for a job just the week before. (Incidentally, the job with the poet would have involved sorting through some things - mostly manuscripts and books of poetry and accumulated correspondence - that still lay in boxes after his recent move.)

Taking a bus out of Manhattan about a month ago, having left the familiar circuits of downtown, we passed through a remote northern section of Harlem. It is a neighborhood I almost never visit. One building after another looked strange, out of place, inexplicable, and yet captivating. How had I never seen these places? I suddenly had a vision of a rat in a maze, the floors of which are made of sand, so that with each navigation of the maze (it is a small maze), the rat unwittingly digs deeper into the floor, while the walls, which were at first low enough that the rat could see over them if he had looked, quickly become so high that the rat forgets there is a way out of his downward spiral.

Just now, I was looking back through an essay by Emerson to find some quote I half-remembered. I hoped it would recapitulate a point I wanted to make about faith and science. I was unsuccessful. Instead I found this:

A character is like an acrostic or an Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, thought I mean it not and see it not.

These were the circles my thoughts had been running in when I heard about Odetta's death. My memory jumped to the evening of October 19, when I saw Odetta perform at Hudson Studios on West 26th Street. Before she took the stage, I had in mind pictures of the folk singer from the 1960s, so I was momentarily stunned by the shrunken, stooped women who sat in front of me, wrapped in shawls and furs, with something of a fortune teller's aspect. But there was no woodenness there - there was no looking back, for her. The first notes out of her mouth obliterated that other Odetta, the one in the black-and-white photographs I remembered. Her voice lifted up and carried high over her head the weights of a lifetime. It was only when she arrived at the chorus of that first song - "If you can't walk, crawl!" - that I realized she was seated in a wheelchair.

Some people in the audience seemed able to view her only through the prism of those former Odettas. "Isn't she amazing," I heard people say, "just imagine her in 196-..." As if now she were only the shadow of some more real presence that had already passed from view, instead of an accumulation and realization of all those former presences - the highest point on a rising spiral.

This was one of her last performances. She had hoped to sing at Barack Obama's inauguration. But I think something of Odetta's spirit - still lifting up, still looking beyond - will be there when we begin that new cycle.

A Friendly Face on the Street

2008-11-26T13:14:00.000-08:00

Somewhere on 5th Avenue.

Buried Fruit

2008-11-24T18:47:00.000-08:00

While doing some research on the history of travel, I opened a book in the New York Public Library only to find its pages fall open naturally, revealing a scrap of paper on which had been written a red X. Of what kind of pirate, I wondered, might this be the work? What sentence did this sign announce, and who would execute it? And was it intended for me or had I intercepted it by accident? For of course this ominous mark reminded me of the scrap of paper that sets in motion the plot of Treasure Island, although I had not thought of that book since I first read it in fifth grade.

But then I remembered that it is not a red X that the blind pirate Pew hands to Billy Bones, but a black dot. I could not recall any more of the novel's plot. The only thing that came back to me of that first reading was my initial impression of the book's complexity, of how the many story lines fit together to create a dense but perfectly balanced space. This impression of compact complexity led me, in response to some class assignment, to compare the structure of the novel to a pomegranate; a dense web run through with red seams - a red the color of rubies and of blood - that still carried a scent of tropical climates. Each character was a seed, seeds bundled together in sections to create individual story lines, and together the segments constituted the complete fruit - the complete text, as it were.

I'm skeptical, now, about how apt the pomegranate metaphor is, but I realize that its impression indelibly linked Treasure Island in my mind with an image of crisscrossed red lines.

Not daring to remove the slip of paper, I replaced the book on the shelf. I'll never know who received the sentence next. For myself, I know each of us is a marked man, and I'll be ready for my fateful meeting whenever it comes.

Smoking Negatively; Paper Tunnel; Door to Nowhere

2008-11-18T16:12:00.000-08:00

More from the New York County Clerk Office.

A PDF in a Glass Case

2008-11-13T17:55:00.000-08:00

Inspired by a live taping of the radio show 'Selected Shorts' which I attended last night, I started re-reading Ed Park's novel Personal Days, which came out in May. In addition to being unsettlingly funny, it perfectly captures the details of a mundane office job. Consequently, as I realized yesterday with a bit of horror for Ed, the book's technological details will probably be hopelessly obsolete in a few decades. The constant references to emails, software error messages, Power Point, pdfs - it won't be long before even the mention of one of these innovations evokes a chortle. Nothing dates an era as surely as its technology. Imagine reading a book, today, where a large portion of the action hinges on the idiosyncrasies of eight-track recorders or one of those first personal computers that no one knows how to use anymore.

The 'Selected Shorts' episode (which will air this Saturday and Sunday) was hosted by Ed and his fellow Believer editor Heidi Julavits. For some reason, they mentioned that they had originally intended to call their magazine The Balloonist. As with so many things, this inevitably put me in mind of Monty Python, and a skit on the golden age of ballooning in particular. As the skit points out, the hot-air balloon was once the height of technological innovation. But technological leaps forward are not always accompanied by scientific understanding. The Montgolfier brothers, who built the first manned hot air balloon 1783, were initially inspired by smoke in their father's paper factory lifting small scraps into the air. Throughout their balloon-building career, the brothers remained convinced that it was the smoke that lifted things, as opposed to the hot air. As a result, early balloon rides could be hard on the lungs.

I spent a large part of today in front of a microfilm reader in the New York County Clerk office on Chambers Street, looking at hand-written immigration records from the turn of the century. How many people today ever use microfilm? Most technologies pass into obsolescence, but others are completely forgotten. After people stop using email, it may not take many more decades before people forget what email was - before they forget that it was ever an innovation in the real world. That is my secret hope for Personal Days - that someday in the future one of its readers will come across a passage about QWERTY keyboards or cd drives and see it not as a laughably retro reference, but as the techno-babble of some forgotten era. On that day the novel will pass from very good period fiction to very good science fiction.

When Times are Good, People Eat Pizza

2008-11-12T09:44:00.000-08:00

If you want to know what Williamsburg looked like on Election Night, here are some pictures of the largely aimless crowd that gathered at the corner of North 7th Street and Bedford Avenue (or, the Nexus of the Universe).

It was about 2 am, and I was on my way home when I ran into a German friend outside of Anna Maria Pizza. What's going on here?, I asked him. It's you Americans, he said, you don't know how to deal with change.

This was just before a guy with an English bull terrier draped across his shoulders starting chanting "Suck my cock!" to the police, for reasons that remained unclear.

For a bigger picture of election night in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, read my story for the Greenpoint Gazette. Then read my other story for the Greenpoint Gazette.

A Visit to the Old Office (letter)

2008-10-22T08:09:00.001-07:00

Dear J----,

Stopped by the office the other day to find it quite literally on fire (I’ve been saying for months that that plastic cigarette tray out front should be replaced), and you “gone for quite some time” as the—in this case—appropriately named Fidelity put it. Strangely, she was the only one at the front desk, and there was a pile of checks sitting next to your computer.

Luckily, Bishop from the studio next door had a hose handy and was able to put out the flames before they got anywhere near the magazines. What he was doing with a hose, I can’t say—it looked like they were working on a pretty typical photo shoot, with six-foot-tall models in stilettos and white silk blouses, the kind you see hanging around there all the time. You should really know how to handle a hose, J----, for moments like this. Hose handling is an essential skill for any young office manager. I can hear you saying that I should have given you some training in that area before I passed the position over to you, but one can only foresee so many things, and I wash my hands of the whole affair at this point.

Anyway, I didn’t write to lecture you about checks lying around, just to say that I found the new issue of The Sophist you said had come in for me, so thanks. Just one thing still on the way for me (I cancelled the shipment of Montecristos, don’t worry)—a book, Imaginary Portraits. Just call me when it comes in. I’ll probably be around the corner drinking tea at The Labyrinth, working on the Henry Irving article.

Best,
AD

McCain's Six-pack

2008-10-16T19:00:00.000-07:00

"Joe the Plumber," the imaginary American John McCain invoked repeatedly in last night's debate, is a poorly disguised euphemism for another, more familiar euphemism. The fact that John McCain's stand-in for every American is a beer-guzzling schmo from Nowheresville, who doesn't understand sentences with more than one dependent clause, is disturbing and insulting enough. Watching him in last night's debate made me feel that he was trying to apologize for - at the same time that he was trying to erase - the fact that he is a rich guy who will stay rich, and I am (each of us is, really) a poor guy forever holding a greasy wrench; to say that actually he admired you and I precisely because we do all the ugly things that he never has to do; to demonstrate that somehow this class drama he was inserting us into didn't at all invalidate his patronizing pander.

But...a plumber?

In John McCain's America, you and I are just people who fix the thing he shits in.

The Unintended Gift

2008-10-02T17:16:00.000-07:00

The episode of Bruckner's coin, related in the previous post, reminded me of a similar story I heard about the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte:
For his coronation as emperor of France, Napoleon ordered a crown to be made of pure gold, in the shape of one of those laurel wreaths given to athletic champions in ancient times. The artist Jean-Baptiste Isabey, who designed the garments for the ceremony, presented the crown to the emperor at his coronation, but as he did, a single gold leaf broke off the wreath. Napoleon gave the leaf to Isabey, who preserved it in the cover of a snuff box for the rest of his life.

Life Under Glass

2008-09-22T16:21:00.000-07:00

In high school I attended a Boston Symphony Orchestra rehearsal of a symphony by Anton Bruckner. The writer of the orchestra's program notes usually gave a brief introduction to these rehearsals. "Bruckner takes his time with themes," the lecturer advised before this rehearsal, "but once you accept the leisurely pace, it's easy to enjoy the motifs as they unfold."

I've been reminded of this lecture and Bruckner's seemingly endless, meandering exposition while re-reading W.G. Sebald's novel, The Rings of Saturn. Where Bruckner's meanderings are harmonic, Sebald's lead from one seemingly unrelated subject to another: Thomas Browne; the herring fishermen of Lowestoft on England's southeast shore; the Chinese dowager empress Tz'u-hsi; the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne; slave laborers in the Congo - all pass before the reader in a distant, slowly metamorphosing pageant. One is almost surprised Bruckner does not make his appearance at some point in the procession.

Sebald calls up again and again an image of life frozen in observation throughout The Rings of Saturn, like one of the recurring themes in Bruckner's symphony. Tz'u-hsi stands ensconced behind the windows of her palace, Sebald recounts, and sees the workers in the distant fields and gardens as though they were flies trapped in a jamjar. A visitor at Swinburne's dinner table can not escape the feeling that the aging poet greatly resembles some strange bug, patiently munching its food beneath a glass case. The narrator gazes from the window of an airplane over Europe at the infinite creations of man below him and is met with a great, lifeless stillness, as if recognizing an ever-expanding bee colony only by the honeycombs they had built.

These scenes put me in mind of a painting I always found disturbing when encountered in grade-school books: Joseph Wright of Derby's Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, painted in 1768. The canvas was meant to depict the revelation of Enlightenment science. But seen today, the bird fluttering beneath the glass might stand for the passing away of that very society of which it is the victim: a society entranced by an experimental science still in its half-theatrical infancy.

Of course, Sebald presents the motif of life caught behind glass in the very first (long) paragraph of the book, when the convalescing narrator peers at dusk from his hospital window and recognizes nothing alive or familiar in the maze of the city below him. But as with Bruckner, the theme must be encountered several times before its importance is appreciated.

Bruckner, reputedly a simple man who enjoyed few things better than a glass of beer, once expressed his thankfulness to the conductor Hans Richter during a rehearsal of the Fourth Symphony by earnestly pressing a coin into his hand, onstage, immediately after the the baton was dropped. "Drink a glass to my health," the composer entreated. Richter wore the coin on his watch chain for the rest of his life.
The coin was a Maria Theresa thaler, named after the Austrian empress who died in 1780. Amazingly, the thaler has been in continuous circulation since its first minting in 1741. At various times it was used as currency as far afield as the United States, Ethiopia, and India, and is still used in the Middle East, recalling in its strange endurance the coins found in ancient burial sites as described by Thomas Browne in his Urn Burial, and which, as Sebald relates, preserved in Browne's view something of the undying soul of the humans who made them.

From the Correspondence of the Author

2008-08-12T20:25:00.000-07:00

"Dear [editor/girlfriend/trusted high-school buddy],

or maybe

Hey [editor/gf/trusted hs bf]!

The [story/article/novel] is going well, thanks for asking. Did you get a chance to read that excerpt I sent you? I think it gives a good idea of what I want to do with the whole thing.

My only concern is the tone, or maybe the word choice. Or diction. Basically I'm unsure of the VOICE here. Why the short, choppy sentences? Why the repetition??

This is how everybody writes now. Why do I have to write that way? It's so AMERICAN. It's so H.S. Thompson. Isn't there something else?

What happened to long sentences, unpacked metaphors, density, elegance, linearity?What happened to invisible European form? What happened to NOT writing yourself into everything you write? Why do we always have to be destroying the [short story/essay/novel] form? It keeps coming back, doesn't it?

Anyway I am not a paranoid schizophrenic, so I don't think I should have to write like one. Why is everyone (editor, girlfriend, trusted HS BF) trying to make me write like a paranoid schizophrenic?

If you do not receive an immediate response to this email, it is because I am off sharpening a quill pen somewhere.

Best,

A.J.D.

or maybe

later,

Propellers of Inspiration

2008-08-04T22:24:00.000-07:00

My fan is very old. It may be from the 1960s or 50s, or earlier. Where modern fans employ elaborate grates to keep even a pen from reaching through to the moving blades, my fan has only four squiggly metal abstractions of protectors. The squiggles seem intended to suggest the motion (which one can't quite see while the fan is on--which is whenever I'm home, in the summer) of the blades behind them. Having been bred on modern fans, it now appears inevitable that at some point I would misinterpret the interpretive protectors and injure myself on this machine designed to ease my discomfort. And this is precisely what I did, about five minutes ago, while trying to move the fan. (For anyone who thinks this post departs from the usual subjects of the blog, I would argue that, to the extent this blog has a subject, it is always, secretly, about me moving things around my apartment.) I sliced the tip of the middle finder on my left hand, which makes this post more difficult than any other post I've written. Needless to say, I did not turn the fan off before trying to move it.
A few days ago, I read in Bookforum that Nicholson Baker is coming out with a new book about the lead-up to World War II, how the war could have been avoided, and, in Baker's view, why it should have been. The book is called Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. Put another way, Baker's book is about how our misreading (in his view) of certain signs lead to (in his view) an avoidable, mechanized shedding of human blood.
I had to read another book by Nicholson Baker for a writing class in my final year of college. To the extent that this blog has an initial inspiration, it is that class. The book was The Mezzanine, whose central theme (as much as it has one) is "the constancy of shine on the edges of moving objects," especially "propellers or desk fans." The narrator announces his obsession on the novel's very first page (in a footnote): "I love [how fans] will glint steadily in certain places in the grayness of their rotation; the curve of each fan blade picks up the light for an instant on the circuit and then hands it off to its successor."
I seem to stand at a strange intersection between these two books of Baker's. Hopefully my finger will not find itself at a similar intersection between the blades of my fan anytime soon.

Living With Boxes (Three Metaphors)

2008-07-09T20:28:00.000-07:00

I. (It's Not The) End of the World

[Invitation for a party that never happened]

"A long time ago, when we were young and naive and the winking lights of Bushwick Avenue filled our sight long after the bodegas were closed, this is how we viewed our (then-new) neighborhood. The walls of our building were unfinished and the nearest movie store didn't even carry Herzog's Nosferatu. Looking back, I wonder at how we survived those first harrowing weeks. But survive we did. One could even say (thought the evidence is dubious) that, for a time, we thrived. Alas, we thrive no longer. So we move on, inevitably dispersing the empire eastward. And in our process of ceasing to thrive we learned that, in fact, this not The End of the World."

II. Packing

I found a place a few stops further on the subway, on the border between Bushwick, in Brooklyn, and Ridgewood, in Queens. I packed my books in liquor boxes. That looks like a very sharp metaphor, so I will leave it alone for the moment, to avoid injuring myself.
During a recent trip out of town I met a dog with the singular name of Arrow. Her singularity increased in my view when I found she was named after the dog Arrow in the movie The Point. The movie tells a bedtime story about a town where everyone is born with a point--literally--on their head. When a boy without a point is born in the town, he is banished (along with the faithful Arrow) to the wastes of the Pointless Forest, and told not to return until he has one.

Anyone who has seen The Point knows its story balances on the idea that one man's Pointless Forest is another man's Ridgewood, Queens. I thought about that, and packed my books into liquor boxes.

III. Arrival

For the past year, a page ripped from a German magazine hung above my desk. It says "Andreus Leikaufs Bilder handeln nich vom Boxen und vom Jazz auch nicht." I don't know what this means. Above the text is an image of a green and black painting of a desk. Inscribed in the middle of the desk are the words "NOW WORK!" When I took the page down from the wall I found a cockroach had made its home on the wall behind it.

A burnished recognition

2008-06-04T21:02:00.000-07:00

I was polishing my shoes tonight (they had gotten stained and scuffed after a rainy weekend in Montreal) when I noticed I had uncovered the figure of a smiling face in the bottom of the polish tin. I decided it must be a sign.

I went to Montreal to visit a friend from high school. In middle school, before we were friends, the two of us were teammates in Odyssey of the Mind. By the first round of local competitions my teammates and I had convinced ourselves we would go to the final round, taking various signs and omens as evidence. For instance, in The Simpsons' episode that aired the night before we competed, the cartoon family travelled to Australia; the final round of competitions was to take place in Australia. Our team never made it past the first round of competition, despite the potency of the signs.
When I finished polishing my shoes I put the lid with the picture of the kiwi bird back on the tin. By that time I had rubbed away the shining, smiling face; I am still confident it was a sign.

King Shag in Venice

2008-06-04T20:58:00.000-07:00

Salman Rushdie: "There was a lot of sex in the 17th century."
Stephen Colbert: "Well otherwise there wouldn't have been an 18th century."

-On the Colbert Report last night

Old Cars

2008-05-27T22:35:00.000-07:00

There are two old cars parked on the block where my office is located. They are there everyday, but I don't know who drives them. One is a Volvo, the other is a BMW. These are the only cars on the block I ever notice--the only ones I like. New Volvos are some of the ugliest cars around, but I would rather drive this old one than almost any new car. Why are new cars so ugly? Ads like that one that tries to entice the customer by putting the new Jaguar alongside a vintage Jaguar just make me think "Yeah, where can I get one of those old Jaguars?"

Old cars were made with an idea of what they would look like on a street--an accompaniment to architecture around them. New cars seem made to keep the street out.

One more thing about Stevie Nicks

2008-05-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

How perfect is this quotation?:

I think they all went too far. Their jeans got too low, their tops got too see-through. Personally, I think that sexy is keeping yourself mysterious. I'm really an old-fashioned girl, and I think I'm totally sexy.

1. In typical bohemian fashion, she is nostalgic about her youth.
2. In typical bourgeois attitude, she derides the immorality of the younger generation (marking her passage into a full-fledged symbol of the present middle-aged middle class).
3. In typical bourgeois-bohemian fashion, she disparages the very ideal (sexual openness) she once purported to stand for.

48/68/08

2008-05-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

Around 1948, a young man from New Orleans named Anatole Broyard began to gain prominence in the bohemian environment of Greenwich Village, then went on to become a revered critic for the New York Times. Now he is considered one of the "lights" (or perhaps "darks"), of post-war American letters. Aware that an African-American writer, no matter his talent, would always be "a black writer," and never simply "a writer," Broyard hid the fact that he was black for his entire adult life. His relatively light skin allowed him to pass, and he eagerly settled into the kind of white bourgeois milieu that blacks were denied. I think his stint in the Village was essential to constructing the narrative of whiteness that eventually delivered him into the upper echelons of American intellectuals.

In mid-19th century France artists and writers began moving into the gypsy neighborhoods of major cities as a way to avoid high rent and high-nosed morality. These transplants earned the name "bohemian" out of a mistaken idea that all gypsies came from the Czech region of Bohemia. Bohemians idealized what they perceived as the gypsy's pre-modern enlightenment, as well as their ability to live outside of modern culture's strictures. Of course, the bourgeois artists drove the group they feigned to admire out of their former neighborhoods.

This kind of emulation, which at the same time parodies what it seeks to emulate, parallels the relationship between artistic whites and the black community in America. The gypsies, after all, were not just different because of their social practices, but because of the color of their skin; their relation to the rest of modern Europe was the result of that racialized difference. It's no mistake that Jimi Hendrix, probably the most influential black performer of the 1960s (that most "bohemian" of decades), called himself a "gypsy".

For the past year, I've lived on a certain street in Brooklyn that lays claim to being an incubator of contemporary bohemianism. But the attention of a wikipedia article, coverage in Gawker and
yesterday's New York Times, and rivaling MySpace pages lead me to believe that its heyday had passed before I arrived. Nevertheless, my stay here has reinforced some of my ideas about the hipster aesthetic--that contemporary, commercialized bastard of bygone bohemianism(s). To better understand the hipster attitude, I've developed a matrix of four essential attributes on which any hipster can be placed. The matrix has four axes, each corresponding to one of the essential attributes, which are: 1. hippy 2. hip-hop 3. punk/hard rock 4. preppy. Notice that three of these categories associated themselves with (and fetishized) a specific group of racialized others: Hippies had their blues musicians, Black Panthers, and--via their predecessors, the Beats--black jazz musicians. Hip-hop need not be explained. Punks drew original inspiration from the West Indian subculture of urban England. The fourth attribute, preppy, represents the bourgeois aspect that cannot be eradicated from the bohemian and may itself become fetishized, perhaps as a compensatory effort.

A coworker of mine recently suggested that the song "Go Your Own Way" by Fleetwood Mac (whose first album came out in 1968) might be a satanic anthem. I'm not sure if I agree, but it made consider their song "Gypsy"--the lyrics of which link the return to a child-like state of creativity with the gypsy--as a concise (if vague) expression of postwar American bohemianism. Not surprisingly, I'd say Fleetwood Mac would rank high in the "Nostalgia" category on a list of favored hipster bands (nostalgia being a key operating sentiment in the bohemian world-view).

As much as it disappoints me (and somewhat deflates the impact of this post), I can't find anything to biographically link Anatole Broyard and Stevie Nicks. While Nicks eagerly embraced a "gypsy" mystique, Broyard's relationship to bohemianism was more complicated. He did a sort of double-reversal, adopting the attitude of white, bourgeois "bohemians" in post-war Greenwich Village as the first layer of erudite WASPy-ness that masked his racialized background. It makes this quotation from him at once more apt, and more ironic:

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

Aphorism (regarding writing)

2008-01-23T19:15:00.000-08:00

The most ignorant copier copies best.

For similar (and grander) statements to the same effect, please see my article, "The Brain and the Tomb," in the January issue of The Believer, about a medieval palimpsest that contains the oldest existing writing of Archimedes.

Floating Worlds

2008-01-07T21:38:00.000-08:00

This weekend I visited the bonsai garden in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Most bonsai are arranged off-center--planted to one side or the other of their pot's axis, or with a trunk slanting away from it. A note on one of the walls of the exhibit offered an explanation from the garden's chief Bonsaiman: "The center is for the Deity."

I thought of catamarans, of bicycles, of the innovation of parliamentary government, of donuts and bagels, of LPs, of equal signs, of a passage from Nabokov I had just read:
the very attraction...lies...in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised.

Bonsai is one of those idioms that appears timeless and pure, but is in fact modern and hybrid. The cultivation of miniature plants was a well-established and highly regarded art by the 14th century. A scroll from the Kamakura period (1185-1333) argues that "to appreciate and find pleasure in curiously curved potted trees is to love deformity". But these trees were always taken from the wild, and their natural miniaturization merely maintained. It was not until the 20th century, when the previously unknown art became popular in western countries, and the globalization of Japanese culture created a huge demand for the trees, that Japanese craftsmen learned to start with young trees and keep them small artificially with root-pruning and wires.

For two centuries before Commodore Matthew Perry's canons arrived at Kanagawa in 1854, Japan's now-familiar crescent of islands, balanced around the empty sea east of Russia, was itself a blank spot on the West's cultural maps. The only Europeans allowed in the country were Dutch traders, restricted to a post on the island of Dejima. (Interestingly, the bonsai house at the Botanical Gardens is named after Cornelius Vander Starr, the son of a Dutch railroad engineer from California, who founded American International Group--now the largest insurance company in the world. Starr began his career as a mail clerk in Yokohama during the lull between the World Wars.)

Within a decade after Japan was opened to international trade, its aesthetics began tipping the balance of arts far beyond bonsai. European painters, from Monet to Bonnard, became fascinated with Japanese woodcuts. As Paris became a hub of exported Japanese culture, the subjects of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings drifted toward the corners of their canvasses.

How much of this history was Ernest Hemingway conscious of when, living in Paris in the 1920s, he began writing according to a "new theory"? He mentions his germinating technique briefly in A Moveable Feast, in the chapter "Hunger Was Good Discipline":
Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story after losing everything…It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted it and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Dots

2007-12-02T13:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I picked up a copy of the business section from the November 19th New York Times that had been left in the bathroom. I was surprised to find the section dominated by media-related stories. Maybe this would not be so surprising to someone who reads the business section regularly. Of the four stories on the front page, one dealt with the coinciding strikes by Broadway stagehands and Hollywood screenwriters; one with the launch of an internet television network; one with a maverick film producer; and the last with the recent, media-magnetic OPEC conference.

I realize that blogs often serve as little more than personalized news digests, so I'll resist, for a moment, reviewing what I read there. The tiles in our bathroom are made to resemble marble, but close inspection reveals that their marble pattern consists of a grid of tiny dots, like a Lichtenstein painting. I don't think I've seen marble-print tiles anywhere else. Turning a few pages into the business section, I found stories of not just of media, but of media doubling media, directing media, and misquoting media:

One article explained that women's book clubs, long an insulated form of media ignored by the larger world of publishing, are now being recognized as powerful trend-setters in the book industry. One woman, who heads ten book groups and lives in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, now acts as a sort of informal marketing liaison between several publishing company and the powerful inner circles of suburban women's book discussion groups.
An entry from the increasingly ubiquitous Wikipedia, another Times article explained, was reproduced, word for word, in a recent book on oil in the Middle East by strangely named author George Orwel. The entry dealt with the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Copyright infringement was not an issue with the open-source wiki page, and the author of the entry was not concerned by the borrowing.

The already ubiquitous Paris Hilton was recently credited, by the Associated Press, with raising awareness for the suffering of drunken, rancorous elephants in northeastern India. It turns out that attribution was fallacious, though the plight of the elephants is not: the animals really do go on drunken rampages after getting into farmers' rice beer, but the story about Hilton was constructed around a manufactured quotation in a British tabloid called The Daily Star. It made it to an entertainment news website, then was picked up by an Indian AP correspondent. Earlier this year, the A.P. broke a moratorium on Hilton coverage when she was jailed for drunk driving.

Our marble-print tiles, intended to be slightly classy, instead make the bathroom look cheap. I imagined our faux-marble was supposed to mimic some specific marble variety, with a specific pattern, from a specific location: Chinese cream jade? Mexican Rosa Aurora? Solker Kristallmor, from Austria? Comparisons with online marble indexes instead led me to conclude that our tiles originated in the imagination of a faux-marble designer somewhere, or maybe a committee of designers, charged with creating a pattern that satisfied some Platonic ideal of veined pink marble, without actually resembling any existing specimen.
One (genuine) quotation from the Times story on the unconventional film producer might be clarifying here : A venerable MC once advised the filmmaker, who was planning a biopic about a then up-and-coming rapper, not to "clown out our world." The producer has profitably followed that advice ever since.

A Mantling of the Blood

2007-10-30T21:03:00.000-07:00

Recently, while on a farm in New Jersey, I opened a door to what I thought was the bathroom of the office-building. Expecting a toilet, my eyes were instead assaulted by a pair of dead deer hanging from hooks above two small pools of blood. My brain seemed to recognize a corpse first, and a deer second. In the first flash of unconscious thought after I opened the door, I felt what we are supposed to think that doomed character in a horror flick feels when he first stumbles upon the serial killer’s bloody work. The conscious part of my brain almost immediately arranged the scene into something coherent—hunter’s game hung in preparation to be processed—but a vague feeling of alarm lingered. I was on the farm for a photo shoot, and the people on the shoot were using the office building for their equipment. The farm’s owners hadn’t thought to tell us what the back of the building was used for.

It’s hard to say how natural my reaction was—whether there’s something in our brain that’s triggered when we see a slain body, or whether the surprised horror I felt was conditioned by things like the formulas of hack-‘em-up movies. But even those formulas might suggest we have an innate reaction to the sight of a murder victim, if the shock of the scene truly depends on it. Last weekend I saw The Assassination of Jesse James, which is not a horror movie, but a visually poetic elegy for a hunted man, containing a fair amount of realistic violence. In it, the narrator informs us that James’ preserved body drew thousands of paying visitors, and photographs of it sold millions of copies. Whether or not this account is true, it suggests that precisely this thrill--of glimpsing in a corpse the possibility of one’s own end--drew the crowds, as much as James’ fame while alive.
I can imagine that other times and cultures might have been more comfortable around a corpse. In Inca cosmology, for instance, there is no "moment of death"--death is a gradual transformation from a fresh, pliable state, to a dried-up, immutable one. The Incas' view of a corpse must have been radically different than our modern, Western view. In his diaries of the 1660s, Samuel Pepys reports deaths and burials with dizzying frequency, suggesting those occurrences were more habitual in his time. The death of an uncle (whose body is kept at first in the house and then in the yard before the funeral); a woman who sails across the channel with her husband’s cadaver; the abrupt passing of the Duke of York’s son: none warrant more than a brisk report in Pepys’ account. Only the body of a man murdered by his brother in a scuffle near his house rouses an emotional statement in the diary. Pepys writes: “after dinner [I] went in the church, and there saw his corpse with the wound in his left breast.” He calls it “a sad spectacle, and a broad wound, which makes my hand now shake to write of it.” The slain body elicits a response that those of the naturally dead do not—yet I can’t tell if it’s the wound's appearance, or the circumstances of the death that unsteadies Pepys’ typically even, journalistic hand.

Later on the day of the shoot, I passed the same door again, to find one of the farm's owners pushing the hanging carcasses on their hooks into a storage freezer. Hunters drop off their kills, the farm processes them, and the hunters come to pick up the product, she explained. She showed me inside the freezer, where bagged trophy heads sat on a shelf, each bag with the name of the hunter it awaited. She asked if I hunted. To her busy eye, the dead deer were just another farm chore. But as the shoot dragged on in the first autumn dusk of the year, and an ancient basset hound drooped back and forth across the yard, the farm felt disconcertingly emptied (the abandoned buildings near the road, at that moment used for the shoot, had been occupied by cattle until recently), and something of my earlier disturbance lingered.
A painting I saw a few weeks ago at the Met by Jan Weenix, called The Falconer's Bag, takes the trophy as its subject. It depicts a hunter's prize, but is itself a sort of trophy piece--a masterly composition, whose effect is heightened by the fact that its true-to-death rendering of slain birds in front of a classical backdrop could not have been executed from an actual scene. The hunt and its trappings were popular subjects in 17th century Dutch art, commissioned both by the aristocracy, who could participate in the pastime, and the aspiring bourgeoisie, who couldn't. In these "game-pieces," the representation of the slain body becomes an assertion of a successful life. But Weenix's painting retains a sense of twilight, decadence, and loss--as if the birds would not be eaten, but left to rot among the statuary of a baroque garden.
While I waited for the shoot to finish, I read a book of poems by W.B. Yeats I had with me. As if on purpose, I came across the tiny, two-sentence "Death of the Hare." In it, the narrator links a lover's glance with the moment of the kill; later, beside the slain hare, he recognizes in both (as he experiences again) the blow felt at the sight of "wildness lost."

The Divine Perhaps

2007-09-20T18:34:00.000-07:00

“The sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears.” This is all we hear of the justice passed upon the nameless narrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Pit and the Pendulum.” In Poe’s universe, punishment need not accompany a crime—the accused begins guilty, and his entire literary life is occupied with the realization of his sentence. Justice is anonymous, disembodied; there is no trial, only the sentence, announced by a fever-dream of faceless judges. The narrator sees their white lips “fashion the syllables of my name,” and he shudders, “because no sound succeeded.”

Last night, I watched Jan Svankmajer’s 1983 short film “The Pendulum, the Pit, and the Hope.” With no narration or dialogue, the Czech director's film takes the short story’s disembodying of justice one step further; we catch only a glimpse of darkened, robed figures leading down dank corridors before we see ourselves, through the gaze of the victim, tied down beneath the pendulum. The entire film is viewed as if through the eyes of the victim, so that we never see his face. In Svankmajer's view, justice’s anonymity makes it omnipotent, while the accused’s anonymity makes him universal. Punishment is not quite senseless, but is certainly source-less. Precisely this absence of origin that prevents us from judging justice in the world of the pit and the pendulum—how can we judge that which comes from nowhere and has no explanation? And it is from this absence that justice derives its authority.

Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. According to Jewish tradition, justice moves entirely outside the realm of human law during the High Holy Days. The season’s most emblematic prayer intones:
On Rosh Hashanah it is written, On Yom Kippur it is sealed:
Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall see ripe age and who shall not,
Who shall be secure and who shall be driven,
Who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled…
The sentence has been passed without a trial; punishment will be meted out with no warning. Hooded monks and black-robed judges must appeal to the same authority and fear the same unknowable judgment as the common sinner. Justice is disembodied in the most profound sense, as it belongs to no human body.

The Jewish tradition I’m familiar with does not draw a clear line on "decrees of fate," as Poe puts it. Does atonement absolve us from our prescribed punishment, or is atonement merely an effort toward acceptance of that fate? One line from the liturgy offers a possible answer: “For sins against god, the Day of Atonement atones. But for sins against another, the Day of Atonement does not atone until you have appeased your fellow.”

In Poe’s world, escaping judgment is possible, not through moral conduct, but with a strange combination of personal ingenuity and well-timed politics: although his narrator escapes the pendulum on his own, he is only saved from his Spanish dungeon by an invading French army. In Svankmajer’s movie, our hero escapes the pit through a hole in the wall, only to fall into the arms of a shadowy monk, his face darkened beneath his hood. Escape here does not mean deliverance: "What! my child! on the eve, perhaps, of salvation.... you would then leave us?" This is the closing epitaph of the film. They are the final lines of "A Torture by Hope," the short story by Count Villiers de l'Isle Adam, a 19th-century French writer who much admired Poe. In it, a Rabbi, on the eve of his execution by fire at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, believes he has found a way to escape the dungeon that holds him. A step away from freedom, he is intercepted by the Grand Inquisitor, who is charitably intent on the rabbi accepting God in his final moments before death. In Villiers' story, the most profound torture is that of "the divine 'Perhaps,'"--the tortured hope of escape from judgment, which is always inescapable.

Aphorism

2007-09-16T20:13:00.000-07:00

He who reads with the least understanding copies with the most faith.

What I could hear of the boss' conversation with the phone company

2007-09-16T18:31:00.000-07:00

"They've sent someone already. I know what they're going to say. They're going to say there's nothing wrong."
...
"Do those people get things done faster than the normal people?"
...
"Ok, what's the highest crisis level you can put it on?...That is the highest level?"
...
"Well, how can I get in touch with you?...Or anybody?"
...
"Yeah. Or today's winning lotto numbers."

The Legacy of the Olive Eaters

2007-09-12T07:25:00.000-07:00

One of the most frightening articles I read this summer was a New Yorker piece on the massive fraud in Italy's olive oil industry. Apparently, I may never have tasted real olive oil in my life. Every year, hundreds of thousands of tons of oil from places like North Africa, Spain and Turkey are shipped to Italy and passed off as genuine Italian virgin olive oil. Sometimes the counterfeit oil isn't even from olives, but made from a substitute like canola. All this is done to make 'authenticity' cheaper and more profitable for the distributors. According to the article, fraud is so widespread that true genuineness isn't profitable any more--small farmers who grow actual Italian olives can't sell their produce.

Unfortunately, I was not too surprised to learn that big olive oil companies have no financial investment in the authenticity of their own product. But Leonardo Marseglia, one of the biggest distributors, doesn't even have an aesthetic investment in the genuineness of his oil. The Italian government and the EU feel they have to protect what they see as an essential part of the country's cultural heritage (although there is evidence that olive oil fraud is thousands of years old), and so have whole departments committed to investigating olive oil counterfeit. But Marseglia seems to think that 'authenticity' is itself a fraud: “When someone has two silos of oil, one Italian and the other foreign, you just have to switch them: the other one becomes Italian oil, this one becomes foreign," he told the article's author. If legitimacy can be so easily fabricated, he seems to be saying, why put any stock in it at all?

I read the article during breaks from a temporary messenger job I had at a well-known designer's office in Manhattan's fashion district, a neighborhood where immigrant-run, sweatshop-like fabric factories occupy adjoining floors of the same building as studios selling multi-thousand dollar items. It's the only industry I know where the people at the top walk across the street to do face-to-face business with the people at the bottom. Despite my surroundings, the olive oil expose put me in mind of a trip to Italy I took last spring. In both Florence and Rome I heard some extremely good gypsy street musicians (and some very bad ones). The groups always had one melody instrument--usually a violin or saxophone--and at least one accompanying instrument--usually a guitar or acoustic bass. The bassists always used only three strings, always made of brightly colored nylon strings which they would snap percussively. Performances consisted of various songs strung together into seamless medleys, with no tempo change or pause between melodies--only a chorus or two of each song would be played before moving to the next. But there were a few tunes that came up in idiosyncratic renditions again and again. The two I heard most often were the theme from The Godfather and "I Did it My Way."

These tunes aren't even Italian, let alone traditional folk music. However, they may be obvious choices for the street ensembles, who count on exploiting the picturesque notion of Italy that American tourists devour in stateside movies and television. But at the same time, the gypsy musicians' repertoire strikes me as odd. It romanticizes the notion of a self-styled, gangster-aristocrat Mafioso--the kind of person who left Italy to escape things like gypsy buskers, and who probably would be the first to spit at someone sawing away at a cheap violin next to their restaurant table.

Vans

2007-08-05T20:17:00.002-07:00

-Originally posted April 15, 2007

Today I was about to step out into the rain when I heard a song coming from someone's apartment: "...now here comes the man--and he says the show must go on..." a song I liked very much but hadn't heard for awhile. It was "Ballerina" by Van Morrison, from the album Astral Weeks, which to me always sounds like a lush, green spring. Maybe it's the album cover...

I never thought about it before, but Van Morrison is a writer who often brings a lot of divergent ideas into one song. Somehow he's able to put an unexpected collection of people and places together and connect them all to a certain setting and mood. For those of you who haven't listened to much of his music, try to forget "Moondance" and oldies stations for a moment and consider a song like "Will You Meet Me in the Country in the Summertime in England," where he talks about W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and William Blake smoking dope, Mahalia Jackson (a gospel singer), Jesus, Avalon (mythic resting place of King Arthur), and the Church of St. John (someplace in England?), and they're all there, in the country in the summertime in England. Or there's "St. Dominic's Preview," where he mentions Edith Piaf's soul, Belfast, Buffalo, San Francisco, and the Notre Dame cathedral.

Van Morrison (born George Ivan Morrison) also brings together two musical divergences with his name: Jim Morrison, the singer for The Doors, and Van Cliburn, a famous classical pianist. Most people today know Jim Morrison, but few know Van Cliburn, though at one point his was a household name. In 1958 he won the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, put on by the Soviet Union to demonstrate Soviet superiority. Apparently, the contest's judges had to ask Premier Kruschev for permission to give the prize to an American, and Time magazine called Cliburn "The Texan who conquered Russian." His full name is Harvey Lavan Cliburn.

Wine and Talmud

2007-08-05T20:17:00.001-07:00

-Originally posted Sunday, April 8, 2007

So, as was already pointed out, it's Passover. (It lasts seven days.) At the seder (Passover dinner) I went to on Monday, we had the typical Manischewitz (really sweet) wine, but also a "semi-sweet" (it wasn't really) brand of wine called "Rashi." I thought this was a little strange, considering the fact that Rashi is mostly remembered as the most respected commentator on the Torah and the Talmud. He lived from 1040 to 1105, mostly in Troyes, France. His real name was Shlomo--the name by which he is remembered is an acronym of Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rabbi Solomon son of Isaac). Rashi is one of those people who, being important enough in Jewish tradition and having lived long enough ago, has several legends attached to his name. The only one I know is about his birth: His parents wanted a child but could not have one. His father was very poor, but one day found a precious jewel. He took it to the jeweler, but it was worth too much for the jeweler to afford. The emperor (or king, or bishop, or whatever) heard about the stone and sent a messenger to Rashi's father to say he wanted to buy it to put on the head of his idol (or on his cross, or whatever). During the journey by boat to see the emperor, there was a great storm and Rashi's father pretended to lose the stone in the sea. When he returned home, a man was at his house and told him that he would be rewarded for not giving the jewel to an idol worshipper. Soon his wife had a son, and they named him Solomon.

Kind of a nice story, but it still doesn't explain why he would have a wine named after him. I looked at the "Rashi" label website, which says Rashi is remembered for his scholarship "as well as for his extraordinary winemaking ability. The pristine vineyards used in the Middle Ages by Rashi have served as models for today's Rashi wine vineyards located in the winemaking heartlands of Italy and New York State." They offer a full line of Kosher wines. Elsewhere I read his father was a winemaker.

But now that I think about it, the Rashi connection is not nearly as ridiculous as some of those that inspired the name of other wines I've had. Some examples: "The Long Paddock" Sauvignon Blanc (Australian agricultural history) or "Big Tattoo" Riesling/Pinot Blanc (tattoo artist-wine importer brother duo commemorate mother's death from cancer).

Arabic Translation

2007-08-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

-Originally posted Sunday, March 25, 2007

Today I went to the coffee shop across the street from my apartment. When I got to the register, I put down on the counter the Penguin paperback I had been carrying. The girl behind the register asked me if I was reading it in translation. It was Don Quixote. I said yes, unfortunately I don't read Spanish. She said she didn't either yet but she was getting better. The guy at her bodega was teaching her.

The Spanish word bodegon means pantry, but is also used to refer to still-life paintings (this at least I know). This is because in the Spanish tradition still-lifes often depict objects from the pantry. Like for instance a coffee cup.

In France, they call bodegas arabes, after those who frequently own them.
Cervantes interrupts his narrative in Chapter IX to write that the rest of Don Quixote's history was recorded by "an Arab historian."

A Clockwork Eclipse

2007-08-05T20:05:00.001-07:00

-Originally posted Sunday, March 4, 2007

I came home today to find some unrecognizable music coming from behind my roommate's closed door (usually his choices run in the Sufjan Stevens-Belle and Sebastian-Wilco vein). At first I thought it might be the soundtrack to one of the over-acted Greek movies he watches to practice for Greek class. But then I realized it was the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's movie A Clockwork Orange.a cd of the soundtrack in a record store in December and bought it. I gave it to my mother for Christmas because she has the album on LP, but recently my parents' record player broke, and at the moment I can only afford to buy them a cd and not a record player. My roommate owns a copy of the movie, so he had wanted to burn the cd before I gave it to my mother. I had forgotten about the gift until tonight. On a whim, I Googled 'clockwork orange soundtrack.' For anyone who hasn't seen the movie, much of the music consists of famous pieces of classical music redone with 70s-era syntesizers, in arrangements by Wendy Carlos. I found out that Carlos was famous for similar classical-synth albums like Switched on Bach in the 60s, and that she had been born Walter Carlos in 1938. All of her albums were released under this name until she had a sex change operation in 1979.
This all sounded vaguely familiar, and then I realized I had heard the whole Wendy Carlos history rehashed in an essay by Sarah Vowell. Vowell is an essayist who has written several books, but who I only know from the NPR show This American Life. In fact, I probably heard about Wendy Carlos from a Sarah Vowell reading on the radio show years ago.

Did I really forget all this and then rediscover it? Or was the Kubrick-Carlos-Vowell connection triggered as soon as I heard the synthesized Beethoven coming from behind my roommate's door, and it just took me awhile to reassemble it? I finally read the last page of Borges' Dreamtigers last night. There he suggests that most of what we call our memory is just disassembled impressions of things we have read or heard. For him this was perhaps more acutely true: he writes that few things that actually happened in his life are more worth remembering than Schopenhauer's words or the poetry of English literature.
---
Wendy Carlos may have disagreed with Borges. She is a coronaphile--someone slightly obsessed with total lunar eclipses--and has apparently spent a large amount of time and energy capturing these non-verbal phenomenon in photos. This one was taken in 1999 in Bucharest, Romania:

Boring

2007-08-05T19:59:00.000-07:00

-Originally posted Sunday, February 27, 2007

Visiting the websiteof Kenneth Goldsmith (“the most boring writer that has ever lived”) reacquainted me with an old friend I had forgotten about. Goldsmith is the founder of the website ubu.com, an online collection of experimental writing, music, and film. I first heard of the site about a year ago while I was studying abroad in Paris from someone in my program. One of my almost daily tasks while in Paris was going somewhere with free wireless internet, as I had none in my apartment and wanted to spend as little time at the NYU center as possible. On rainy days, the closest place to my apartment was the basement of the McDonalds on Rue de Passy (“the most boring neighborhood in Paris”—A.D.). It was here, probably eating french fries or drinking bad espresso from a Styrofoam cup, watching Passy teenagers on after-school dates, that I first visited Ubu. I don’t remember what else I looked at that day, but I wrote this in my notebook:

come the torch comes
feet quick come
the women of the past come
thick grass come out of
from thick bushels come outside
on the paths of gods always lie

from “The dance of the greased women”
Nauri [Africa]

and dated it March 20, 2006.

Today, I went back to the site for the first time in awhile. I started to watch a Discovery Channel-type documentary about Borges (“he was destined to become one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century...”—pretentiously-accented narrator), but quickly decided against it. Instead, I watched a video of a performance of a composition for 100 metronomes by György Ligeti (1923-2006). Titled Poème Symphonique (“une des pièces la plus rarement performé du monde”), the performance was bizarrely introduced by two identical computer animated women in green t-shirts, speaking at the same time, one in German and one in French. The composition itself features one hundred mechanical metronomes on a set of tiered shelves, which are triggered to start ticking at the same time. They continue for a few minutes until each one stops from inertia. I was reminded how, when I used to practice music when I was younger, I always preferred the old wooden mechanical metronome that sat on our piano to the plastic electronic one my teacher had me buy. He explained that the electronic one was much more accurate, but I couldn’t understand how anything could be more accurate than gravity. Ligeti’s piece can only be performed by mechanical metronomes, because electronic ones would only stop when their battery ran out. But the amazing thing about the swinging metal arm of the old-fashioned metronome is that, up until the moment its own weight brings it to a halt, it never slows down, but continues to click at exactly the same rate.

Watching Movies Alone

2007-08-05T19:45:00.000-07:00

-Originally posted Monday, February 26, 2007

The other night, inspired by My Best Fiend, I watched Woyzeck, a 1979 Werner Herzog film starring the ever-deranged Klaus Kinski. It's about a low-level soldier in a small early-nineteenth century town whose mind deteriorates, possibly from a crude medical experiment and possibly from jealousy, so that he is driven to...Well you should see the movie. I found it haunting and poetic (Kinski's Woyzeck may be mad, but he speaks in a sort of lunatic reverie that is poetry compared with the rationalist gobbledygook that surrounds him), so I was rather disappointed when G., with whom I was watching the movie, fell asleep about half-way through. It may have had something to do with the fact that she was sick, but wasn't that why I had suggested we rent a movie on a Saturday night in the first place?

I'm joking, but I always feel somewhat offended when someone falls asleep during a movie I'm really into, and I seem to have a bit of a history of it. There was this summer, when I explained to one of my best friends that 8 1/2 was possibly the greatest movie I had ever seen (I had just seen it for the first time a few weeks before) and that we had to rent it immediately, only for him to fall asleep about halfway through.

There was last spring, when my girlfriend was visiting me in Paris and she didn't want to go out and I told her that was fine because she had to see Godard's Bande a Part. She didn't even make it to the Billy the Kid spoof scene. Then there was last New Years, when I was visiting said girlfriend in North Carolina and she wanted to rent a movie for the third time in one weekend and I conceded to getting something called Russian Ark that she suggested instead of the French New Wave film I had been meaning to see. Russian Ark turned out to be an amazing and baffling movie, shot in a single, beautiful, time-warping, two-hour-long take in St. Petersburg's Winter Palace, which I was very glad to see, but which my girlfriend fell asleep about halfway through.

Maybe the earliest example is seventh grade, when I had a bunch of friends over and I suggested we watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, and one of my best middle-school friends fell asleep halfway through.

Monkeys

2007-08-03T18:28:00.000-07:00

-Originally posted Sunday, January 28, 2007

Last Sunday I went to the Brooklyn Museum to see an exhibition of Ron Mueck, who makes frighteningly lifelike sculptures of humans in very inhuman dimensions and bizarre poses. The Mueck exhibit was interesting and impressive, and clearly the major attraction at the museum--there was a long line to get in, and it was always hard to get an unobstructed view of the silicone statues. But for some reason another exhibit caught my eye, even though I had never heard of it and it didn't seem to be drawing as many people as Mueck's. It was called "Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford," and the advertisement for it at the museum entrance made me think it was a group of naturalist paintings from the 19th century, like Audubon's watercolors of America's birds. Maybe it was this impression that I would be looking at something antique that interested me; or maybe reading Borges' Dreamtigers--as I had been doing, a chapter at a time at a friend's apartment, since I discovered it on her desk--triggered my interest in the paintings. It turns out Walton Ford is actually a contemporary artist, and his watercolors were done in the past fifteen or so years. But his style consciously imitates Audubon's naturalist illustrations, and his vision is not so far from Borges'. Each painting depicts a wild animal--tiger, leopard, wolf, the extinct elephant bird of Madagascar--in a 'natural' pose, and includes the animal's scientific name. But the apparent subject of each 'naturalist' study is also unwittingly tied into a larger human history that Ford implies through fragments of texts, allusions to legends, and glimpses of crumbling empires integrated into the portrait. For instance, in one group of paintings, Ford imagines the group of monkeys that belonged to Sir Richard Burton, a nineteenth century British military officer, explorer, and 'orientalist,' who supposedly spoke 29 languages, translated the Thousand and One Nights and Kama Sutra into English, and was considered one of the greatest fencers of his time. According to his wife's writings, Burton also at one point during his time in India kept about forty or so monkeys and was quite successful at learning their language, to the extent that he was able to compile a monkey dictionary. The dictionary was unfortunately lost in a fire.

Walton Ford graduated from the Rhode Island School of design in 1982. Last night a friend of mine who goes to RISD was in the city, so we hung out at a bar near my apartment that always has a big glass jar of unshelled peanuts and I told her about "Tigers of Wrath" and we ate peanuts.

An Introduction

2007-08-03T18:24:00.000-07:00

This is a blog. The first posts originally appeared elsewhere. Posts will appear irregularly at first, regularly later, hopefully.