Author: Dan

How to apologize in public

During my month-long vacation in the U.S., one of my pleasure reads was Chuck Klosterman’s Eating The Dinosaur. This was the first Klosterman book I’ve read and I found it highly digestible and somewhat addictive, finishing it in three quick sittings over two days. After an excellent essay on Ralph Sampson, my other favorite bit was a short section that felt like an interstitial joke where he prints a series of public apologies from various high-profile celebrities for various inane misdeeds without any contextualization at all. For example, here’s Plaxico Burress, the New York Giants wide receiver who accidentally shot himself in the leg with an unlicensed gun he was carrying in a nightclub:

First of all, you people probably don’t know anyone who’s been shot. I, however, know lots of people who’ve been shot. I know lots of people who claim they want to shoot me, and some of those people are technically my friends. So that’s why I carry a gun. Second, you people probably trust the government, and you probably trust it because your personal experience with law enforcement has been positive. I’ve had the opposite experience all my life. I’m afraid of the government. I’m afraid of the world, and you can’t give me one valid reason why I shouldn’t be. So that’s why I did not apply for a gun license. Third, I shot myself in the leg, which is both painful and humiliating. What else do I need to go through in order to satiate your desire to see me chastised? The penalty for carrying an unlicensed weapon is insane. How can carrying an unlicensed firearm be worse than firing a licensed one? I broke the law, but the law I broke is a bad law. Would you be satisfied if the penalty for unlawful gun possession was getting shot in the leg? Because that already fucking happened!

This is awesomely looney and yet strangely persuasive at the same time, right? The section as a whole is kind of silly, but it also plugs into some larger, recurring themes. Like David Foster Wallace, Klosterman seems to worry a lot about the idea that it’s almost impossible nowadays to relate to other people in an honest and unselfconscious way. Fame and celebrity therefore naturally come up in his writing a lot as nothing involves more examples of people acting in a dishonest, calculating fashion towards one another. Klosterman seems to say that there’s something inherently really screwed up about any dynamic where one person is being observed by either an individual or public that doesn’t actually know the person in question. The asymmetric nature of the observation leads to all sorts of bizarre assumptions, expectations and distortions that eventually result in the convoluted spectacle of one person ‘apologizing’ to a group of people whom he or she doesn’t know from adam.

Eating The Dinosaur is a great read– given the choice, there’s only one thing I would change about the book if I could, and that would be to add the public apology of German artist Jörg Immendorff to this section, as I think it’s the greatest such ‘apology’ I’ve ever heard about.

Immendorff was one of the most successful post-War German painters, an artist who had practically become the patron artist of the city of Dusseldorf by the early 2000s (I only know about this story because I happened to be traveling in Dusseldorf in 2003 right after it happened and was told about it by friends who lived there). He even designed Dusseldorf’s Monkey Island, a kind of tiki beer garden island in the middle of the city that exemplifies the phony exoticism beloved by Germans (the music of Manu Chao being another such instance). Immendorff had also drawn some attention for marrying a model 30 years his younger who looks more or less like Kobe Bryant’s wife.

Then, in 2003, the 57 year old was caught in a hotel with a bunch of cocaine and seven prostitutes. Plus, four more prostitutes on the way. Scandalized, the citizenry of Dusseldorf demanded a public apology. Cantankerous and unrepentant, Immendorff released an awesomely defiant statement where he insisted that the matter was between him and his wife and nobody else’s business:

“My wife knows how much I love her. Sometimes I have to live out an Orientalism that has nothing to do with that.”

As my friend likes to tell it, a tidal wave of ‘Orientalism’ naturally swept over the city of Dusseldorf on the heels of this kick-ass justification. It also provided a fine running joke for the rest of my stay there: ‘Who’s up for a little Orientalism?’ someone would ask when it was time to go hit the town in the evening. I only hope I have the presence of mind to invoke it as a cover for whatever debauched misdeed I might commit down the line.

Clichés in action

In addition to the Belmont pit stop described below, we also made it up and down the east coast during our just-completed month of traveling, making stops in upstate New York, Vermont, Vieques (small island off of Puerto Rico) and New York City.

One of the perks of sampling so many disparate places is all the little regional and situational clichés you run into on the way. A clueless-looking dude pulling off his boot in a ski lodge to find acute frostbite covering his foot (we happened to be watching his foot and his facial expression at the exact moment of discovery). A flight to San Juan nearly postponed on account of volcanic ash. Hassidic Jews tromping around mid-town Manhattan. A flight in a tiny 10-seater plane where we taxied by an iguana sunning itself on the runway.

Things came to a head, cliche-wise, at 6am on our first morning in Vieques. Imagine: we’ve gotten up at 5am the previous morning and taken two planes with my mom and 7 month-old baby to get to the island from Boston, so we’re really, really tired and desperate to catch up on sleep. At 6am, we’re woken bolt-upright in bed by blasting, cheesy Latin pop music that seems to be coming out of the heavens. It’s so loud that you can’t even identify a directional source of the sound– it just seems to be emanating out of the air particles around our heads.

Realizing that kiddo is not going to sleep through this onslaught, and that our prospective morning of sleeping in is dashed, I decide to throw on some clothes and at least make a grumpy harrumph of it. Stomping out into the bright Carribean morning sunshine, I make a wrong turn before correctly identifying the direction of the noise and setting off across a small field towards it. At one point, I look back over my shoulder and see that I’ve been joined by an irate comrade-in-arms, a shirtless, insanely-disheveled-and-outraged-looking guy. He looks strangely like a combination of Robert Downey Jr. and Morton Downey Jr. Finally, I cross the field and near a road where I am presented with the source of The Din and the following sight: about 20 guys neatly lined up on horseback, wearing sort of festive, tricked-out ranch wear. A kind of self-appointed inspector guy is making his way up and down the line, checking out everyone. A truck sits in front of them with a couple heavy-set women bouncing up and down next to giant speakers – the kind you see used for outdoor concerts– that are playing the music.

Of course, it turns out to be impossible to communicate anything in words once you get that close to a loudspeaker truck, much less in Spanish. After lots of irate hand-gestures, I eventually turn around and huff back to our guesthouse, satisfied at least to see that a veritable lynch mob of angry villagers has started to form behind me. At breakfast (served outdoors by the pool), The Din is the hot topic, with one of the guesthouse staff commenting off-handedly that the malefactors were probably just ‘some really drunk guys’. ‘They didn’t look drunk to me,’ I find myself saying. ‘They looked really, really organized, actually.” We never were able to figure out what the whole thing was about, although it seems reasonable to guess that it had something to do with 3 Kings Day, which happened a few days later and apparently is a big deal there.

This is the point where the blog entry veers sharply into insensitive ethnic generalizations… but: I haven’t experienced such an insane, nuisance-y episode of noise-making since, oh… the 10 years that I lived in the Mission District. Once I arrived in Prague, it felt disorienting to actually experience REM sleep, as though I’d been skidding over the surface of it during a decade spent with street noisy and crappy single-ply windows in SF. One morning in particular, shortly before I left SF for Prague, I was woken up at 8am on a blazing hot Saturday by a bunch of drunken guys congregated on the sidewalk outside with a guitar, literally doing the ‘Aye, aye, aye-yi … aye yi, yi aye-yi‘ song. Fuming, I decided to retaliate by filling a garbage pail full of water and dumping it on them from the roof, in much the same way as you train a cat not to jump on a table by flicking water at it.

There’s a big difference between thinking about doing something like this and actually peeling yourself out of bed to do it, but a few minutes later I actually got to the top of the stairs lugging a several gallons of water behind me. Unfortunately, our upstairs neighbor was also there, meditating in a cross-legged position and chanting. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to push by him and nonchalantly hurl a trash bin full of water onto people below while he was trying to tap into his inner center. So, I made my egress, feeling thwarted (common theme in these two stories, I guess). It struck me as a specifically ‘San Francisco’ kind of quandary: trapped between drunken noisemakers on one side and chanted Ohm Shanti Shantis on the other.

(Photo: world’s dinkiest baggage carousel at Vieques airport).

Accountability

Can we at least agree to print this on the back of all relevant health insurance correspondence for the next generation? Thanks.

Speaking of the Massachusetts special election, here’s the first ever Mock Duck poll:

[polldaddy poll=2559557]

Vote early and often, and move for cloture.

Sinister Minister

My wife, baby kid and I have been on the road for nearly a month now and are flying back to Prague this evening. Currently, we’re holed  up in my hometown of Belmont, MA, a town which – despite its close proximity to Boston – was once declared ‘Region’s Most Boring Town’ in a Boston Globe headline that I gleefully clipped out of the paper’s metro region section as a spiteful teenager. Belmont is so boring that, until recently, there was a law forbidding the sale of any booze within the teeny town confines, but that’s a blog rant for another day…

One of the poignant aspects of being home is all the Beavis-and-Butthead-type memories from junior high years that had nearly vanished from memory but come flooding back once I walk around the old neighborhood. This being my first trip back as a parent, these incidents somehow seem all the more comically juvenile and parochial in juxtaposition with my current ‘mature’ state.

Case in point: a few days ago, I walked by the bus stop where I used to idle away interminable periods waiting for the bus to come take me to more enlightened, boozing neighboring places like Cambridge and Boston. The site of the old bus stop immediately brought back a blazing hot summer day in 1989 or so when I was waiting around and spotted a big fat debauched-looking metalhead guy crossing the street with a brown paper bag under his arm and a weird dazed-yet-exalted expression on his face. ‘Hey, man,’ he cheerfully regaled me from halfway across the street. “What town is this?”

Always a good sign, I think as I yell back “Belmont!”

“Belmont,” he says, wincing slightly. “Last thing I remember, I was drinking at the Aku-Aku last night and musta blacked out…”

The Aku-Aku was an incredibly depressing-looking tiki bar located in cement mall in a corner of Cambridge near the Belmont border. It had a spinning plastic sign picturing the Easter Island statues that people had thrown innumerable rocks through. The Aku-Aku figures prominently in Caroline Knapp’s tell-all memoir of her years as a Boston-dwelling alcoholic, Drinking, A Love Story.

“… Next thing I know,” continues the metalhead, “I wake up and some fat bitch is on top of me, going… (mimes coitus)… so I said, (with great vigor:) ‘Get the fuck off me, give me some beer, some money and some sandwiches!'” At this point, he happily flashes open his paper bag to show me some  beer and sandwiches lurking inside.

I spend a few minutes talking to this jolly reveler while we wait for the bus, eventually getting onto the subject of music and the Boston-area punk/metal band Bullet Lavolta in particular. He mentions being a big fan as well, and adds that they’ve had a big influence on his band. “Oh, what are you guys called?” I ask. “Sinister Minister,” he answers with great delectation.

At the time, this little meeting provided a much-appreciated rebuttal to the notion (apparently supported by Globe reportage) that nothing of interest EVER happened in this neighborhood. For a while, I would wait for the bus and look at the houses across the street, wondering where this sandwich-and-beer-dispensing seductress might live.

(Photo: corners of Belmont and Grove streets. Above-described incident happened in the left-hand corner of this scene).

Highway to Hellichova

Two weeks ago, we drove down south and met up with the wife’s family in a town called Henry’s Castle (Jindrichuv Hradec). The castle was nice, although I never learned who Henry was or how he came into a castle. Here are some weirdly-named towns and areas we’ve passed near or through in our last two road-trips (this one and the Austrian Alps trip) and their English translations:

• Sobeslav = Celebrate Yourself

• Tabor = Camp

• Pisek = Sand

• Velka Dobra = The Big Good

• Česká sibiř = Czech Siberia. Czech Siberia is a little hilly area near Tabor that tends to get  colder weather and more snow than surrounding areas– something like that altitudinous stretch you hit about half an hour before hitting Los Angeles on Highway 5. To name it after a region that contains 8 time zones and 1/12th the world’s land mass is sort of an endearing stretch in my book. There’s also a ‘Czech Canada’, ‘Czech Switzerland’, ‘Czech Paradise’ and probably some others I’m forgetting.

Photo: short-lived Czech metal band Alarm. If there was really a song called “Highway to Hellichova”, I like to imagine that they would have made it.

—–

Unrelated rant:

This is all pretty subjective territory to wade into… but wasn’t 2009 the worst year for new music since, like, 1894? I was just looking at Pitchfork’s top 500 albums for 2009– off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of anything from this year that I was super excited about, but I figured there’d be a few gems I’d forgotten about. Nope. The Grizzly Bear album was probably the thing I like the most out of their top 50, and I don’t love that one. Like it a lot, but don’t love it. And it’s not like I’m a ‘Bah humbug, recent music isn’t as good as in my day‘ guy (or at least I hope not): 2008 was full of records I loved (Arthur Russell, David Byrne/Brian Eno, Fleet Foxes, pretty good Santogold all jump to mind, and that’s just off the top of my head).

Oh, good

Hey, it’s a rare sports-related post. Just when you thought it couldn’t get more bleak for Tiger, this appears on the front page of espn.com:

Heaven protect me from the moment when I’m experiencing a crushing personal crisis and the phone rings with a consoling Ron Artest on the other end. It’s the sports world equivalent of something like ‘Economists worried about falling dollar | Robert Mugabe offers support’

Little Mouth Cat, Where Have You Been Hiding?

OK, I’m really excited to post this, although– WARNING– it’s incredibly crude and full of South Park-type sexual humor. If you’re not into that kind of thing, please move along to the more thinky, family-oriented content elsewhere in this blog…

Back in May of 2008, I was forwarded a hilariously offensive story written by a woman who decides to pass the time during the writers’ strike by sleeping with all three then-candidates for president. The origins of the story are something of a mystery to me: apparently, it was written by a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who writes for TV or screen… a comic genius, in any case, albeit of a highly puerile nature.

Just a few days ago, I discovered this site xtranormal.com that lets you easily make an animation from any text you choose to copy-and-paste. This text seemed like the perfect thing to turn into an raunchy animated monologue (although the 2008 campaign storyline is obviously pretty dated at this point). Anyway, without further ado, here’s ‘Little Mouth Cat, Where Have You Been Hiding?‘

2666

I finished Roberto Bolano’s 2666 last night and felt the same disorienting feeling as after stumbling out of a David Lynch movie. This is the first Bolano I’ve read, but I get the distinct impression from reviews (for example, Jonathan Lethem’s, which also makes the Lynch comparison) that if Bolano books were Lynch movies, 2666 would be Lost Highway: expansive, shape-shifting, baffling and, at times, really scary. (Bolano’s last novel The Savage Detectives, meanwhile, sounds like Mullholand Drive– i.e., striking a more accessible balance between outre and grounded. But, I haven’t read it, so whatever…)

The book is made up of five separate novellas that are loosely intertwined and have blunt, descriptive names– ‘The Part About The Critics’, ‘The Part About the Crimes’, etc– that come across both as kind of joke and also as a huge relief, given how non-literal everything else in the book is. One of the most apt comments about I’ve read about 2666 is that it would actually make more sense if you read the five parts in reverse order, especially given that the last section actually happens first in chronological terms. So, yeah, it’s a bit… convoluted.

One weird thing about 2666 is that I can’t ever remember reading a long book that seems so short in immediate hindsight. And it’s not like this is a breezy page-turner or anything: the grueling ‘Part About The Crimes’ is a solid 200-page dossier-like account of dozens of rapes and murders plaguing the fictitious city of Santa Teresa, interspersed with occasional wacked-out digressions involving a Mexican television psychic, a turgid love affair between a cop and sanatorium manager and other curious narrative cul-de-sacs that lead nowhere at all. What makes the book seem so short is that it’s constructed like a paper accordion: viewed from a distance, you only see (or remember, as the case may be) one face, that being the events relating to the story line. Pick it up, though, and it expands into multiple faces, all connected together at the edges but facing off in their own directions. The events that drive the plot of 2666 can be summarized in maybe just 100 words, but are dispersed around countless accounts of characters and events and anecdotes-within-anecdotes that are totally extraneous and fascinating, and can be totally absorbing while you’re with them but then instantly forgettable as soon as you’re abruptly carried away to something else. In this way, the book feels frighteningly like real life, where people’s lives seem grotesquely over-stuffed with detail when viewed up close and then utterly inconsequential when looked at from some distance.

Meanwhile, the only things that seem real in Bolano’s vision are artistry and violence. Like Lynch, he makes a strong case for the essential primacy of horror– this is what is real; everything else people fill their lives with is just inane, civilized whistling-past-the-graveyard. In this sense, the use of anecdotes and digressions seems as clever and complex as the 18th century English literature I studied in college and can barely remember now (uh… Fielding, Sterne… those guys). The more vapid and diverting the digressions are, the more implicated we are as readers for clinging to them in the face of the brutal, toneless Part About The Crimes.

But, putting aside all the lit-crit stuff, the best thing about 2666 is that it’s so well written and has so many inventive, emotive or odd (and sometimes all three at the same time) passages that jerk you up in your seat. A few I dog-eared:

It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadranglar sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness.

Musicians often visited Grete, including an orchestra director who claimed that music was the fourth dimension and whom Halder respected greatly.

He craned his neck towards Reiter and leaned on one elbow and began to whisper and moan imagine scenes of splendor that together formed a chaotic assemblage of dark cubes stacked on top of the other.

That night, as he was working the door at he bar, he amused himself by thinking about a time with two speeds, one very slow, in which the movement of people and objects was lamost impercetible, and the other very fast, in which everything, even inert objects, glittered with speed. The first was called Paradise, the second Hell, and Archiimboldi’s only wish was never to inhabit either.

Lastly: most of 2666 takes place in the fictitious city of Santa Teresa that Bolano apparently based on Juarez (which did, in fact, experience a wave of rape-murder cases that were bunglingly misinvestigated). Between this and Dylan’s ‘Just Like Tom Thumb Blues’, it’s hard to think of a city that’s been more damningly portrayed than Juarez. You even kind of get the same impression from both book and song (nameless dread, weird malaise, so on and so forth). Don’t think I’ll be taking any vacations there soon.

Image: painting by Guiseppe Acimboldo (1527 – 1593, amazingly) whom Bolano’s main character renames himself after.

Also: see Ivan’s post on 2666 at Moonraking.

Favorite holiday songs

Inspired by recent TK references to ‘Fairytale of New York’, I thought I’d present my abridged list of Top 100 Christmas Songs. I’m ranking these according to a combination of (a) how good I think they actually are as songs and (b) holiday cheer factor:

1. ‘Good King Wenceslas’, Traditional. The class of the field in terms of Xmas carols. Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither! Bonus points for: establishing GKW as the most recognized Czech person in history. Loses points for: creating syllabic confusion about whether it’s ‘Good King Wenceslas looked out’ vs. ‘Good King Wencles last looked out’.

2. ‘Fairytale of New York’, Pogues. A close second— manages to be both heartwarming and bitterly cynical at the same time, which is quite an accomplishment. I’m embarrassed to admit that for a long time I had mentally combined Kirsty MacColl (the woman who shares vocals here) and Kylie Minogue into one person. This was before the latter became really famous; suddenly, when ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ was playing everywhere, I struggled to understand how this could be the same person who had once called Shane MacGowan a ‘cheap lousy faggot’. Only then did I realize the mistake behind my Krystie MacPogue confabulation.

3. ‘Jesus Christ’, Big Star. Here’s a good idea: once you strip the Nativity of all its religious gloss and worn-out piety, it just becomes a really rocking, kick-ass thing to write a song about. Which- hey- it was. Bonus points because you never know to what extent Alex Chilton is being sarcastic here.

4. ‘Christmas Wrapping’, The Waitresses. Another good idea: treating the holidays with New Wave’s signature attitude of cool detachment. Fun, dorky, smart.

5. ‘Christmas In Hollis’, RUN D.M.C. ‘Oh my god, it’s an ill reindeer’. Bonus points for: definitively being first holiday hip-hop track ever. Loses points for: the reality that a rap song can’t ever really put me in a holiday mood.

6. ‘Last Christmas’, Wham! Delightfully terrible from the moment George Michael hisses ‘Happy Christmas’ at you and the beat comes galloping in. Infectiously puts me in a holiday mood even as I desperately wish it didn’t. Simply the mention of this song would have earned this post the “actually good or just ironically ‘good'” tag if the speculation about Alex Chilton above hadn’t already put it in the running. Bonus points for: god-awful video, where the social norms of the 80s forced the Wham! lads to partake in a sham version of a prototypically heterosexual ski weekend.

7. ‘Ivan Meets G.I. Joe’, the Clash. Not a holiday song per se, but starts off with a few moments of what sounds like holiday shopping. And can loosely be construed to relate to Xmas in that it describes the Cold War and – thus, indirectly – our attempts to protect our holiday consumer culture against a Xmas-less enemy.

8-80: This is the part where I list songs that don’t actually do much for me but are about the holidays and are by bands that I like, so I have to mention them to prove that I’m not some idiot who sits around listening to Wham! all day. So: dBs, Beck, Belle & Sebastian, the Ronettes, Flaming Lips, XTC, etc.

81-98: This is reserved for holiday songs by artists I don’t care about at all, but who are worshipped by tons of people I know and like. Sufjan Stevens and Arcade Fire, come on down!

99. ‘Let It Snow’, Gloria Estefan. The ultimate Starbucks holiday jingle set to a demented Casiotone-sounding rumba. Rum-blegh.

100. ‘Silent Night’, Traditional. I had an extended conversation with my father a few months ago about how much we both dislike this song. Especially the sanctimonious lilt at the end of the verse (‘sleep in heavenly pe… eeeeeeeeeeeeeace!‘) Plus, it was composed by a slave trader (OK, I made that up). Get bent, ‘Silent Night’.