Slatternly Behavior

We are in the business of watching selves endure the places they live in. Some places are better than others, and some frailties are more fragile than others. For instance, my friend who went to Norway recently tells of tall Blonde Teutonic Godmen among the people there, and these walking deities do not have any trouble enduring their environments. They make their environments, molding – shaping – redefining them – and then they cash their checks that the government doles out after collecting oil lease money. These examples are like evolutionary privilege bootstrapping itself again and again and again, until coal’s become diamond.
Other selves stay stifled in landscapes without redemption or second-chance iconography, much less Nordic fecundity. These lesser souls don’t live in deserts or suburbia or the haunted regions of Norman Mailer’s mind. Some live in trailers with little yellow Tonka trucks strewn across the lawn and green Ninja Turtle pajamas hanging out to dry on the line, but just because you can see that doesn’t mean you have any idea what the story is. That’s what I’ve come to realize, at least.

soma anyone?

1) alas another day in winterwonderland. i have ocular migraines, which are - as the name indicates - painful incidents during which unrelenting pressure builds up behind the
pupils and gives the world a shimmering look to it, especially in the lower corners of
your field of vision. Everything oscillates, and so if you look out at a field of snow in
the early morning sunlight and stare at it for awhile, listening to the pathetic robins
opine about the absurdity of their situation, the hallucinatory effect is disquieting and
grand, too, in its own way. The snow sparkles, and it seems like the sparkles are
vibrating against each other to create a kind of unified kinetic field of light playing off
itself.

2) Pundits continue to frame their punditry about Iraq in terms of winning and losing.
Are they still in a K-hole? Iraq is off the chain. It's one of those metastasizing outbreaks,
feral and unpredictable and disrespectful of whatever rhetorical categories you use to try
to tether it down. What would constitute "winning?" Not that most Americans really
give a shit. I'm beginning to think that our collective madness only exists in the aggregate
and subsists on a mixture of ignorance and puerile fascination with whatever artifact the publicity machine happens to have emitted at the time. On the other hand, it's hard not to
resent the chattering class conviction that leaving the country we've effectively immiserated is the only way to go.

Effluvia.

Late March snowstorms bring down power lines and cause administrators to furrow their fuzzy brows and relent: when it comes down at 2 inches per hour it’s best to let out at 1 pm. So goes the tradition. This is what I’m hoping will happen at least.

I like abominations in weather patterns. Blizzards in early September, tornadoes in February, spring days in the mountains when it’s 80 degrees fifteen minutes after a snow/hail/thunderstorm rushes off the nearest ridge and drags shadows over everything.

Abominations in weather patterns line up with the recurrent feeling of late that the veneer of order and sense the world obtains is slowly stripping off. Not only are things stopping to make sense, but it’s increasingly becoming apparent that the appearance of sense they used to retain was a willful projection based on personal need. Or not. I don’t know. I’m just talking about snow.

The principal just came over the intercom and announced school is over at 1 pm and we have no school tomorrow.

Asphyxiated rappers, unite!

Things I have reason to believe are true:

1) The Slap Happy Jesus Freaks is not a good name for a band.
2) Joan Didion probably had it right when she wrote, as the first line of the epochal "White Album," - we tell ourselves stories in order to live. The applicability of these stories, their relationship to truth, their genesis, their constituent parts - these may all vary but the survival element stays.
3) Ticks are invasive of body and soul. As a result of finding three on my person in the past hour (I went on a hike), I now have psychosomatic "bugs crawling all over my skin" syndrome. And I never did that yea-yo.

Ever increasing amounts of dopamine are evaporating

Me and You and Everyone You Know is a movie about loneliness and the false antidotes we’ve created for it. It’s also about confessional art and teenage sexuality, the fun you can have if you don’t let growing up stop you from playing, and the debilitating drag that comes from having a million bits of information at your fingertips but no one to share it with and no language to share it in. I think there’s something in there about what makes a physical object a real thing and various other strands that have something to do with authenticity as well, plus a cute little weird-voiced kid who has ideas about cooperative poop adventures.

Miranda July wrote, directed, and starred in this movie. Have that for breakfast. She plays a strange and strangely alluring young cab driver cum performance artist who eventually falls in love with shoe salesman self-mutilatist single father guy (the actor is the guy who played Seth the Jew on HBO’s Deadwood). In one of the opening scenes, the shoe salesman sets his hand on fire, which is shot using alternating close/far perspectives and slo-mo as well. The heroine’s version of performance art is using a videocamera to focus in on pictures she’s affixed to a wall, and then doing a voiceover narration. There is much to do about the Image in this movie. Much later, we see her videos showcased in an art museum – she and her elderly father stand in front of a large video screen that show the profile of their heads as they look at a picture and narrate it. There is a certain recursiveness to this shot that borders on too cute by half status, but July never forces the audience to go crit theory on her stuff. Her character’s attraction is rooted in a mixture of vulnerability, awkwardness, and the sprightliness of the script.

The truism that we’re all fundamentally alone has previous cinematic touchstones – people used to like mention Taxi Driver here, which I used to own but now find unwatchable – and this movie belongs in that category. It’s attuned to the ways in which cell phones, instant messaging, email, and the various video technologies add ever thinner branches to our lives’ base and reduce the amount of time we’re actually centered. It’s hard to really describe all of this without at least acknowledging that this particular communicative medium is of the Devil’s Party, so to speak, despite people’s protestations to the contrary. Fragmentation, hyperavailibility, and other modern neuroses may just be the sea in which we all swim, but it doesn’t seem necessary that this be anything but a slogan for people who can’t think (or step) their way out of the conceptual box they inhabit.

truth cannot be imparted, it must be inflicted

Rick Reilly, a columnist for Sports Illustrated and overall famous sportswriter guy, published a fairly straightforward compare/contrast essay on two fourth-grade basketball teams that exist at opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum. He begins by describing the Texas team whose travels and expenditures are lavish and underwritten by some guy who has a net worth of $1.1 billion. The team has a chartered plane, lives large, etc. Then (in italics) he writes about a team from DC with a social worker for a coach and a 2000 Suburban for transportation purposes. This team sometimes stays in motels that are quite dirty and some of the parents can’t afford the tournament fees, which means the social worker/coach steps in and does it himself. The article ends by schmaltzily reporting that the poor DC team has beaten the rich Texas team all four times they have faced each other this year.

A couple of preliminary questions: are you the type of person who roots for the underdog? Do you generally cast the underdog as a poor, urban, underprivileged youth who faces surmountable but soulforce-draining obstacles? Conversely, do you sometimes think that being the son of an ultrarich, ultrasuccessful individual who pays for you and your teammates and your teammates’ parents might also be difficult, though in a different way than being the son of someone poor? Do you hold something against the very rich and also have a set of static classificatory traits you tend to assign to them, some of which are positive but perhaps not all? Is thinking about class a bit like doing a math problem the likes of which you’ve never seen, in that you don’t really know how to begin and the attempt to just like manipulate symbols or whatever feels like it has no basis in what should actually be going on?

I think the notion that life with money isn’t easier than life without money is strange, though I buy into the assumption that people with means can live lives that are just as miserable, helpless, and stultified as the rest of us. I’ve lived on $14,000 a year and $28,000 a year, and the latter is easier in the sense that it shuttles a certain set of worries off to the side but (the catch) other, more virulently autonomous worries may then go on to colonize that space. I guess the move to generalize about this (for me) mucks it all up.

Point being, something about this Reilly article bothered me, and it’s not just the lame tone and the unspoken treacle that ends up speaking louder than anything else. There is the aggravating assumption that the reader would finish the article, sit back and sigh, and reflect on the unique way in which sport transcends the gritty reality of economic disparity. This is going to end without resolution or even much rational analysis. I’m done. Ends now.

Imagine pursuing a profession where your uncle is known as "The Human Highlight Film."

I’ve been getting up a bit earlier than usual this week, which has allowed me the opportunity to listen to some music I might otherwise miss. Yesterday I found an unlabeled burnt disc at the bottom of a stack of discs. I threw it in, sipped some coffee, grabbed the book I was reading, and pressed play expecting to encounter some random backpacker hip-hop or shoe-gazing “independent” music. Instead, I came across Tchaikovsky. This was not a bad thing.
I have a very limited knowledge of classical music, with about four discs to my name that qualify. That said, this particular symphony – the 4th or the 6th, whichever it is – absolutely slays me. It’s a live concert version, played by I have no idea which orchestra, and the last movement is just glorious. I won’t even attempt to describe it because I was born without the connection between language and music that some people have and the music itself defies whatever pedestrian account I could give of it. The point is that this particular recording has an example of pure unadulterated fandom, the admirableness of which is compounded by its occurring in the very august classical music scene. The final movement concludes with a brass buildup (quarter-note beats for the last oh shit I don’t know five or six measures with brass runs laid over top) and when the last run concludes, you hear a single male voice scream out, “YEAAAAAAAHHHH” before the rest of the crowd’s applause overwhelms it. I picture a middle-aged guy in a tuxedo in about the twentieth row, stage right, catapulting out of his seat just as the last beat ends, raising his arms and letting that part of himself that exudes passion and energy and complete in-the-moment’s-flow spontaneity take over. I like the yell almost more than I like the music that inspired it. Go out in the world and yell like that or author an act as grateful and heartfelt as that, I dare you.

Speaking of words, speaking with words, etc

1) Context

I don’t know about the splendid dispensations at the heart of the rhythm of the American street, but I do know about the lilt and the verbal signposting embedded in the speech patterns of American Indians from the Northern Plains. I wonder which one I’ll miss more, for the pure variety’s sake, if I rejoin a grandiosely insular monoculture and look back on the verbal mélange Chicago offered or the diphthong/glottal stop rollercoaster I presently ride. If you don’t get into languages, accents, slang, dialects, metaphorical conceits, etc., what is it that you’re thinking about when you listen to people?

2) Caricatured sarcasm? Sarcastic caricature? The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence is false.

I reserve one hour a day, no more and no less, for scoffing. Whether thumbing my nose at the latest from politics or books or music or stupid sitcoms with insidiously catchy theme songs, I like to maintain a purity of disparagement that, once wielded, tends to prolong its own instrumental value. On the other hand, I like to create big romantic notions of inspiring people and ideas I encounter. I like to Google the person/idea and read every single mention that comes up as a result and then order the oeuvre from Amazon and dive into it with Emersonian abandon. Then I make smaller-than-lifesize mashed potato icons and calcify them with cancer-metastasizing amounts of clear enamel spray.