Dont put lipstick on a pig

It would be nice to have pointed to a vacation in Nantucket, the Jersey shore, Minnesota lake house, or some other summer hotspot as the proximate cause of the gap in posts. No such luck. Mostly work and busy work and unreflective rumination on cultural phenomenon I had recently come across, the kind of experience Predrag recently referred to as as "discrete photons of soul or whatever."


Discrete photon of soul #1

Eat the rich


I played golf at a country club this summer. The former greenskeeper of the course was a guy I used to work for, and they had disposed him without much of a pension or a word of thanks for 35 years of work. I continued to work for, and golf with, his family, during the formative 14-18 year old life phase. This period also included the Dead Kennedys, Noam Chomsky, and Camel Lights, in terms of unscripted self-actualization and agonizingly scripted attempts at self-fashioning. So I came to see this country club as an emblem of the Good Stuff that Bad People Had Because the World is an Unjust Place. That emblem had an antidote (mixed metaphors being an appropriate means of capturing the conceptual blurriness of this period) - AND WE HAVE TO FIGHT THAT INJUSTICE! - that seemed cooler than attempting to get ahead to attain the kind of status that would make it easy to reap benefits from the state of affairs, rather than bear burdens.

I guess most of my feelings about country clubs and class were oriented around what feels like a Cool-O-Meter, is what I mean. That's not how I understood it though. It was an ethical stance. but I think it's probably more aesthetic now, the aversion to (ratcheted down from disdain of) the country club. Sort of Caddyshack crossed with the combative boredom of the similarly situated. Check on the injustice, check on complicitness with it, but also check on the fight it rather than become resigned to or escape from it. A good Kierkegaardian would want to explore whether there is also a religious stance on the issue. Not being one, I'm not sure. I'm also not sure what it means that I'm the kind of person who not only devotes a fair amount of time thinking about how he stands vis a vis the concept and semiotic meaning of country clubs, but also thinks that said stance conveys something larger about the drift (or evolution, who the fuck knows?) in perception that makes us strangers of our past selves.

Discrete Photon #2
Night of the Gun

David Carr used to smoke crack. And be a journalist. And beat his girlfriends up. He hung out with Bob Mould and Tom Arnold and various players across the Minneapolis scene of the 80s. And then one of his girlfriends, who had connections with Columbians and acquired access to kilos therefrom, got pregnant and never quite got clean. The twins, when born, were crack babies. He got clean, raised the twins, got back into journalism, and now writes for the Times. This is an addiction memoir that asks whether a person in recovery can access what happened through the prism of his own addled recollections. Not likely seems to be the answer, and Carr's attempt to deal with this by treating his story like any other journalistic fodder (conducting interviews, accumulating sources, etc.) is the book's central conceit. It uses David Foster Wallace and Faulkner and Mailer in epigrams. Incidentally, if unsurprisingly, Carr hearts the Hold Steady. I will save normative commentary for later.

You be good, people! Don't sleep on old EPMD.