Dennis Perrin delivers a magisterial lesson on SNL, Season 4 ('78-'79). Now that's how to talk comedy.
Read this article…
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Thursday, December 18, 2008
My funny friend Jack Silbert
Jack and I worked together at Scholastic Classroom Magazines for a brief, magical time in the 90s. He's a very funny writer--here are a couple of recent pieces...
http://www.saltinwound.com/2008/12/thursday-in-dark-with-jorge.html
http://www.saltinwound.com/2008/12/another-week-another-movie-another.html
Enjoy!
Read this article…
http://www.saltinwound.com/
http://www.saltinwound.com/
Enjoy!
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Unpacking my feelings about David Foster Wallace
The New Statesman has an interesting article about David Foster Wallace in light of his suicide. For various reasons, lately I've become more interested in Wallace, even though I have read only a smattering of his work. I am too impatient to enjoy his longer-form writing, as virtuosic as it clearly is. I acknowledge its worth, I just can't relate to it yet--this is probably a lack in me, not in him. Please indulge me as I try to work my thoughts out a bit; if you are a fan, I mean no disrespect either to him, or to your affection.
Something in the New Statesman article explains my basic concern with Wallace:
Unfortunately, our current culture recognizes young talent much more readily--and so genius has become equated with what young artists do. This prejudice is blatantly commercial; the biz needs a steady stream of "geniuses" young enough to be molded into saleable forms, to keep their Satanic mills going. Thus Wallace became "the next Pynchon." Fact is, the amount of renown Wallace got, at the age he got it, probably retarded his authentic artistic progress. The morbid self-consciousness, the surfeit of ideas, the complex sentences which belie a need to dominate the reader by demanding lots of time and close attention...Without the need to maintain a brand, all of these might've melted away. Maybe they were doing so, I'll read more and see.
IMO, Wallace would've become a genius precisely to the degree to which he yoked "the workings of his own fiction" to "ideas of audience." To do otherwise is to introduce a imprecision of communication that is intolerable. Non-audience-focused writing may sell, it may even inspire, but this is luck; and master craftspeople replace luck with skill. That's what makes them master craftspeople--the desire to make every word, image, page, thought count. I look at "Infinite Jest" and see a solid week of my life; that is a bar few books can clear. The desire for concision in one's own writing is a reflection of the depth of one's knowledge of mortality. As a writer, you steal people's time, and it's immoral to steal more than you absolutely need. I don't trust Wallace to play by those rules.
But going ga-ga over Wallace's style is flawed in a more important way: In our current time-crunched era, when audiences are hopelessly fragmented, and mass culture so dominated by more efficient visual media that reading fiction seems to be deteriorating into a lifestyle choice--an upward thrust by strivers, a la playing chess or listening to Gilbert and Sullivan--in this time, is a "dense, discursive, and insanely detailed style" something to be celebrated? He came by it honestly, raised by an English teacher--but isn't such a style the linguistic version of bad prep school food or a Italian sportscar that's always in the shop, a kind of conspicuous consumption? The sales advantages of a "big serious book" aside, isn't writing 1000 pages when 500 would do a weakness, an unwillingness to do the hardest work of all--to choose, to commit?
When I read Wallace--and like I say, I need to read more--I feel a lot of hedging. "How am I coming off? Am I authentic, or just fooling myself? How do I hide?" Such are the common calculations among white, moneyed, intensely educated and oververbal Americans, the people who bought Wallace's work, edited it, packaged it, and above all claimed it as their worldview. Careful people aware of just how complicated and difficult the world is. But, dear friends, most of this thinking is neurotic bullshit. Certainly such calculations are the enemy of genius, and it would've been great to see if Wallace could've unshackled himself from all of it, as he aged and got more comfortable in his own skin.
When I read Wallace, I feel someone so self-conscious and uncertain, so fundamentally afraid of making the wrong selection, that he refuses to choose and tries to dazzle me with more words, more ideas, more conceits. This self-doubt, denial of responsibility, confusion about what art is or should be (which of course is a confusion about what being an adult is or should be) is completely in tune with Wallace's (and my) generation: overeducated, underemployed, loathe to commit, prone to apocalyptic despair, wanting to dazzle but fundamentally disenfranchised from themselves and the opportunity of being alive--a generation so unsure of what is worthwhile and what is not, and so terrified of being wrong about that, that they have as a group, quailed at the jump. We have frozen ourselves at the moment at which the culture focused its greatest attention on us, at the 16-24 demographic, yet the years pass. Every photo I ever saw of Wallace makes him look like a junior in college.
We all know the type: What does it mean when you are 35 and still wearing ironic t-shirts? Comic books; Seventies-worship; trivia about Saturday-morning cartoons--how sad it is to have "stopped" at age 20, not because there's anything inherently wrong with comics or the Seventies, but because nothing since has really grabbed our attention. Tom Wolfe's trademark is white three-piece suits; Wallace's was a bandanna--to deny that there's a difference is to deny any meaning in either choice. I'd argue that the choice Wallace made was to remain a talented undergraduate, dazzling with raw talent, brain buzzing with words. The tragedy of his death is that it seems like he was trying to move on; he was no longer quailing at the jump. This is my sense; I will leave it to more knowledgeable people to confirm.
The pathological exhibitionism of, say, a talented 20-year-old.
Why fiction needs to underscore the estranging, aggravating facet of existence I cannot say. If indeed the ground rules of existence are that we are all "sort of marooned" there is no great need for fiction to remind us of it--unless fiction is simply a formalistic exercise in translation of existence into ink-on-paper. Obviously every writer must choose what writing is for, and Wallace's choice says more to me about his mental state--the chemical drizzle he languished under--than about art or fiction or what our world needs from writers. I felt the depression in his writing before I knew he was depressed, and felt the suicide gathering in his body every time I read his work. A human mind--even one as capacious as Wallace's--is a finite place, and without sources of joy outside of its own machinations, what other outcome can there be but self-destruction? There is something adolescent about suicide, and without denigrating Wallace's great suffering, the chemical background of which is obvious, his end strikes me as consonant with that talented 20-year-old. I suspect his ill-fated attempt to go off Nardil (which I believe he started in college?) was an attempt to grow up, move on. That was one hell of a courageous choice, and I wish for him--not his books, which can and will take care of themselves--that he could've caught a break.
And having said that, let's ask: was this a good thing? I suspect that a "highly developed generational self-consciousness" is primarily an artifact of modern consumer culture--one seldom reads of "the Civil War generation," for example, even though the experience of that conflict had, I would argue, a bit more impact than say, Saturday morning cartoons. I'm kidding, but only just; this slicing of experience into cohorts is a false operation, and the alliance formed by shared recall of "H.R. Pufnstuff" only feels substantial if the culture keeps insisting that's all you've got. As artists, we needn't be content to merely reflect this impoverished heritage, we can actually call bullshit and start determining what's really worth our attention. Art isn't sliced into generations; that's marketing.
Liking David Foster Wallace appears to be one of those markers; you're a certain type of person, you read DFW. But this ability to call up touchstones is a minor skill magnified by how books are packaged and sold; like Fitzgerald, Wallace strikes me as a talent on its way to genius, and probably not helped by the weight of our goofy generation. Wallace's popularity--which of course is minuscule next to the popularity achieved by mediocre television or a reasonably competent superhero movie--always seemed to me to be based on the scratching of a very specific itch. Reading Wallace--or McSweeney's, or comic books about serious subjects, all that pre-9/11 cultural boomlet that promised to loosen up literature but just made it snobby in a slightly different way--satisfies the intellectual jones of the underemployed post-collegiate. It soothes that lingering sad throb so many of us feel after we transit from the word-drenched intellectual world of University into the less stimulating (and perhaps less comfortable) texture of adulthood. I'm sure smarter people than I have correlated the rise of postmodern fiction with the lengthening and specialization of higher education; I'm not talking just about fiction MFA programs, but simply education in general. Wallace may be sudoku for liberal arts grads, and that's perfectly acceptable--but to equate that with "genius" shows just how narrow a space words-on-paper have come to occupy in our culture. Being dubbed "the voice of a generation" is, in the end, a limiting thing. It's a shame we won't see what he would've done after the mantle had passed, the glare had died down and he could really get down to more work.
Before I finish, I want to be clear: everything I've written above says more about me than David Foster Wallace. My thoughts about him continue to evolve, and as I read more, and think more, and hear more opinions, I reserve the right to deem anything I've written here as complete self-indulgent bullshit. But then again, this is a blog, and complete self-indulgent bullshit is what blogs are for.
See, now I'm hedging, too. But more important than all that: everything I've read about David Foster Wallace suggests that he was a genuinely decent, genuinely talented, kind human being who lived under circumstances ranging from difficult to truly tormented. That is the achievement we should celebrate--to be decent and helpful and give of yourself, who does that in this world? Damn few people, especially in the literary scene he occupied. That he accomplished what he did under his chemical/emotional circumstances is heroic; and whether or not he took his audience into account as much as my aesthetics would wish him to, an audience sought out and loved his work. Maybe I share that connection, maybe not, but I don't forget that the connection is the essential thing, and everything else, including this post, is blather. I do think, however, that his success--his lionization--owes much to the narcissism and flaws of my generation and the literary scene we've created, and I wonder that if he'd been a little less celebrated he might have been a bit more content. Success, like failure--talent, like madness--can lead one to destruction, and I cannot help but wonder whether precisely the things that his audience so related to--the anxieties mentioned above--kept him from healing personally. What makes it to the page is but a vapor of the true emotion; if a reader gets a whiff of painful self-consciousness, for example, you can be sure that the author felt it in every cell. When I read Wallace, I sense a mind desperate for diversion from an existence he's not sure is really worth the effort. I respect this struggle--shit, I relate to it. And because of that, I think we owe him what we owe all our honored dead: to live, not in perpetual self-doubt or compulsive analysis, or (shudder) with ironic distance, but fully and truly and well.
P.S.--I let my wife Kate, a passionate fan of DFW, read this before posting it. Her comments were very interesting, and I'm posting this after extracting a promise that she will write in and set me straight.
Read this article…
Something in the New Statesman article explains my basic concern with Wallace:
And what is "that kind of genius"? Can one be a genius in any artistic form while remaining largely unconcerned with "ideas of audience"? I'd argue not. In the young artist, art is flashy instances of still-shifting craft in the service of raw self-expression; it is energetic, exciting even, but very rarely genius. In the mature artist, the now-internalized craft disappears and communication becomes paramount. Older artists can communicate in a much deeper and more effective way, because the accumulation of experience encourages them to acknowledge "the idea of audience." When you're a young writer, all you know is you.
"[a chunk of DFW, then the author says:]
This is writing of extraordinary syntactic control, and it is characteristic of what Eggers describes as Wallace's "dense, discursive, and insanely detailed style". The sentence continues for almost another page; the paragraph in which it occurs runs over four pages. Eggers says that he asked Wallace to consider breaking up some of the paragraphs before the story was published: "It was as if he were visiting the notion . . . for the first time. He was that kind of genius, whose understanding of the workings of his own fiction was, I think, largely separate from ideas of audience."
Unfortunately, our current culture recognizes young talent much more readily--and so genius has become equated with what young artists do. This prejudice is blatantly commercial; the biz needs a steady stream of "geniuses" young enough to be molded into saleable forms, to keep their Satanic mills going. Thus Wallace became "the next Pynchon." Fact is, the amount of renown Wallace got, at the age he got it, probably retarded his authentic artistic progress. The morbid self-consciousness, the surfeit of ideas, the complex sentences which belie a need to dominate the reader by demanding lots of time and close attention...Without the need to maintain a brand, all of these might've melted away. Maybe they were doing so, I'll read more and see.
IMO, Wallace would've become a genius precisely to the degree to which he yoked "the workings of his own fiction" to "ideas of audience." To do otherwise is to introduce a imprecision of communication that is intolerable. Non-audience-focused writing may sell, it may even inspire, but this is luck; and master craftspeople replace luck with skill. That's what makes them master craftspeople--the desire to make every word, image, page, thought count. I look at "Infinite Jest" and see a solid week of my life; that is a bar few books can clear. The desire for concision in one's own writing is a reflection of the depth of one's knowledge of mortality. As a writer, you steal people's time, and it's immoral to steal more than you absolutely need. I don't trust Wallace to play by those rules.
But going ga-ga over Wallace's style is flawed in a more important way: In our current time-crunched era, when audiences are hopelessly fragmented, and mass culture so dominated by more efficient visual media that reading fiction seems to be deteriorating into a lifestyle choice--an upward thrust by strivers, a la playing chess or listening to Gilbert and Sullivan--in this time, is a "dense, discursive, and insanely detailed style" something to be celebrated? He came by it honestly, raised by an English teacher--but isn't such a style the linguistic version of bad prep school food or a Italian sportscar that's always in the shop, a kind of conspicuous consumption? The sales advantages of a "big serious book" aside, isn't writing 1000 pages when 500 would do a weakness, an unwillingness to do the hardest work of all--to choose, to commit?
When I read Wallace--and like I say, I need to read more--I feel a lot of hedging. "How am I coming off? Am I authentic, or just fooling myself? How do I hide?" Such are the common calculations among white, moneyed, intensely educated and oververbal Americans, the people who bought Wallace's work, edited it, packaged it, and above all claimed it as their worldview. Careful people aware of just how complicated and difficult the world is. But, dear friends, most of this thinking is neurotic bullshit. Certainly such calculations are the enemy of genius, and it would've been great to see if Wallace could've unshackled himself from all of it, as he aged and got more comfortable in his own skin.
When I read Wallace, I feel someone so self-conscious and uncertain, so fundamentally afraid of making the wrong selection, that he refuses to choose and tries to dazzle me with more words, more ideas, more conceits. This self-doubt, denial of responsibility, confusion about what art is or should be (which of course is a confusion about what being an adult is or should be) is completely in tune with Wallace's (and my) generation: overeducated, underemployed, loathe to commit, prone to apocalyptic despair, wanting to dazzle but fundamentally disenfranchised from themselves and the opportunity of being alive--a generation so unsure of what is worthwhile and what is not, and so terrified of being wrong about that, that they have as a group, quailed at the jump. We have frozen ourselves at the moment at which the culture focused its greatest attention on us, at the 16-24 demographic, yet the years pass. Every photo I ever saw of Wallace makes him look like a junior in college.
We all know the type: What does it mean when you are 35 and still wearing ironic t-shirts? Comic books; Seventies-worship; trivia about Saturday-morning cartoons--how sad it is to have "stopped" at age 20, not because there's anything inherently wrong with comics or the Seventies, but because nothing since has really grabbed our attention. Tom Wolfe's trademark is white three-piece suits; Wallace's was a bandanna--to deny that there's a difference is to deny any meaning in either choice. I'd argue that the choice Wallace made was to remain a talented undergraduate, dazzling with raw talent, brain buzzing with words. The tragedy of his death is that it seems like he was trying to move on; he was no longer quailing at the jump. This is my sense; I will leave it to more knowledgeable people to confirm.
Wallace believed that each of us is "sort of marooned" inside our own skull, and that it is fiction's job to "aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people". It was the estranging apparatus of his style - the postmodern rhetorical devices, the hyperextended sentences - that was meant to do the aggravating.
That, at least, was the theory. However, Wallace was tormented by the thought that the “antagonistic elements” in his fiction might in fact just be manifestations of a pathological exhibitionism.
The pathological exhibitionism of, say, a talented 20-year-old.
Why fiction needs to underscore the estranging, aggravating facet of existence I cannot say. If indeed the ground rules of existence are that we are all "sort of marooned" there is no great need for fiction to remind us of it--unless fiction is simply a formalistic exercise in translation of existence into ink-on-paper. Obviously every writer must choose what writing is for, and Wallace's choice says more to me about his mental state--the chemical drizzle he languished under--than about art or fiction or what our world needs from writers. I felt the depression in his writing before I knew he was depressed, and felt the suicide gathering in his body every time I read his work. A human mind--even one as capacious as Wallace's--is a finite place, and without sources of joy outside of its own machinations, what other outcome can there be but self-destruction? There is something adolescent about suicide, and without denigrating Wallace's great suffering, the chemical background of which is obvious, his end strikes me as consonant with that talented 20-year-old. I suspect his ill-fated attempt to go off Nardil (which I believe he started in college?) was an attempt to grow up, move on. That was one hell of a courageous choice, and I wish for him--not his books, which can and will take care of themselves--that he could've caught a break.
This highly developed generational self-consciousness is one reason Wallace was held in such esteem by his peers: he held up a mirror to their own anxieties, and articulated them more clearly and honestly than they ever dared.
And having said that, let's ask: was this a good thing? I suspect that a "highly developed generational self-consciousness" is primarily an artifact of modern consumer culture--one seldom reads of "the Civil War generation," for example, even though the experience of that conflict had, I would argue, a bit more impact than say, Saturday morning cartoons. I'm kidding, but only just; this slicing of experience into cohorts is a false operation, and the alliance formed by shared recall of "H.R. Pufnstuff" only feels substantial if the culture keeps insisting that's all you've got. As artists, we needn't be content to merely reflect this impoverished heritage, we can actually call bullshit and start determining what's really worth our attention. Art isn't sliced into generations; that's marketing.
Liking David Foster Wallace appears to be one of those markers; you're a certain type of person, you read DFW. But this ability to call up touchstones is a minor skill magnified by how books are packaged and sold; like Fitzgerald, Wallace strikes me as a talent on its way to genius, and probably not helped by the weight of our goofy generation. Wallace's popularity--which of course is minuscule next to the popularity achieved by mediocre television or a reasonably competent superhero movie--always seemed to me to be based on the scratching of a very specific itch. Reading Wallace--or McSweeney's, or comic books about serious subjects, all that pre-9/11 cultural boomlet that promised to loosen up literature but just made it snobby in a slightly different way--satisfies the intellectual jones of the underemployed post-collegiate. It soothes that lingering sad throb so many of us feel after we transit from the word-drenched intellectual world of University into the less stimulating (and perhaps less comfortable) texture of adulthood. I'm sure smarter people than I have correlated the rise of postmodern fiction with the lengthening and specialization of higher education; I'm not talking just about fiction MFA programs, but simply education in general. Wallace may be sudoku for liberal arts grads, and that's perfectly acceptable--but to equate that with "genius" shows just how narrow a space words-on-paper have come to occupy in our culture. Being dubbed "the voice of a generation" is, in the end, a limiting thing. It's a shame we won't see what he would've done after the mantle had passed, the glare had died down and he could really get down to more work.
Before I finish, I want to be clear: everything I've written above says more about me than David Foster Wallace. My thoughts about him continue to evolve, and as I read more, and think more, and hear more opinions, I reserve the right to deem anything I've written here as complete self-indulgent bullshit. But then again, this is a blog, and complete self-indulgent bullshit is what blogs are for.
See, now I'm hedging, too. But more important than all that: everything I've read about David Foster Wallace suggests that he was a genuinely decent, genuinely talented, kind human being who lived under circumstances ranging from difficult to truly tormented. That is the achievement we should celebrate--to be decent and helpful and give of yourself, who does that in this world? Damn few people, especially in the literary scene he occupied. That he accomplished what he did under his chemical/emotional circumstances is heroic; and whether or not he took his audience into account as much as my aesthetics would wish him to, an audience sought out and loved his work. Maybe I share that connection, maybe not, but I don't forget that the connection is the essential thing, and everything else, including this post, is blather. I do think, however, that his success--his lionization--owes much to the narcissism and flaws of my generation and the literary scene we've created, and I wonder that if he'd been a little less celebrated he might have been a bit more content. Success, like failure--talent, like madness--can lead one to destruction, and I cannot help but wonder whether precisely the things that his audience so related to--the anxieties mentioned above--kept him from healing personally. What makes it to the page is but a vapor of the true emotion; if a reader gets a whiff of painful self-consciousness, for example, you can be sure that the author felt it in every cell. When I read Wallace, I sense a mind desperate for diversion from an existence he's not sure is really worth the effort. I respect this struggle--shit, I relate to it. And because of that, I think we owe him what we owe all our honored dead: to live, not in perpetual self-doubt or compulsive analysis, or (shudder) with ironic distance, but fully and truly and well.
P.S.--I let my wife Kate, a passionate fan of DFW, read this before posting it. Her comments were very interesting, and I'm posting this after extracting a promise that she will write in and set me straight.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
My latest book, A Christmas Peril...
is now available. Click here to buy it on Amazon.
It's a parody of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, naturally, but done in a way that I've never seen before. Kate really liked it, and she's a tough woman to please. After writing the text, I designed the book to recall Dickens' original 1843 edition; all in all, I think it's a fine piece of work to be read and savored (or at least purchased) by every carbon-based life form.
Merry Christmas!
Read this article…
It's a parody of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, naturally, but done in a way that I've never seen before. Kate really liked it, and she's a tough woman to please. After writing the text, I designed the book to recall Dickens' original 1843 edition; all in all, I think it's a fine piece of work to be read and savored (or at least purchased) by every carbon-based life form.
Merry Christmas!
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Screaming, laughing, crying...
...all for Barack Obama, President-elect of the United States.
God, it feels good to type that.
Read this article…
God, it feels good to type that.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Friday, October 17, 2008
My New Hero
Lahde Quits Hedge Fund, Thanks 'Idiots' For Success.
Turns out pot is a gateway drug...Only the gateway is to WORLD DOMINATION.
Read this article…
Turns out pot is a gateway drug...Only the gateway is to WORLD DOMINATION.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Owl Club manual FOUND
Ahh, to be young and smart and funny and at Harvard and heavily influenced by McSweeney's...And yes, I smile as I say that.
Legion is a great-looking blog that I'm going to be checking out, and forwarding to my friend Ed Park, because THESE ARE HIS PEOPLE. The young rascals have found the manual for the Owl Club, one of Harvard's Finals Clubs, and mercilessly dissect it here. Thank goodness Yale doesn't have anything like that.
Keep up the good work, youths.
Read this article…
Legion is a great-looking blog that I'm going to be checking out, and forwarding to my friend Ed Park, because THESE ARE HIS PEOPLE. The young rascals have found the manual for the Owl Club, one of Harvard's Finals Clubs, and mercilessly dissect it here. Thank goodness Yale doesn't have anything like that.
Keep up the good work, youths.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Hari Puttar?
A Bollywood film is being sued by Warner Bros. for copyright infringement. The Times of London's overview of the kerfuffle (I know, easy for me to say) can be found here.
Read this article…
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Like The Beatles in 1961
F.O.S. (friend of site) and boon companion Jerry Neufeld-Kaiser plays tuba in a Seattle-area "Balkan-inspired brass-and-drum band" called Orkestar Zirkonium. The Orkestar's homebrewed CD has just been reviewed by All About Jazz; here's what Elliot Simon had to say:
Anyone interested in communing further with said real deal can their site/buy their CD here. $14.95's a small price to pay for the precious boast, "Oh, them? I was a fan BEFORE it was cool."
Read this article…
Balkan brass bands are large aggregations with lots of brass, a tuba/drum/percussion backbeat (one of the most infectious things on earth) and hot soloing by trumpets, saxophones, clarinets and assorted other instruments. They have for some time been drawing large crowds in NYC nightspots such as the Knitting Factory, Brooklyn's Barbes and even boast their own yearly NYC Golden Festival. Bands like Romashka, Zagnut Cirkus, Frank London's Brotherhood of Brass and Slavic Soul Party pay homage to the "old country" super groups such as trumpeter Boban Markovic's legendary brass band but do so by putting their own American take on the genre. They intertwine klezmer, Rom, Latin, funk, jazz and other ethnically driven musics into the overall mix for a sound that gets you dancing and, of course, drinking. Orkestar Zirkonium, from the somewhat unlikely quarter of Seattle, Washington, is the latest offering in this eclectic and highly danceable genre.
Things kick off with a literal hand-clapper entitled "Heavy the Foreign Land" that immediately showcases the hot polyrhythmic intertwines of percussionists Paul Kikuchi and Sari Breznau, bass drummer Anne Mathews and drummer Matt Manges. Zirkonium has a big full sound thanks, in large part, to Jerry Neufield-Kaiser's pumping tuba which sets a frenetic pace on the burning "Hot Coals," also featuring a slick clarinet solo from Kevin Hinshaw. A decidedly nasty trumpet section (Stephen Lohrentz, Ted Lockery and Samantha Boshnack) combine for great voicings that evince more than a hint of Eastern-European ethos while at times Latin, Spanish and jazz seep through for a great multi-ethnic stew. Such is the case on "The Mimbo" where Serbian and Latin brass find common ground against a pulsating beat, and the frenetic "Rusasca De La Buzdug" nearly careens out of control—but somehow stays on track—for a wild brass infested excursion.
While many of these cuts start out fast and get quicker there is a soft, almost elegant side to the band as well. This is expressed most obviously in the delightful new music composed by trombonist Colin Ernst: the beautifully meandering "Guillotine" slowly snakes to its inevitable swift conclusion, "A New Light" has a stately klezmer-esque feel and the emotive pathos of "The Purge" is portrayed as a classically injected Spanish symphony. A hidden cut is the perfect denouement as all solemnly reflect on what was one hell of a great ride.
This is great "tukhes" shaking music with a depth of composition and style that keeps it from becoming cartoonish—Orkestar Zirkonium is the real deal.
Anyone interested in communing further with said real deal can their site/buy their CD here. $14.95's a small price to pay for the precious boast, "Oh, them? I was a fan BEFORE it was cool."
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Monday, July 14, 2008
Judging a "book" by its cover
I'm taking a break from writing (blogging in particular) for the summer and maybe longer. But there is a controversy afoot, a tiny little tornado in a teacup that, like the ringing of Pavlov's bell, has wrung an inevitable response from me. I'm just as God made me, folks, a simple satirist and ex-magazine person and lover of GOOD magazines, and so must fling out my two cents, asked for or not.
Don't let the glossy intellectualized idiom confuse you: The New Yorker cover of Barack and Michelle Obama is bad satire--blurry in intent, flawed in execution, and...well, the kind of clunking, ill-formed thing that rigid hierarchies of smart-but-unfunny people create when they're determined to crack wise. Illustrator Barry Blitt has depicted the putative First Couple in the Oval Office, she dressed as Angela Davis with 'fro and bandolier, he as an turbaned Islamofascist. There's even a portrait of Osama bin Laden over a roaring fire, stoked by an American flag. The pair share a fist-bump in sly solidarity.
Blitt's objective was, I can only assume, to lampoon June's FOX News fantods over "terrorist fist-jabbing," as well as the right-wing's endless whispery smears of the Obamas as somehow unamerican. There's nothing wrong with this goal--the hysteria and smears ARE ridiculous, and legit targets--but there's nothing particularly right with it, either.
First off, it's old news. Six weeks is an eternity for political humor, and there's nothing lamer than an untimely attempt at timely satire. This would have been a fine cover (nothing extraordinary, but fine) if it had appeared within a week or two of FOX's fluttering (June 7, according to YouTube). Running it now makes readers go "Huh?...Oh, I remember that." It is this moment of confusion, followed by vague recollection--a timely joke delivered in a non-timely fashion--that is causing the negative reaction.
Second, the style doesn't match the satirical intent. The intent is to underscore the absurdity of Obamas-as-fifth-column, to show it to be a fever-dream born of rhetoric and paranoia. You can do this either by creating a grotesque fantasy--amping it one way--or going in the other direction, and anchoring it in reality. Blitt's slight, watery, wan style is exactly the wrong treatment. Maybe Blitt came to them with the idea; fair enough, pair him with somebody who can use Photoshop, have the pair of them create a seamless photocollage that takes the right-wing fantasy to its FARTHEST POINT. Make it graphic, make it punchy. Photorealistic or Felliniesque, it doesn't matter, but the finished product should insist upon the opinion you want the reader to take away: "this is absurd."
Whenever The New Yorker does a reasonably decent cover, the ancient Steinberg cover of Manhattan as the center of the world is referenced; but this comparison shows just why Blitt's cover is so structurally weak. To begin with, the Steinberg cover fit the venue; its satirical point was that many Manhattan-dwellers believe that their island is the center of the world. The presence of that idea on the cover of The New Yorker was completely appropriate, and allowed the reader to absorb that idea without having to decode its relationship to the magazine "behind" it.
The viewpoint of Blitt's cover is one diametrically opposed to the one held by your average New Yorker reader; therefore, it's understandable for readers to see it and think, "Why is The New Yorker saying that the Obamas are militants/Islamofascists?...They would never do that...Oh, I get it." Ideas like this--ones that require a second of mental processing--these are weak vehicles for satire, especially in our hyper-visual, hyper-distracted, information-dense era, when none of us have time to process anything very deeply, given the volume of crud that comes at us every minute of every day.
Furthermore, there was a fitness of idea and style in the Steinberg cover that does not exist here. Steinberg's style was cartoonish, idiosyncratic, exaggerated to the point of absurdity--all completely of a piece with the "NYC as center of world" idea he was trying to put across. Like Steinberg, Blitt's style is personal, artistic--but in this case, it confuses the reader; is this Blitt's fantasy, since it comes from his pen? If we remember the old news story, AND know the political stance of TNY, we realize, no, it's not--it's commentary. The idea Steinberg was putting across was a small, amusing one; a harmless affectation held by New Yorkers everywhere, grist for a witty, stylish cartoon. The whisper campaign against the Obamas is not such light-hearted material, and that the editors could not make this distinction shows exactly why they should be kept far away from the funny cabinet. It could potentially make for a great cover, and maybe even a great cartoon cover, but this ain't it. It ain't anywhere close.
Jokes don't get over when you ask the reader to spend too much time "decoding." This is where idea and execution must work together, sharpening and enhancing each other. Blitt's cover is blurry in all three facets, intent, context, or execution. Intent: "Is this pro-Obama or con-? It seems con-, but because I know that The New Yorker is liberal, I guess it's pro-..." Properly sharpened satire, not to mention top-notch magazine covers, do not rely on the reader's prior knowledge of the magazine. They answer this question automatically, unequivocally, viscerally. Laugh or don't, but we WILL kill this dog.
Context: Why now? Timely satire must be timely; this cover is the comeback you imagine six weeks later. Yes, I know the mechanics of producing a magazine require a certain time-lag--so don't do timely satire. Execution: The style employed does nothing to aid or refine the satirical point, and unlike Steinberg's style--or the photorealism of the famous NatLamp cover--actually blunts its impact...Which is, of course, completely intentional on the part of The New Yorker.
See, the problem isn't that the cover is blah. The problem is that the cultural turf staked out by TNY means that it cannot produce satire, and lacks either the good grace or self-awareness to abstain. Good satire is almost by definition excessive, and that runs counter to the "timeless intellectual arbiter" brand TNY strives so mightily to maintain (for commercial reasons). The reason that Tina Brown fizzled is because you cannot simultaneously pull stunts in the belief that all publicity is good publicity, while at the same time relentlessly harkening back to the Good Old Days when men wore suits and Shawn despised adverbs (or was it Ross?). One or the other stance always feels false. When Roseanne guest-edits, it feels like they're slumming; when they print this cover, it feels like they're giving authority to ideas that should be ignored. They can't win, so they shouldn't play.
But strange as it may seem the people at The New Yorker envy the people at The Daily Show; they envy them their relevancy, and their reach, and their hipness. Just like the people at The New Yorker in 1975 envied those things about SNL. The difference is, TNY in 1975 knew what it was, and what it was for, and today's New Yorker does not. That's why this cover doesn't work, and also why the pundits are rallying 'round to say that it does, because if they admit that it's just a ham-handed attempt at what things like The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and (yes, even) South Park do regularly--and effortlessly--they'll be forced to see just how many steps behind they really are.
So laugh, or don't, but know that it isn't a big deal--magazines don't matter in America, and haven't for 30 years--and we wouldn't even be discussing it were it not for the media's preference towards stories about itself. But given the poisonousness of the Obama-as-traitor meme--and the skill and persistence with which the right-wing smears Democrats--I personally wouldn't have run it. Unless, of course, it was really fucking funny.
It isn't. Moving on...
PS: When Kate read this post, she suggested that it either be done in a pure tabloid style (to which I replied, you could do it as a sideways spread inside the mag), or if you had to stick with TNY's house style, have McCain in a grocery store checkout line, reading a Weekly World News-type thing that reprinted all the lurid Obama-smearing. (I particularly liked that idea.) Kate also said she'd cancel her subscription, but felt that people who did that over objectionable covers "are asshats."
Read this article…
Don't let the glossy intellectualized idiom confuse you: The New Yorker cover of Barack and Michelle Obama is bad satire--blurry in intent, flawed in execution, and...well, the kind of clunking, ill-formed thing that rigid hierarchies of smart-but-unfunny people create when they're determined to crack wise. Illustrator Barry Blitt has depicted the putative First Couple in the Oval Office, she dressed as Angela Davis with 'fro and bandolier, he as an turbaned Islamofascist. There's even a portrait of Osama bin Laden over a roaring fire, stoked by an American flag. The pair share a fist-bump in sly solidarity.Blitt's objective was, I can only assume, to lampoon June's FOX News fantods over "terrorist fist-jabbing," as well as the right-wing's endless whispery smears of the Obamas as somehow unamerican. There's nothing wrong with this goal--the hysteria and smears ARE ridiculous, and legit targets--but there's nothing particularly right with it, either.
First off, it's old news. Six weeks is an eternity for political humor, and there's nothing lamer than an untimely attempt at timely satire. This would have been a fine cover (nothing extraordinary, but fine) if it had appeared within a week or two of FOX's fluttering (June 7, according to YouTube). Running it now makes readers go "Huh?...Oh, I remember that." It is this moment of confusion, followed by vague recollection--a timely joke delivered in a non-timely fashion--that is causing the negative reaction.
Second, the style doesn't match the satirical intent. The intent is to underscore the absurdity of Obamas-as-fifth-column, to show it to be a fever-dream born of rhetoric and paranoia. You can do this either by creating a grotesque fantasy--amping it one way--or going in the other direction, and anchoring it in reality. Blitt's slight, watery, wan style is exactly the wrong treatment. Maybe Blitt came to them with the idea; fair enough, pair him with somebody who can use Photoshop, have the pair of them create a seamless photocollage that takes the right-wing fantasy to its FARTHEST POINT. Make it graphic, make it punchy. Photorealistic or Felliniesque, it doesn't matter, but the finished product should insist upon the opinion you want the reader to take away: "this is absurd."
Whenever The New Yorker does a reasonably decent cover, the ancient Steinberg cover of Manhattan as the center of the world is referenced; but this comparison shows just why Blitt's cover is so structurally weak. To begin with, the Steinberg cover fit the venue; its satirical point was that many Manhattan-dwellers believe that their island is the center of the world. The presence of that idea on the cover of The New Yorker was completely appropriate, and allowed the reader to absorb that idea without having to decode its relationship to the magazine "behind" it.The viewpoint of Blitt's cover is one diametrically opposed to the one held by your average New Yorker reader; therefore, it's understandable for readers to see it and think, "Why is The New Yorker saying that the Obamas are militants/Islamofascists?...They would never do that...Oh, I get it." Ideas like this--ones that require a second of mental processing--these are weak vehicles for satire, especially in our hyper-visual, hyper-distracted, information-dense era, when none of us have time to process anything very deeply, given the volume of crud that comes at us every minute of every day.
Furthermore, there was a fitness of idea and style in the Steinberg cover that does not exist here. Steinberg's style was cartoonish, idiosyncratic, exaggerated to the point of absurdity--all completely of a piece with the "NYC as center of world" idea he was trying to put across. Like Steinberg, Blitt's style is personal, artistic--but in this case, it confuses the reader; is this Blitt's fantasy, since it comes from his pen? If we remember the old news story, AND know the political stance of TNY, we realize, no, it's not--it's commentary. The idea Steinberg was putting across was a small, amusing one; a harmless affectation held by New Yorkers everywhere, grist for a witty, stylish cartoon. The whisper campaign against the Obamas is not such light-hearted material, and that the editors could not make this distinction shows exactly why they should be kept far away from the funny cabinet. It could potentially make for a great cover, and maybe even a great cartoon cover, but this ain't it. It ain't anywhere close.
Jokes don't get over when you ask the reader to spend too much time "decoding." This is where idea and execution must work together, sharpening and enhancing each other. Blitt's cover is blurry in all three facets, intent, context, or execution. Intent: "Is this pro-Obama or con-? It seems con-, but because I know that The New Yorker is liberal, I guess it's pro-..." Properly sharpened satire, not to mention top-notch magazine covers, do not rely on the reader's prior knowledge of the magazine. They answer this question automatically, unequivocally, viscerally. Laugh or don't, but we WILL kill this dog.
Context: Why now? Timely satire must be timely; this cover is the comeback you imagine six weeks later. Yes, I know the mechanics of producing a magazine require a certain time-lag--so don't do timely satire. Execution: The style employed does nothing to aid or refine the satirical point, and unlike Steinberg's style--or the photorealism of the famous NatLamp cover--actually blunts its impact...Which is, of course, completely intentional on the part of The New Yorker. See, the problem isn't that the cover is blah. The problem is that the cultural turf staked out by TNY means that it cannot produce satire, and lacks either the good grace or self-awareness to abstain. Good satire is almost by definition excessive, and that runs counter to the "timeless intellectual arbiter" brand TNY strives so mightily to maintain (for commercial reasons). The reason that Tina Brown fizzled is because you cannot simultaneously pull stunts in the belief that all publicity is good publicity, while at the same time relentlessly harkening back to the Good Old Days when men wore suits and Shawn despised adverbs (or was it Ross?). One or the other stance always feels false. When Roseanne guest-edits, it feels like they're slumming; when they print this cover, it feels like they're giving authority to ideas that should be ignored. They can't win, so they shouldn't play.
But strange as it may seem the people at The New Yorker envy the people at The Daily Show; they envy them their relevancy, and their reach, and their hipness. Just like the people at The New Yorker in 1975 envied those things about SNL. The difference is, TNY in 1975 knew what it was, and what it was for, and today's New Yorker does not. That's why this cover doesn't work, and also why the pundits are rallying 'round to say that it does, because if they admit that it's just a ham-handed attempt at what things like The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and (yes, even) South Park do regularly--and effortlessly--they'll be forced to see just how many steps behind they really are.
So laugh, or don't, but know that it isn't a big deal--magazines don't matter in America, and haven't for 30 years--and we wouldn't even be discussing it were it not for the media's preference towards stories about itself. But given the poisonousness of the Obama-as-traitor meme--and the skill and persistence with which the right-wing smears Democrats--I personally wouldn't have run it. Unless, of course, it was really fucking funny.
It isn't. Moving on...
PS: When Kate read this post, she suggested that it either be done in a pure tabloid style (to which I replied, you could do it as a sideways spread inside the mag), or if you had to stick with TNY's house style, have McCain in a grocery store checkout line, reading a Weekly World News-type thing that reprinted all the lurid Obama-smearing. (I particularly liked that idea.) Kate also said she'd cancel her subscription, but felt that people who did that over objectionable covers "are asshats."
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Clay Felker, RIP
Legendary editor Clay Felker has died at 82; here's the NYT obit.
Along with his one-time Esquire-mate Harold Hayes, Felker has always been a bit of a hero of mine. His New York continued in the 70s what Hayes had demonstrated in the 60s: the vision of a magazine as a beautiful, lively, important thing. "Beautiful" because it was written and designed passionately, by artists like Tom Wolfe and Milton Glaser. "Lively" because it was fully integrated into the culture, not apart from it, and examined it all. (In a magazine like Hayes Esquire or Felker's New York, nothing was too small that it did not deserve a bit of intelligence to illuminate it; nor too big that it could escape a bit of puncturing wit.) "Important" because it had some power of its own.
The great magazines of the 60s and 70s--Esquire, New York, Rolling Stone, National Lampoon--these were the last batch that introduced ideas into the culture in the way only TV and movies do today. Not coincidentially, Felker's generation was the last group of really top-flight creative people to enter the business, and I would guess that was because they grew up before TV began rewiring our brains. There is something about having to come up with the images on your own that gives print and radio a different kind of imaginative rigor, and all our misplaced populism about TV and movies (really a sort of wishful present-ism) doesn't change that.
In Felker's magazines there was a willingness to address any topic, in any way that suited it best. This is a function of intellectual confidence, in themselves and their product and above all their readers, that editors simply don't show anymore. (I suspect they could have it, in the right environment; my friend Ed Park did some great editing at The Believer.) Heading down the chain of command to artists and writers, the uncertainty only increases--a magazine's content is only as audacious as the editors controlling it.
And so people with the capacity of a Felker or Glaser or Wolfe don't go into magazines today, because what a magazine is, and what it is for, has devolved into something unworthy of them. With very few exceptions, the American magazine business can be seen as an arm of advertising, and shares with advertising all of its flaws: its lack of substance; its obsession with surface; its confusion of currency with importance; its manipulative aspect; and above all its tendency to repeat itself. But unlike advertising, there is no driving force behind the modern magazine. In our time, selling something is an utterly elemental pursuit; a magazine is simply a vehicle, one among many, no more beautiful or necessary than a billboard.
Most really intelligent people aren't interested in, say, Justin Timberlake; and those really intelligent people who must force themselves to keep up with such things are, in my experience, gloomy tending toward miserable. Successful or not, they live in the chilly shadow of their own wasted potential. You cannot work in American magazines without ceding some portion of your brain over to topics that really only enthrall 13-year-olds, and though the same thing is true to a certain extent in TV and movies, the brute amount of money flowing through those industries means that a lot of offbeat and interesting stuff happens in spite of itself. Not so with magazines.
Felker said, "I believe that print — now that broadcast has become the dominant mass media — has to be aimed at educated, affluent people.” This is undoubtedly correct, on both the ad and edit sides, and grows more so by the day. As print retreats, its few gestures towards mass appeal are merely cross-promoting truly popular forms like TV or movies. But it is a shame; there are certain things that print can do better than other media, and need to do if we're going to have a well-functioning country. The newspaper experience can be replicated via internet; for the moment magazines are still trapped on paper. Killed by the old technology, not yet saved by the new one, those few magazines that still insist on their own territory--that demand the reader come into their sphere, not simply consume more facts about famous strangers in a slightly different way--are more irrelevant than ever.
Felker's New York probably hastened that slide, in that what it spawned wasn't a new generation of Glasers and Wolfes, but a puffy lifestyle magazine for every mid-sized city. Art is difficult, and the gap between success and failure large and obvious. Commerce is a much more predictable transaction; and so without someone at the top who is completely committed by the idea of creating a new world of the mind via ink on paper, a magazine inevitably declines into just another way to make a buck, and a not very efficient one at that.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Maybe if we all close our eyes...
...this wonderful parody of Google News will become real...Except for the Cubs winning the Series, of course. That's only okay if they could share it somehow with the Redbirds.
Read this article…
Thursday, June 5, 2008
"The Second Gun"
Today is the fortieth anniversary of RFK's being shot here in Los Angeles. (He died a day later.) Though his murder is commonly thought to be open-and-shut--"crazy Palestinian enraged over the sale of fighter jets to Israel, et cetera"--unfortunately this is not the case. While it has never taken on the Byzantine permutations of his brother's murder, as with the Martin Luther King assassination, the passage of time and the accrual of information increasingly suggests dark dealings were afoot.
The main discrepancy in RFK's murder is how the number and direction of the shots fired by Sirhan do not match up with the wounds suffered by Kennedy and others, most specifically RFK's fatal shot, which LA Coroner Thomas Noguchi put at behind the ear, from roughly point blank range. Given that there seem to be shots from two directions, and too many shots for Sirhan's eight-shot revolver, the question is: who else was shooting? The main candidate is right-wing rent-a-cop Thane Eugene Cesar.
This theory is put forth in the 1972 video below, which I've attempted to find for years; it's out-of-print and nobody could ever get me a copy, so I thank whoever posted it on Google Video). While some aspects of its construction (reenactments, suggestive montage) make it obvious that it is far from objective, its points are succinctly made and difficult to refute. And there's a wealth of footage and photography.
Fascinating, and depressing. I embed it below...with the knowledge that perhaps there are better ways to honor RFK. Given my choice, I'd opt for vigorous sex with movie stars. I wouldn't even care if the FBI was taping it.
Read this article…
The main discrepancy in RFK's murder is how the number and direction of the shots fired by Sirhan do not match up with the wounds suffered by Kennedy and others, most specifically RFK's fatal shot, which LA Coroner Thomas Noguchi put at behind the ear, from roughly point blank range. Given that there seem to be shots from two directions, and too many shots for Sirhan's eight-shot revolver, the question is: who else was shooting? The main candidate is right-wing rent-a-cop Thane Eugene Cesar.
This theory is put forth in the 1972 video below, which I've attempted to find for years; it's out-of-print and nobody could ever get me a copy, so I thank whoever posted it on Google Video). While some aspects of its construction (reenactments, suggestive montage) make it obvious that it is far from objective, its points are succinctly made and difficult to refute. And there's a wealth of footage and photography.
Fascinating, and depressing. I embed it below...with the knowledge that perhaps there are better ways to honor RFK. Given my choice, I'd opt for vigorous sex with movie stars. I wouldn't even care if the FBI was taping it.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Me? Number one?
(Folks, I wrote this a couple of weeks ago for fun. I had vague notions of trying to sell it, but realized over the weekend that I couldn't possibly do so in time. The wheels of publishing grind ever-so-slowly. So, enjoy.)
I JUST WANT TO HELP THE TEAM
All of us who follow NBA basketball were a bit shocked this week when we heard that the Chicago Bulls snagged the number one pick in the upcoming draft. Mathematically, they only had a 1.7% chance of getting the pick, and since Michael Jordan left in 1997, the franchise has seemed, well, a little snake-bit. Fluky injuries, a lot of bad draft picks, some trades that haven’t panned out…Put it this way: it’s been a tough decade to be a Bulls fan.
So the sudden good luck was surprising. But what was even more surprising was the news that they plan to select me.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful, It’s a huge honor and I will absolutely try my best, that goes without saying. It’s just—I guess I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it. I didn’t realize they could pick anybody. Then again, when you’re talking the kind of money they mentioned on the phone, who’s going to say no, right? I like working from home and everything but…damn.
I found out the day after the draft when John Paxson, the general manager of the Bulls, called me here in Santa Monica. I was out doing errands on my tricycle and he left a message on my machine. That was what, Wednesday morning? I haven’t called him back yet; I know I should, but to be honest, the more I think about it, the more it freaks me out. I mean…wow. What a life-change. Having to shower with your co-workers.
The main reason I’m freaked is because I’m not technically what you’d call a professional basketball player. But my wife Kate reminded me that none of the other players in the draft are professionals either. “Some of them haven’t even finished college,” she said. “Didn’t you get most of a Master’s Degree? They’re the ones that should be nervous.”
I love my wife.
Still, optimism doesn’t change the fact that I am only 5’6” (well, 5’5—or maybe 5’4” if I haven’t done my yoga). But then again, how tall was Spud Webb, 5’2”? Of course he had tremendous leaping ability, whereas at 38 (39 next month) I have to stretch every day or else my lower back gets really tight. When that happens, everything’s uncomfortable, even sitting on the couch. But that’s why they have trainers, right?
And on the other hand, whenever we used to play “HORSE” on the hoop next to the garage, my dad always said I had a decent jump shot. We didn’t play often, because I got sick of losing. Honestly, I couldn’t afford it; whenever there was money on the line—even, like two dollars—I’d totally freeze up. I’d have to visualize missing, just to relax enough to hit the rim.
Even though my shot is all right—I probably make five out of ten when I’m “on”—after about twenty shots, the ball starts getting really heavy. I wonder if that’s ever happened to LeBron. You’re playing HORSE with your dad and doing all right, then all the sudden, it’s like heaving a boulder, and he starts asking if you want to play “double or nothing” and you can hardly breathe and have to start visualizing shooting the ball so it gets wedged behind the backboard where all the spiderwebs are, just so you can quit with dignity. “Sorry Dad, I would finish the game, but you know how I feel about spiders.”
I probably shouldn’t tell Paxson all of that, at least not until after the contract’s signed. I’ll go to the park and practice, that’ll make me feel more confident. Maybe somebody in the building has a basketball. Or better yet, a soccer ball—they’re a bit lighter.
Number one picks are really about the future of the franchise. In that case, I think I can see why they picked me. I mean, I’m not likely to get any worse, especially if I’m going to be getting a lot more exercise. If they think I’m good enough now, when all I do is sit at my desk…What I’m trying to say is, I’m happy to be “a cornerstone.” That doesn’t seem like it will require a lot of physical activity.
Obviously, I have no problem mentoring the young guys. Dating, careers, investing—we forget how tough it is when you’re that age. Especially if you’re suddenly famous and have a lot of money. Don’t worry—it won’t go to my head. Except for the money part, that might be a little tough. And having people recognize me, how weird. Maybe I should change my name.
The one thing Mr. Paxson did say in the phone message was that “I seemed like a high character guy” and that they were always looking for those. Well, I may be short, and pretty weak in my upper body, and I think legally I’ll be obligated to tell them I have a slight case of cerebral palsy (people usually just ask, “Did you twist your ankle?”)—but if you’re looking for high character, I’m your man. I won three “Human Relations” awards in high school, and I’m still a pretty solid citizen. The people downstairs are always calling to see if I can watch their 11-year-old, and I usually say “yes” even when it’s not totally convenient. Hey, whatever. What goes around comes around. Although to be frank my wife ends up doing more work than I do, the kid being a girl and relating better to her. But—and I swear this is totally true—I found a twenty dollar bill at Whole Foods last year and tried to turn it into the security guard (he told me to keep it).
I guess Kate’s right, that kind of good deed does pay off!
Read this article…
I JUST WANT TO HELP THE TEAM
All of us who follow NBA basketball were a bit shocked this week when we heard that the Chicago Bulls snagged the number one pick in the upcoming draft. Mathematically, they only had a 1.7% chance of getting the pick, and since Michael Jordan left in 1997, the franchise has seemed, well, a little snake-bit. Fluky injuries, a lot of bad draft picks, some trades that haven’t panned out…Put it this way: it’s been a tough decade to be a Bulls fan.
So the sudden good luck was surprising. But what was even more surprising was the news that they plan to select me.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful, It’s a huge honor and I will absolutely try my best, that goes without saying. It’s just—I guess I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it. I didn’t realize they could pick anybody. Then again, when you’re talking the kind of money they mentioned on the phone, who’s going to say no, right? I like working from home and everything but…damn.
I found out the day after the draft when John Paxson, the general manager of the Bulls, called me here in Santa Monica. I was out doing errands on my tricycle and he left a message on my machine. That was what, Wednesday morning? I haven’t called him back yet; I know I should, but to be honest, the more I think about it, the more it freaks me out. I mean…wow. What a life-change. Having to shower with your co-workers.
The main reason I’m freaked is because I’m not technically what you’d call a professional basketball player. But my wife Kate reminded me that none of the other players in the draft are professionals either. “Some of them haven’t even finished college,” she said. “Didn’t you get most of a Master’s Degree? They’re the ones that should be nervous.”
I love my wife.
Still, optimism doesn’t change the fact that I am only 5’6” (well, 5’5—or maybe 5’4” if I haven’t done my yoga). But then again, how tall was Spud Webb, 5’2”? Of course he had tremendous leaping ability, whereas at 38 (39 next month) I have to stretch every day or else my lower back gets really tight. When that happens, everything’s uncomfortable, even sitting on the couch. But that’s why they have trainers, right?
And on the other hand, whenever we used to play “HORSE” on the hoop next to the garage, my dad always said I had a decent jump shot. We didn’t play often, because I got sick of losing. Honestly, I couldn’t afford it; whenever there was money on the line—even, like two dollars—I’d totally freeze up. I’d have to visualize missing, just to relax enough to hit the rim.
Even though my shot is all right—I probably make five out of ten when I’m “on”—after about twenty shots, the ball starts getting really heavy. I wonder if that’s ever happened to LeBron. You’re playing HORSE with your dad and doing all right, then all the sudden, it’s like heaving a boulder, and he starts asking if you want to play “double or nothing” and you can hardly breathe and have to start visualizing shooting the ball so it gets wedged behind the backboard where all the spiderwebs are, just so you can quit with dignity. “Sorry Dad, I would finish the game, but you know how I feel about spiders.”
I probably shouldn’t tell Paxson all of that, at least not until after the contract’s signed. I’ll go to the park and practice, that’ll make me feel more confident. Maybe somebody in the building has a basketball. Or better yet, a soccer ball—they’re a bit lighter.
Number one picks are really about the future of the franchise. In that case, I think I can see why they picked me. I mean, I’m not likely to get any worse, especially if I’m going to be getting a lot more exercise. If they think I’m good enough now, when all I do is sit at my desk…What I’m trying to say is, I’m happy to be “a cornerstone.” That doesn’t seem like it will require a lot of physical activity.
Obviously, I have no problem mentoring the young guys. Dating, careers, investing—we forget how tough it is when you’re that age. Especially if you’re suddenly famous and have a lot of money. Don’t worry—it won’t go to my head. Except for the money part, that might be a little tough. And having people recognize me, how weird. Maybe I should change my name.
The one thing Mr. Paxson did say in the phone message was that “I seemed like a high character guy” and that they were always looking for those. Well, I may be short, and pretty weak in my upper body, and I think legally I’ll be obligated to tell them I have a slight case of cerebral palsy (people usually just ask, “Did you twist your ankle?”)—but if you’re looking for high character, I’m your man. I won three “Human Relations” awards in high school, and I’m still a pretty solid citizen. The people downstairs are always calling to see if I can watch their 11-year-old, and I usually say “yes” even when it’s not totally convenient. Hey, whatever. What goes around comes around. Although to be frank my wife ends up doing more work than I do, the kid being a girl and relating better to her. But—and I swear this is totally true—I found a twenty dollar bill at Whole Foods last year and tried to turn it into the security guard (he told me to keep it).
I guess Kate’s right, that kind of good deed does pay off!
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Paul! Yale! Right on!
Ed over at Dullblog has posted the happy news that Yale has given Paul McCartney an honorary degree.
I wonder if they'll hit him up for money? "Your Class Dues, Mr. McCartney, cover the costs of your Alumni Magazine..."
Read this article…
I wonder if they'll hit him up for money? "Your Class Dues, Mr. McCartney, cover the costs of your Alumni Magazine..."
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Buy Ed's book!
A friend of mine (and fellow Dullblogger) named Ed Park has just had his first novel come out. It's called Personal Days
and its website is here. Now, because the publishing business is fantastically messed-up, the performance of one's first novel is very, very, oh-so-very important--either the beginning of a beautiful relationship, or cause for recriminations and broken hearts on both sides.
So if you're looking for something to read on the beach, buy Personal Days. Ed's a funny guy and great writer.
Read this article…
and its website is here. Now, because the publishing business is fantastically messed-up, the performance of one's first novel is very, very, oh-so-very important--either the beginning of a beautiful relationship, or cause for recriminations and broken hearts on both sides. So if you're looking for something to read on the beach, buy Personal Days
. Ed's a funny guy and great writer.
Monday, May 12, 2008
$7500 spent; carbon reduced by 90%
Jon over at Tiny Revolution linked to a very interesting column about one man's successful (and surprisingly cheap) efforts to retrofit his house, eco-style.
Read this article…
Monday, April 28, 2008
John Cleese on comedy
This podcast of John Cleese breaking down a few pages of a comedic screenplay with some students from UCSB makes me think we should start cloning him. We have the technology, and it would only require a swab from the inside of his cheek. Trust me, any petty moral concerns would fall by the wayside once we saw how much funnier the movies were...
I'll start a petition.
Read this article…
I'll start a petition.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
The Greatest Cartoon EVER is coming back...
Dear wife just turned me on to this bootleg video: it's a preview of Season 3 of The Venture Bros. TiVo being set NOW...
Read this article…
Friday, April 4, 2008
Martin Luther King, RIP
Spare a thought today, from the heart, for Martin Luther King, probably the greatest citizen this country has ever produced. Assassinated forty years ago today.
Also consider using the phrase "by gum" in a sentence.
Those interested in how the world really works should consider listening to these two podcasts, courtesy of radio station KPFA's "Guns and Butter" program. In them, lawyer and writer William Pepper outlines what took place on April 4, 1968. (Hint: it wasn't one crazy guy going crazy.)
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=24212
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=24329
Read this article…
Also consider using the phrase "by gum" in a sentence.
Those interested in how the world really works should consider listening to these two podcasts, courtesy of radio station KPFA's "Guns and Butter" program. In them, lawyer and writer William Pepper outlines what took place on April 4, 1968. (Hint: it wasn't one crazy guy going crazy.)
http://www.kpfa.org/archives
http://www.kpfa.org/archives
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Attention all lovers of D&D
In some random gambolings around the internet, I unearthed this great piece about E. Gary Gygax from The Believer. As I was reading, I could almost smell my pal's mildewy basement rec room (along with the lingering scents of sexual frustration and Doritos). Looking back, I'm sure that much of Barry Trotter was lifted directly from my hours as a teen playing D&D. So blame that, if you wish.
The line in the article that particularly struck me was, "in a society that conditions people to compete, and rewards those who compete successfully, Dungeons & Dragons is countercultural..." It certainly felt that way to me, as I played it way back when. D&D had its roots in war games, and could often devolve into fantasies of rape and rapine--but like improv, its outside hides a core of authentic rebellion, the kind you get whenever someone is given a method to tap into their unedited self.
Dungeons and Dragons' authentic power in this regard--in its unleashing of the imagination of its participants--is as plausible a reason as any for the anti-Satanist anxieties that accompanied the peak popularity of the game. Remember, this was the Reagan-era Cold War, a time of binary choices: capitalism or communism, God or Satan, Coke or New Coke. Never mind that it was a false choice--that the USSR wasn't primed to roll across Western Europe, or that the "Leave It to Beaver" lifestyle was a much a fantasy as free-love, or that New Coke was a brazen hustle designed to increase market share. The Sixties and Seventies were still fresh in everybody's minds; we all saw what happened then, didn't we, when people got a little too creative, a little too cute...I'm just riffing here, but is it any wonder that a game based on imagination, and cooperation--where the whole point is to envision a new world, and working together to succeed in it--would threaten the authorities of this one? The irony is that D&D is above all an orderly world; for me, playing it never felt like a trip through chaos. More like time serving under a different God. Characters who acted before they thought, or were merely self-indulgent, usually didn't last long.
The backbone, the self-sustaining myth of our current junior-varsity dystopia is simply "that's the way it is, always has been, has to be." That's crap, of course, but it's not crap to fear the power of the liberated mind. To imagine is an attack on the flaws of the present. And, as ineffectual as it seems, the mother and nourishing root of any change. Just as every tyranny comes from apathy and stupidity, every innovation is born first as a whim. So I think the more imagination humanity can generate, the brighter our collective future will be. I wonder if they could teach D&D in schools?
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
There is no "q" in team
...but there is "eat me." Or there would be, if they hadn't been so chinzy with the e's. It's like that friggin' novel, what was it called, "Even Though Great Literature is Incredibly Difficult to Write, and One Could Claim, With Quite a Bit of Evidence, That Novels are Dead as a Cultural Force in Our Society, I Think What the World Needs is a Book With No 'E's In It"? Was that the title?
Anyway, Dirk Voetberg has a funny piece up at McSweeney's today. Check it (but don't wreck it).
Read this article…
Anyway, Dirk Voetberg has a funny piece up at McSweeney's today. Check it (but don't wreck it).
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Rutles 'n' roundup
Check out my latest post on Hey Dullblog here.
Other things I like:
The BBC sketch show "Swinging."
"Top Gear."
The Apu Trilogy. (Rex Reed: "So good apu'ed myself!")
Read this article…
Other things I like:
The BBC sketch show "Swinging."
"Top Gear."
The Apu Trilogy. (Rex Reed: "So good apu'ed myself!")
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
Where am I these days?
I'm posting quite a bit over at Hey Dullblog, a group blog focused on The Beatles. You are encouraged to check it out.
Read this article…
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Those of you determined to resist Obama-mania, or simply amused by the novel gender politicsl embodied in the latest Clinton candidacy, should check out these snappy Bill for First Gentleman items. The creator of the merch, Lee Tyler, says that "proceeds go towards the production of South African electro and funny comedy shorts." And who can't get behind that? Wallets open, forward march!
Sex, Lies, and Hollywood
Friend Dave Hanson has joined the Web-olution! (That seems just lame enough to be a word.) He's writing for a new site called Sex, Lies, and Hollywood, where browsers can satisfy their need for snarky gossip as quickly and efficiently as a deep-net trawler scours the oceans free of all life.
Seriously, there's a picture of Aretha Franklin that'll make you lose your appetite. Forever.
Read this article…
Seriously, there's a picture of Aretha Franklin that'll make you lose your appetite. Forever.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Monday, February 4, 2008
I am part of a spiffy new group blog called "Hey Dullblog." It will cover all things Beatles, and I think you will love it. Come visit.
Read this article…
Some Random Thoughts
Random thought #1: I was as impressed as anybody during the regular season, and I was rooting for the Pats to win because the Giants bore the crap out me. But now that the Super Bowl is over, can we dispense with the idea that this year's Pats team was the best ever? If the Giants did that to them, what would the '85 Bears have done? The real question is, would Brady have been KILLED? You beat the Pats by running on their undersized defense, and pressuring Brady. That is precisely what the Bears could do. (BTW, I was going to link to a vicious, vicious hit by Wilber Marshall, but the NFL has taken it down. Punks.)
Random thought #2: In the last fifteen years, how I'd always planned to earn my living--stringing together amusing words--has been rendered almost worthless by the internet. With a practically limitless amount of funny writing now available at the click of a mouse, how will people like me--people with the ability and desire to make people laugh, but who aren't Will Ferrell--modify what they do to make money? This blog provides some interesting theories as to what will sell on the internet, and why.
Read this article…
Random thought #2: In the last fifteen years, how I'd always planned to earn my living--stringing together amusing words--has been rendered almost worthless by the internet. With a practically limitless amount of funny writing now available at the click of a mouse, how will people like me--people with the ability and desire to make people laugh, but who aren't Will Ferrell--modify what they do to make money? This blog provides some interesting theories as to what will sell on the internet, and why.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Playboy's party jokes, written by God
Overheard at College. Just read it, you won't be disappointed.
"Guy: I slept with a bear once.
Girl: In what way?
Prof: Was it a mistake?
Guy: Oh, it was definitely a mistake."
Sarah Lawrence College
My favorite so far:
Guy: Guess what? I’m coming out to my parents over Thanksgiving!
Girl: Yeah?
Guy: Yeah, and I’ve already picked out my outfit.
Yale University
Kate just called this site "Playboy's party jokes, written by God."
(BTW, speaking of Playboy's party jokes, I recently learned that the little cartoon girl in the stockings who capered around in-between all the jokes was called "the Femlin.")
Read this article…
"Guy: I slept with a bear once.
Girl: In what way?
Prof: Was it a mistake?
Guy: Oh, it was definitely a mistake."
Sarah Lawrence College
My favorite so far:
Guy: Guess what? I’m coming out to my parents over Thanksgiving!
Girl: Yeah?
Guy: Yeah, and I’ve already picked out my outfit.
Yale University
Kate just called this site "Playboy's party jokes, written by God."
(BTW, speaking of Playboy's party jokes, I recently learned that the little cartoon girl in the stockings who capered around in-between all the jokes was called "the Femlin.")
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Why I was a History major
(And no, it's not 'an History major.' That sounds retarded. The first rule of grammar is you don't have to do it if it sounds retarded.)
Read this article…
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
If you're not reading my wife's blog...
...you're only robbing yourself. Check it out here.
Kate sez, "Fi (a cat of ours) doesn't read my blog because I use too many swears." But you, YOU have no excuse not to go over there and read about inviso-text, my questionable TV-viewing habits, a folder titled "No, Kate, No!", and a miniature Jane Austen parody.
Read this article…
Kate sez, "Fi (a cat of ours) doesn't read my blog because I use too many swears." But you, YOU have no excuse not to go over there and read about inviso-text, my questionable TV-viewing habits, a folder titled "No, Kate, No!", and a miniature Jane Austen parody.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
If you've ever wondered, "What is it like..."
"...where Mike lives?" take a look at this interactive map. Go to the Santa Monica portion--the far left portion, where Wilshire Boulevard meets the ocean--and browse around. We live right close to Zucky's (now a bank). The bowling alley built by Harold Lloyd has been entirely gutted, with a new structure being built behind the preserved facade. I bike past all these buildings many times a week. Fun, eh? And I've never crashed on "Dead Man's Curve"!
Read this article…
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Groucho Marx
Having caught a double-feature at the Aero last week, I was reminded how much I adore Groucho Marx. If you are similarly inclined--or simply "Groucho-curious" as they say in the personals--I highly recommend Stefan Kanfer's bio.
In the meantime, whet your appetite with this documentary from my one-time employer, WTTW.
Read this article…
In the meantime, whet your appetite with this documentary from my one-time employer, WTTW.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
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