the Thunderclap of my Father's Indignation

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2010-09-15T14:16:00.004-06:00

You're looking in the wrong place! Should you have stumbled upon this blog in search of my terribly interesting misadventures, well, look no further than here:

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Adieu,

Douglas

Cranky Pants

2009-10-30T11:30:00.004-06:00

Man, I'm not sure if it is the crappy weather, or if everyone is not getting enough sleep worrying about H1N1 or what but boy have people put on their cranky pants today. The worst part of this is that 'innocent bystanders' have to suffer for that most insufferable of qualities: entitlement. Both of the incidents I'm about to narrate could have been avoided if people just didn't assume the world revolves around them, or that the rules don't apply to them, or that everyone is out to ruin their day.

About an hour ago a gentleman came into the store and wanted to make a return. Here is, to the best of my memory, the transcript of his conversation with (unbeknownst to him, the worst person he could have possibly pulled this stunt on, let's call them Beth):

Customer: "I purchased this book yesterday because I couldn't find my other copy in my room. I found it now, and I'd like to return this. I'm returning this book."
Beth: "I'm sorry, but we can't do that. That is textbook; it's being used for a class. All books used for classes had to be returned by October 9th."
Customer: "But I just bought it yesterday."
Beth: "That... doesn't really matter, sir. The returns information is on that bright pink slip of paper stapled to your receipt..."
Customer: "I didn't read that. I didn't know. I'm returning this book."
Beth: "But you got in from the textbook aisle, right? And you didn't know it was a textbook?"
Customer: "Right."

long pause.

Beth: "OK, I'm going to make an exception, this one time..."
Customer: "Good, 'cause I make an exception to shop here. I've bought thousands of dollars of books here."
Beth: "An exception from what?"
Customer: "From shopping at other bookstores. From buying books on-line for a fraction of the price."
Beth: "OK, look, you've already won here. We're allowing the return. You don't have to yell anymore."
Customer: "Good, so let's just drop this, OK?"

long pause. transaction completed.

Beth: "Have a nice day." (said, amazingly, sans sarcasm).

There is lots to say here but firstly, even though I work here and have our best interests at heart, at the outset I hadn't taken sides. Our returns policy for textbooks is harsh, but it was enacted to prevent people from treating us like a lending library. Students would actually walk in, buy the book for class, and then return it an hour later after class was over. Most times the book would be damaged enough by handling, that the publishers we order from would deny us returns. In short, we're stuck with lots of books that don't look new and won't sell. Add that up every semester and in an unforgiving economy and yikes. No wonder bookstores are closing all over the place.

So yeah, the returns policy is harsh. And in this situation, I actually would have been inclined to cave. But it became very clear early on, perhaps the second "I'm returning this book" that this guy could give a care about us. He was used to getting his way, and in this case, being denied a return was the equivalent of telling him he failed at life. We were a tool at his disposal which when functioning correctly, always left him feeling better. Now I'm not sure if the whole "I already had the book" was true, or if he just did as he implies he goes out of his way to avoid, and his Amazon order just took longer than he thought to arrive. But the guy sure was a piece of work. We're not going out of our way to disservice you as an individual.

The second incident involved a woman who was asked to check her bag up front. She then proceeded to rattle on about how she "always hated this policy" and "been coming here for 20 years..." Well here's the thing. New people work the register every few months. To them it makes no difference if this was your first time in the store. And they aren't profiling. They are not judging you. You have to check your bag because everyone does. Everyone does because a few folks would like to fill their bags full of books and walk out with them. That, and its tiny and cramped in here. If everyone was walking around with a University sized book-bag stuffed with laptops and everything there would be no room to do anything. Don't be so entitled; it is unfair to give you preferential treatment.

rant over. sorry. weekend? ohsweetjesusyes.

14 OF 69: Love You, Obviously / Like You Really Care

2009-10-27T09:24:00.003-06:00

Oh, how we get so jaded so fast.

Its funny how all of those same things that get the poets all worked up, a beautiful sunset, a bright shining moon, when set in the wrong context can also make us pretty damn cranky. How fucking romantic, but I've been there.

There is something terrible about this feeling, something selfish and untoward. When you are single, even the sight of a couple holding hands can give one a bad case of snark. Holding hands? How cute. They must have just met. Roses? Nobody has ever thought of those before! You may as well have gotten that Valentine's bear from CVS.

Its odd, too, how this feeling is a mostly youthful one. I'm sure its far from universal, but I'd bet that most people who enter in this mindset are in their early 20s. So wise but so young. So old but so sensitive. A good reminder that not all emotions generated from Love are pleasant, far from it. And this one might be the worst.

Structurally this song doubles up its power by fusing the lyrics to a sort of beat-poet form. Very pared down, I can almost hear the finger-snaps at the ends of the line. And there are some dandies. The "love you, obviously" is a killer, it's delivery, with the 'obviously' splintered with cynicism just makes you roll your eyes. Oh dear.

Sadness and depression, from being rejected or let down? I get that. But then to turn the tables and make it so that everyone else who is having a good time, they're the walking cliches? Poor form. Yes indeed Mister Singer, you are a dancing bear and you look ridiculous.

13 of 60: Fido, Your Leash is Too Long / Fido, Your Leash is Too Long

2009-10-26T11:59:00.005-06:00

Ostensibly a song about sticking your nose, or perhaps other things, where they don't belong, "Fido, Your leash is Too Long" can be boiled down to a couple of pretty clever to semi-clever dog breed puns. I've never been a huge fan of this tune, mostly because I consider it a throwaway between two very powerful moments on the first album, the aforementioned "Book of Love" and the acerbically funny "How Fucking Romantic" (a paean to hipster dating if I ever heard one).

The bubble and pop of this song can't be entirely ignored though. The synthy, electro vibe is as silly as the puns, which in the end don't scan as puns at all. I'll give you shitzu for "shit, you"; but foxhounds has to be pretty garbled to come out "fucked."

Calling a cheating lover a dog is one thing...

rating: (an apropos) "puppy love"

12 of 69: The Book of Love is Long and Boring/ No One Can Lift the Damn Thing

2009-10-21T12:50:00.005-06:00

A fascinating premise: a single book containing everything you ever wanted to know about Love. Every single relationship, the pit-falls to avoid, tried and true methods of landing that perfect person, all the crazy stuff anyone has ever done in It's Name. Some Borgesian mammoth of a text, conceivably infinite in size and scope. A document of humanity, or at least, the better parts of it.

And, of course, it is also the physical record of music. As the singer remarks, "the Book of Love has music in it/ In fact that is where music comes from." We're not just talking 'love music' but music. period. And that's not so unreasonable a theory, right? This song is also a reminder that music can also be read, both in a written form, with the clefs and lines and squiggles and all that, with words or without. And not just 'scanned,' but interpreted. My Book of Love would be filled with chicken scratches lining the margins, copious underlined passages and frequent "No, no no, no, no"s, "ew"s and "You're damn right!"s.

The Book of Love also occupies the center of the first CD of songs. I'm guessing that not everyone purchases all three albums at once, so for many of us, at least for a while, this song operates right at the heart of things. It's a weighty song, both in tone and in meaning, arguably the 'textbook definition' of Stephin's 69LS project. The voice, as always, is gravely and wonderful--as old as the Book of Love itself. I could easily picture this voice narrating the whole thing, droning on and on, and he must have been at this for some time now, because it's getting kind of ragged.

But then there are the beautiful moments, where Stephin sings what might be my favorite line of the whole damn piece:

"I love it when you read to me/
and you
you can read me anything."

It's such a romantic moment, he can't even say it all in one go. He breaks up on the most important word, 'you,' ends up repeating it, doubling its presence, and finally get that single line reading "and you". Another precise distillation of love. What is love? "and you".

rating: 'infatuation"

While I Was Away

2009-08-03T14:18:00.004-06:00

Fear Not loyal readers. I will be back to the 69LS breakdown soon. I've just been busy. The Summer storms have come and gone and left us up to our ears in... well congratulations, if you can finish that quote on your own, you're as much of a Mr Show fan as I am.

Stuff that has been keeping me sane these past weeks in the face of work:

10. Mad Men. A recent affair, but a good one. Just finished the second episode. To quote the missus: "Ergh! This show gets me so mad!... in a good way!"
09. M83. The frenchy electronica band that played Pitchfork a few weeks back. I've been listening to Saturdays = Youth a lot. Its very summery and light, but my work friends have told me: "You listen to the same music as pretentious 12 year-old girls." Um, thanks?
08. the Tribe. My favorite baseball team has slowly been dismantled. Goodbye Victor. Goodbye Phifer. Hello 2012.
07. United 93. A terribly disturbing re-enactment of 9/11 and the passengers who attempted to re-take their hijacked plane. Not a perfect film by any means, but the subject matter alone makes it deeply moving.
06. Green Lantern Comics. Sinestro War! Blackest Night! Zombie Elongated Man and Martian Manhunter! Scratch the 'pretentious 12 year-old girl' comment from above an replace it with 'average 12 year-old boy'. But man I love me some green lantern.
05. Dirty Projectors. Their latest album Bitte Orca is my runaway choice for album of the year so far. It's strange and catchy and playful and awesome. Listen to the song "Stillness is the Move" and if you aren't sold, then you should just give up on contemporary music.
04. the "Very Short Introduction" series by Oxford. So far I've read their intro to Dinosaurs and WW1. Up next: Consciousness? Dada and the Surrealists? We'll see...
03. Homicide. The non-fiction account by David Simon. I am a Wire fiend and it's come to this in order for me to get a fresh fix.
02. Inherent Vice. the novel by Thomas Pynchon. technically it goes on sale tomorrow, but there are some perks of working in books. I liken this novel to the Big Lebowski set back in 1970, where the Dude isn't a burn-out quite yet. A little more conspiracy-er, too. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
01. The Simpsons. I've made it my mission to rewatch the series in order. So netflix has been sending me a DVD or 2 a week. I've just finished Season 2. Amazing how good this show was so early on. They really found themselves quite quick. Also amazing how much better the 3rd-7th season will be, if memory serves.

anyhow. thanks for your patience...

11 of 69: Cause I always say I love you / When I mean turn out the light

2009-06-19T11:55:00.004-06:00

"I think I Need a New Heart"

Human beings rarely say what they mean. That in itself is sort of a meaningless statement--through the 'duh' factor of how obvious it is. Of course we don't say what we mean. Language is too sloppy and evasive and full of multiple meanings. Even the most careful and taciturn among us slip up sometimes. What I find interesting though is when people purposefully say the wrong thing for the right reasons or vice versa.

If a person is psychologically exhausted from a long day of work, has possibly fought a bit with their significant other during the day (but things are good now) and is just tired of further conversation and they say "I love you" they may very well mean "Please turn out the light (I want to go to sleep)." But that "I love you" still functions the way the person intends it--most of the time. If the other person is kind, or intuitive enough, they'll respond with a "I love you too," and *click* off goes the lights. Simply asking the person to "Turn off the light" would be the honest route, but also the one most fraught with peril. If the significant other is still fuming, that's the last thing they want to hear. If they are in the middle of a story or anecdote about their day that they feel is very important, and you blurt out "Turn out the light," you sure as hell better believe that the light is staying on.

And that's just the domestic reading of that couplet. I think the actual lyric refers more plainly to 'If I tell you that I love you then we'll end up having sex.' But is this more or less duplicitous? It's certainly selfish and unfair, but does the other person really not know what they are getting?

I think its wonderful that the narrator can only speak the truth in song. It's pretty much the thesis statement of 69LS. Forget everything the singer is actually telling their lover, their real message is in the song "I Think I Need a New Heart" which just so happens to be this song. If 69LS is an album of love songs about love songs, then this is its heart. Odd (or maybe perfectly apropos?) that this heart needs replacing.

Grade: "Adoration" (5 of 6)

10 of 69: The Cactus Where Your heart Should be / Has Lovely Little Flowers

2009-06-12T08:34:00.004-06:00

"The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be"

Alright, time to man up and get back on this project. My competitor is gearing up to lap me. Although to be fair, my discussions of the 69LS have like, paragraphs and stuff, whereas hers are twitter-esque in their succintity. Anyhow, on to my tenth entry in what increasingly appears to be a Summer long quest to pick apart the Mag Fields magnum opus.

"Cactus" coming right on the heals of "Bunnies" packs a helluva a one-two punch. The playful randiness of the previous song (where our protagonists are content to roll around in the hay all day--let's disregard the 'furries' undertone) is supplanted by a downright cranky guy who is refreshingly equal parts wistful. This is just another example of how strategic the 69 songs are arranged. And disparate pairings like this have the effect of augmenting each partner's salient features. you know, like a collage. or a really nice BLT.

At first blush, a cactus doesn't seem like a particularly attractive vehicle in a metaphor for love. Rather simplistic, no? It's spiky and forbidding. If your heart was a cactus, well, you wouldn't be attracting to many mates. But this short song is overflowing with unexpected connotations. Leave it to Merritt to remind us that just like any other forbidding plants, cacti produce incredibly beautiful flowers. And thus the singer can be both 'stuck' on their love object's spines and completely enamored of her "lovely little flowers."

And when the cactus becomes less a person and more a person's heart all kinds of nice lines of thought can be drawn. A cactus is one tough customer, built to thrive in a harsh environment. It can go long periods of time without nourishment. It defends itself with princkly spines but can also be quite grand and statuesque. "Cactus" the song doesn't cite these possible meanings, but they are there, and suddenly a heart as a cactus isn't all that far-fetched. It's actually pretty damn wonderful.

A surprisingly powerful little song. Grade: "Adoration" (4 out of 6)

9 of 69: Let Abbots, Babbitts and Cabots / Say Mother Nature is Wrong

2009-06-08T10:15:00.007-06:00

"Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits"

Not to put too fine a point on things but this song is about fucking.

After a few days of combing through the lyrics of 69LS I decided to cut short what may be a fool's errand to document any all usage of or allusions to sex. If my basic knowledge of Freud proves in any way accurate, if you look hard enough, you'll find sex everywhere. So hopefully the list that follows chronicles only the most overt references. Anyhow, and away we go:

"Putting folks on the moon"
"Have an affair"
"Stars exploding in the night"
"Bang"
"Making you feel like a woman"
"A tryst"
"I've had him before"
"Two fireflies Fluoresce"
"The same song a million times in different ways"
"Do it"
"The things we did and didn't do"
"The way you say goodnight"
"See(ing) God"
"One night stand"
"Things we're all too young to know"
Any time "Dancing" is mentioned.
"Make love"
"Spinning like a gyroscope"
"Feeding your bear"
"Sex"
"The night you can't remember, the night I can't forget"
"Make things dark"
"I miss doing the wild thing with you"
"Cried out"
"Electric eels under the covers"
"You flew"
"Until you've had sweet lovin' there's no lovin' worth the name"
"I made you mine"
"You'll be the Pope"
"A twirl"
and....

drumroll please...

"Let's pretend we're bunny rabbits/
Let's do it all day long"

8 of 69: I Only keep this Heap for You

2009-06-01T12:59:00.004-06:00

"Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side"

Saving Graces.

You've just spend an entire weekend enjoying the gorgeous late Spring weather and then Monday rolls around and demands you return to work. Inside. In a basement. The saving grace? The second you step in the old stone structure the sky opens up and it's raining dogs and cats. So what happens if the girl you like just so happens to be a big hit with the menfolk, could theoretically be with anyone up to and including professor Blumen (who alledgedly makes her feel like a woman) and you aren't exactly doing so well in the looks department? Relax. Everything is okay. After all you're the luckiest guy on the lower east side. You've got wheels and she wants to go for a ride.

"Luckiest Guy", for me, is the first game changer on 69LS. If the album were boiled down to a dozen or so essential songs, this would be on the ballot for sure. It's beautifully simple if not offering the deeper registers of meaning like some of the others that came before it. It's merely the tale of a dude with a busted mug, the girl he loves and the rusted heap he hangs on to just for her.

It strikes me these kids are young and poor. Maybe its just in his head, but I doubt that any of the many guys buzzing around the object of the singer's affections are actually astronomers or buying her expensive gowns. Andy, bicycling across town in the rain just to bring her candy seems much more likely. And even if that guy pedaling through puddles is a regular Don Juan, you're the only one (for the moment) who can make the wind blow through her hair and laugh like a little girl. Yeah, maybe there's no chance for anything more, but sometimes the laughter of the pretty girl in the bucket seat next to yours is enough.

grade: "Infatuation" (5 out of 6)

7 of 69: Damn you/ I've never stayed up as late as this

2009-05-27T08:42:00.005-06:00

"Come Back From San Francisco"

Ah, the long distance relationship. Or rather, the long distance non-relationship, since much of what I can tease from these lyrics suggests a one-way street of rueful longing. It just so happens that street runs the breadth of our entire country, from New York to San Francisco. Not a small piece of real estate, that. In either case it doesn't seem like anyone is coming back to anybody else anytime soon.

Shirley Simms sings the lyrics on the album and this generates some interesting gender confusion ("Should pretty boys in discos/ distract you from your novel" implies that either a) the singer's far away man is bisexual or b) if the person in San Francisco is a girl then the singer herself is gay or at least bisexual) since the words are carefully arranged not to give away any gender pronouns for the love object. It's always just you, you, you. I've heard that Merritt will perform the vocals in concert if Simms is not around. This smoothes out some wrinkles, if anything makes the story 'simpler' so to speak seeing as Merritt, a gay man would most likely be pining over another man.

The second most notable theme of the song is an unattractive and overwhelming inferiority complex. The singer is constantly showing how insecure and just not good enough she is. There's some wordplay here. She's not just "in love with them" she is "awful in love them." Key difference. She talks of worrying, quitting all her bad habits, being inevitably betrayed, to sum up, "Will you stay/ I don't think so." And that only if her lover comes back to her in the first place. Even the (mightily) strained metaphors imply a submissive relationship. Her object is powerfully vast like the Moon (which will carry on being a heavenly body with or without her assuming the role of its dutiful poetry) or a force of nature like the Wind (which will go on blowing through anything and everything regardless if the singer is its trees). The object of affection needs her only in so much that she enhances its already very obvious attractive qualities.

Even the soft strumming of the guitars give away the singer's true feelings. "You need me," she says, but I'm not sure even she believes that. Perhaps something with more percussion, or a more confident electronic rythym would be more convincing, more likely to change my mind. But does that mean 69LS doesn't need "Come Back from San Francisco"? Nothing of the sort. This sort of love, while perhaps unattractive, has its place. I for one, am just happy its way the hell over in New York.

grade: a "fondness" (1 out of 6)

6 of 69: I guess I should take Prozac, right/ and just smile all night/ at somebody new?

2009-05-26T07:38:00.005-06:00

"I Don't Want to Get Over You"

Read just about any critical assessment of 69LS and you'll be bombarded with praise. This was a very favorably reviewed project, and almost every article I've read boils down to the same key topics. Granted, music journalism has become even more 'catching' with the advent of blogging and the rise of the internet as the key source of information about new music. By now it feels like most writers on the web are spewing the exact same regurgitated catchphrases (as opposed to, say, physical "zines" whose material, while more original, can and often does feel dated in the mere time it takes to get the damn thing to the printer and back). However it is surprising how much reviewers aped from each other even in 1999. Either that, or everyone just noticed the same things:

1. The scope. The album's massive length has been discussed as both a positive (a sweeping magnum opus) and a negative (can one actually sit down and listen to the whole damn shebang in one go?) And as some have joked, like, totally 69, dude!

2. Fascination with Merritt's voice. This comes largely from folks who, like me, were first introduced to the Magnetic Fields through 69LS. At the end of this project I will have to gather all of my Merritt Voice descriptions and have a simile "battle to the death". Everybody, it's a Metaphor-off! (Listen to your friend Billy Zane...)

3. And the eclecticism. Perhaps the most signature aspect of the album is just how many different styles of music are embraced, parodied, messed with, sincerely reinterpreted, savaged, honored, and buried. Which makes it all the more frustrating when casual listeners say the darndest reductive things.

A few weeks ago I was listening to V1 in a back room at work and a passerby heard a snippet of "I Don't Believe in the Sun" and groaned. He then cracked his typical litany of jokes that the situation appeared to cry out for:

"Awww, cheer up, emo kid!"
"Put on some sad bastard music, see if I care!"
"Rob, that's the worst fucking sweater I've ever seen, that's a Cosby Sweater, a Caaaawwwwwzzzzby sweatuh!"

This wouldn't have been so irritating if not a week earlier, just days before this project sprang forth from my forehead fully grown, the prime antagonist dismissed this music in an equally casual manner as being 'emo.'

This is frustrating for a variety of reasons, least of all the aforementioned remarkable variety found on 69LS. But even still, if you take the Magnetic Fields body of work into account, whatever it is that 'emo' describes would hardly be accurate in the first place. Merritt's fallback style appears to be variations on 80's electro-pop. Snappy synths and playful guitars. Generally upbeat and fun. So is 69LS so different? Or do people just love dismissing stuff as 'emo'?

"I Don't Want to Get Over You," is certainly not the best place to begin my rebuttal. It is mopey and despondent, but gets interesting as it describes how easy it is for a person to slip into this mindset, the "happy being dumped" philosophy. This comes after the real pain of separation, the not being able to eat or sleep part, the raw depression where something you had is missing and the mind and body have yet to build up psychic and physical defenses. There is a romantic, poetic aspect to being so broke up over love, a misguided egocentric place where you are so sure that most people just don't have the ability to love like I do man, but good friends will only tolerate you acting like an idiot for so long. But some people don't respond to their friends hints, and this drudgery becomes a lifestyle choice. There's a slippery slope down to maudlinville, full of "clove cigarettes and vermouth" where people "dress in black and read Camus." Merritt, to his credit, appears to be making fun of this kind of behavior, dismissing it as only fit for 17 year-olds.

But its slightly more complicated than all that. Because there is no quick fix. You can't go from being in love to miserable to all better in 24 hours. There is a time where sleeping pills to get through the night might actually be a wise choice, and where a night out with friends sounds just nightmarish, and Prozac might be the only way to be able to "smile all night" and not bring everyobody else down. Which is the genius of even a mediocre song on this album. That it can take itself seriously and not so seriously all at once.

Or, you know, it's just a bunch of emo whining.

Grade: "Puppy Love"

5 of 69: Have I annoyed you or is there a boy who well he's just a whore

2009-05-21T09:26:00.007-06:00

"Reno Dakota"

I suppose this short, playful (I wouldn't exactly call it disposable) song is a chance to explain how I came upon the 69LS in general.

As the last entry suggests, I'm a sucker for lists. And I simply LOVE year's end 'best of' lists. Back in 1999 I was a junior at Syracuse University. There is (I hope this shouldn't be modified to 'was') a great record store downtown called, perhaps somewhat unfortunately, Soundgarden. It was the record store that sold me my first Les Savy Fav EP, my first White Stripes album, my first Le Tigre, Fugazi and inevitably, Magnetic Fields CD. The kind of record store that has a scruffy mongrel dog that kicks around your feet as your fingers clickety clack through the bins of used CD jewel cases. The kind of record store that gives birth to hipsters such as myself en masse.

As 1999 dovetailed into 2000, I flipped through SPIN magazine's year end best albums article. This was right around the time SPIN was very tough on music, had become the slightly pale and freckled Rolling Stone of its time (while Rolling Stone no longer had any sort of critical acumen toward music, e.g. putting the backstreet Boys on the cover and celebrated Kid Rock as a musical savant). A few years later someone must have realized that this wasn't a very good business model, and SPIN caught up with Rolling Stone once more, only the crappy contemporary era version of RS, (you know, sans the meaty political journalism) that it has never been able to shake. Of course I'm being way too hard on SPIN (why oh why did you play fast and loose with my heart?), but only because I've since fallen for magazines like Magnet and (RIP) Punk Planet.

SPIN's 1999 best album list had some serious chops, with names like the Flaming Lips (at their peak IMO, with Soft Bulletin), Beck (with his insanely catchy party album Midnight Vultures), Mary J Blige, Rage Against the Machine, Wilco, Built to Spill, Ol' Dirty Bastard and at number 4, the Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs. The latter entry struck me as just the sort of over-ambitious magnum opus I might like (I really like excessive trainwrecks, especially films, like A.I. and the Fountain), and when I had a chance the following June, while restoring the empty coffers of my paltry bank account with shitty Summer jobs, I picked up the first volume.

And the thing is, I really didn't get into it. I liked it, but certainly didn't appreciate it. I listened to it a bunch of times before it slept and gathered dust on my CD tower for several years. It wasn't until I picked up a used copy of Volume 2 (just filling out my collection really) that I fell in love with the Magnetic Fields. That is the CD that captured my heart and urged me to buy V3 a mere week later, but wouldn't even allow me the sonic space to listen to that later purchase, or go back to V1 for that matter. To this day I've probably listened to the series in this kind of ratio 5 : 9 : 2. And the first 23 songs only so much because I've owned it nearly twice as long as the rest.

Alright, I suppose this narcissistic music history lesson must end. Short story made shorter, 69LS is a grower of the best sort. As I descend into the depths of adulthood (to say nothing of middle-age) I find that I can finally appreciate work of this caliber. Because I'm wiser? Probably not. Mostly, I would guess, because it is fucking awesome.

grade: "puppy love" (2 out of 6)

4 of 69: Woah Nelly

2009-05-20T12:13:00.005-06:00

"A Chicken With its Head Cut Off"

Among the many reasons why I love this song, it begins with a list. Hurray for lists!

1. Eligible.
2. Not too stupid
3. Intelligible
4. Cute as Cupid
5. Knowledgeable
6. Not always right.
7. Salvageable
8. Free for the night.

My man here is modest. Look, he's not asking for the Moon. Not this time. No, he's sitting at the dive-bar, glancing around and is hoping for the best. Is this Convenience Mart love? Nope. It is everyone you've ever known love. Because knights in shining armor/princesses with their braided golden locks are hard to come by. And one can waste a whole lot of time obsessing over that shit.

Maybe its because the weather is getting its Summer on around here and is making me recall the days when I was a perpetual undergraduate bachelor, but there's a feeling built up in this song, along with the modesty of course, that the singer is falling in love with just about every person that walks by. There were times when I'd walk out of design studio at 8 in the morning (after staying up all night) to go home and catch some winks until 1 or 2 in the afternoon or so before starting the whole work press all over again. And on those shambling, warm May mornings I'll tell you what. I must have fallen head over heels in love with every girl I passed. "All around the barnyard falling in and out of love" is quite apropos. Now I wasn't the drooling idiot variety of underclassmen. No, I could barely manage a smile before blushing and looking away at my feet, but it sure as hell felt like my "heart was running around like a chicken with its head cut off."

Though to be fair, I have to imagine the singer of this song sees a lot of action. There's a suave everyman-ish character to his romancin'. He's up front about what he's looking for, but he probably won't call you back. All that matters is right up there in that crushingly simple yet wonderfully poignant list. Are you single? We don't want to be upsetting a more important relationship here. Let's have you be able to keep up your end of the conversation and be cute about it. As far as 'knowledge' goes, I'm fairly certain he's not looking for book smarts. And if you are a fixer-upper? Whatever, doesn't matter if you're free for the night. Because he's also kind of a horn-dog. He's looking to get laid but don't be expecting "stars exploding in the night or electric eels under the covers." Bottom line, he's realistic.

And although Merritt sings this with with a roly poly bawdiness in his belly, its not too difficult to listen to this song with a woman on the mic. I might have used a lot of "he's" in the above review, but its as gender non-specific as any of the 69. In fact, in my life I might have known more women who behave this way than men. And while this behavior "ain't pretty", its not like anyone is coming out of this little tryst with hurt feelings.

Another solid "adoration" (4 of 6)

3 of 69: You said you were in love with me/ Both of us know that that's impossible

2009-05-18T09:14:00.009-06:00

"All My Little Words"

At the risk of descending too far into the soggy morass of psychology and all those french philosophers of objects and subjects, there is something be said of being in love with someone, but not yet with them. In a ten round title bout, Desire might very well clean Love's clock, especially in the early rounds, and there are plenty of reasons for this, particularly for the romantically inclined and the imaginative among us. Before declaring your affections, before being recognized, accepted, brushed aside or bluntly rejected, before one actually knows anything of consequence about what will surely be your Great True Love, anything is possible. Your object can be anything you want him or her to be, they are a gigantic projection screen for all your fantasies. And wooing them! The mind revels in an infinite number of possible futures where we are impossibly suave and witty and say all the right things. Where we fully command all our little words. And nobody can possibly resist them.

At first listen, "All My Little Words," seems simple enough. Merritt gives up his vocal reins to another man, one L D Beghtol. Unlike Merritt's famously untrained bellow, Beghtol's voice, to my ears, is a floral, almost histrionic affair, especially when paired with the sparse strumming of the simple accompaniment (strummmm, bdang-dang bdang-dang). It is a voice that seems comfortably at home playing the troubadour at a renaissance fair. And it is sincerely lamenting a failure, of sorts, and if one cursorily examines the lyrics, well, that failure seems like one of courtship. The end result was rejection, this object was 'unboyfriendable.'

Yet "You said you were in love with me/ Both of us know that that's impossible," is as loaded a pair of lines as any song on 69LS. I completely apologize for the perhaps half-baked interpretation that is to follow, but I'm of a mind to say that the "you said you were in love with me" is entirely in the songwriter's saccharine-sweet head. They then follow this up with "both of us know that that's impossible" because they know they'll never get up the courage to ask. Or perhaps they know their lovely object would never go for them for a thousand and one very real life reasons. The fact that someone said yes, even in thier head, while nice in a heady day-dream sort of way, in the end remains just so many little words.

But the "you said you were in love with me" of the first stanza can be read in many different ways, least among them literally. Perhaps they did indeed receive an affirmation, but in that case what went wrong? More to the point, what exactly is the singer really in love with?

One one hand, almost certainly another human being. But on the other hand, I'd argue that on some level Beghtol isn't singing to anyone at all, at least not in the objective sense. His object is "a splendid butterfly," it's most wonderful feature: it's wings (they are what make it beautiful after all). The imagery is both delicate and transformative. It's difficult to think of a butterfly without recalling its extraordinary metamorphosis, and to call out its wings is to specifically latch on to its elusive nature. In my mind, the singer is also describing his desire in the first stanza, a powerful and dramatic emotion that has undergone so many odd transformations and one which might just be narrowing in on it's target. Confused, excited about all the possible outcomes only one thing is certain of desire, no power on earth will ever make it stand still, will "ever make it stay."

This one gets another "adoration" (4 out of 6)
(and apologies for a simultaneously overwrought yet undercooked review. The next one will be better, I promise!)

2 of 69: The only Sun I ever knew/ Was the Beautiful one that was You

2009-05-15T09:02:00.006-06:00

"I Don't Believe in the Sun."

Only two songs in and it's already come to this. It's come to 'went aways,' 'nevers,' and 'given up and dies.' It's come to astronomical revisionism. Not only has the world been turned upside-down, the heavens are in a state of disrepair. And all because he's just not that into you.

Although that is slightly unfair. This isn't the indignant anger and frustration of putting yourself out on a limb, of asking someone out and being rejected. That would easier to swallow. No, this is the deep gloom of being loved, of actually getting in and finding a place for yourself, of being shined upon for a time, and then being rejected. This shit hurts.

And this is the first time on the album that the listener gets a real taste of Merritt's broken basset hound voice. A voice that really feels like it could keep the Sun from rising. He says he doesn't believe in the Sun and when I hear him I'm inclined to agree. Even the moon and stars aren't safe. You took them all with you, you son of a bitch. But again, this isn't a song about resentment. It's about longing. This person doesn't want to rewrite the heavens because you left. This person still thinks you are beautiful.

There is something kind of wonderful how Merritt tips the romantic universals that poets have harnessed from the Sun (or more often the Moon) and parlays them into something personal and specific. Here Love is the fundamental right of all people, it "shine[s] down on everyone." Yet the singer's Sun is an individual one, "the only one he ever knew" the "one that never shone on other guys." In other words, just because you have felt the sun shine, doesn't mean you understand a damn thing about how it felt like shining on him.

There is only one moment where I feel like the singer might be finding their way through this, one crack in their armor of romantic melancholy:

"Since you went away/
it's nighttime all day/
and it's usually raining too."/

That last little addition sounds, to my ear, like a half-hearted attempt at a joke. Merritt is winking at himself because he knows how ridiculous it sounds to believe the Sun won't ever shine on him anymore, that this blackout is a cruelty perpetuated specifically for him. There is a lightness in the last line that betrays a subtle enjoyment of being left in the cold. As if Merritt is almost perpared to admit that feeling this shitty might, in the long run, be a good thing. 'Cause the only way you get to night is through the day, and with a little astronomical tinkering, hey, we might be able to rig up another Sun sometime after all. But not too soon.

I give this song an "adoration" (4 out of 6)

1 of 69: It's only fair to tell you/ I'm absolutely cuckoo

2009-05-13T09:52:00.005-06:00

Recently a friend of mine sent me the following little missive:

"I only like about 3 of the 69 Love Songs."

I had to read the damn sentence four times in order for it to penetrate my thick, disbelieving skull. Surely I had read it incorrectly? I was baffled, flummoxed, completely bamboozled as to how someone could have any other opinion of the Magnetic Fields magnum opus other than completely outfuckingstanding. Gradually my perplexed mind succumbed to slight case of miffery. How dare anyone hate on Stephin Merritt! My brow furrowed and I may or may not have snorted. But that emotion was silly and short-lived, and quickly faded to my natural fallback state of quiet curiosity and general bemusement which lead to the following question:

"Why do I love 69 Love Songs so much?"

And thus a new blog feature was born. In the coming weeks (and most likely months) I plan on digging through each and every one of those 69 precisely crafted pop songs and waxing a little poetic on one of my favorite albums of all time. I've also devised a scale, or ranking system, less to weed out any possible stumblers, and more to separate out those songs that truly affect me, the ones that really sing, the ones I can't imagine living without. So after a (sometimes not so) brief discussion of each song I'll give it a grade from least enjoyed to most liked:

1. fondness
2. puppy love
3. weak in the knees
4. adoration
5. infatuation
6. ecstasy

And seeing as we all have our own opinions on what composes a great song, feel free to castigate me in the comments for not loving your favorite or for really enjoying something you think is a complete joke. And without further ado...

1/69 "Absolutely Cuckoo"

I don't know about you but I tend to really dig albums that open with a bit of quirk. It is the rare album that can come out guns blazing with the might of a single or knock-out punch caliber song and not make everything that follows feel like an afterthought. Even big serious albums sometimes have a sort of throwaway first song, not that I view 'Cuckoo' as inessential. But it's tone is playful and just barely hinting at the amazingly comprehensive rumination of love that follows on the rest of the album.

There is a bit of self-referentiality here with lines like "Don't fall in love with me yet/ We only recently met/ Give me a week or two to/ Go Absolutely Cuckoo." As in don't judge a book by its cover or an album of 69 (!!!) songs by a single tune that clocks in just over 90 seconds. It presupposes a wealth of good stuff to come but is coy about it, offering up a single warning: "I only tell you this 'cause/ I'm easy to get rid of/ But not if you fall in love" which, as I mentioned far above I have a hard time beliving anyone with even a scrap of a soul could not possibly do after giving this album a listen or three (hundred in my case).

The playfulness is also very reassuring, and adds to the winking title of the project (aka "69 Love Songs") in disarming the worrisome notion that no topic can be as pretentious, overwrought or heavy (in the most perjorative sense) as Love. So why not come running out of the gate with a bit of levity? There's plenty of time for inamorato and "can't live withouts".

I give this song a glowing "weak in the knees" (or 3 out of 6).

Heath and Esme Have an Adventure

2009-05-12T13:39:00.007-06:00

Disclaimer: It should be known to the reader that the following story (helpfully narrated in the third person) regards a pair of individuals whose names have been disguised under pseudonyms. Hopefully this veil of anonymity will protect them the harsh glare of the outside world for the subject matter of the anecdote below is a bit... sensitive. Under no circumstances should one imagine that the unfortunate experiences detailed below happened to me, or anyone else I might know. With that in mind...

Heath and Esme decided to take a lovely vacation away from their native Madison. While their trip was not far, it was sufficient to get them away from it all, and their destination was a two stop-light hamlet in the middle of nowhere, Iowa. The sleepy town was chosen precisely for its backwoods, old-timey, slightly old fashioned ways, and when Heath pulled into the motel he had already shed his city stiffness and a smile crossed his face.

Esme was thoughtful enough to have packed all kinds of foodstuffs for a simple cold dinner, as the pair had come here in years past and found the local restaurants either closed or... not particularly up to snuff. This evening was no exception as the diner was closed and a majority of the village's 12 cars were parked in front of the lone bar with a flickering Budweiser logo in the window.

After checking in the pair decided that it would be best if they secured some sort of dessert to follow their simple repast before settling in for the rest of the night. Ice-cream topped the list of desirables, and it was this delicious treat that propelled them back out into the foggy midwestern night. However, as the doors of the Toyota banged shut, Heath was reminded of an unfortunate spat of forgetful packing earlier in the day. Heath is a respectable and loving young man, and the particular item he had forgotten, one does not speak of them in polite conversation. Needless to say it is easier to forget them than say, your toothpaste.

Now, hours after the fateful blunder, it occured to Heath, that it might be advisable to procure some of said indelicate items. Surely this could be accomplished at the same time as finding some delicous ice-cream sandwiches, say, at a gas station or what passed as a convenient store in these parts. The first two stops proved futile, and whilst driving into the adjacent town they saw a glowing sign which might have had a hand in impeding their progress. There was a formidable sized Bible Camp in the area. As everyone knows, Bible Camps are notoriously anti ice-cream.

Perhaps because of this powerful Camp, a jaunt into the neighboring town's supermarket was equally unsuccessful. But there in the distance, loomed the mighty sign of the Dread pagan god Walmart. Surely they would have both items the young couple sought as no mere Bible Camp could dictate what a corporate behemoth stocked on its shelves.

Like the bar, Walmart appeared to be a recreational destination as a freakish preonderance of the (larger) neighboring town's populace roamed the megamart's aisles, looking for that one purchase that would complete them, I suppose. Sobbing human pupae in strollers and generously proportioned middle-aged men sauntered amidst scandalously clad tweens and prowling cougars. It took Heath and Esme no time at all to locate each and every item on their list, which had grown to include plastic cutlery for their ice-cream cups, some mints, and chapstick among the other items in question.

Esme did her best to select the cashier that might be least embarassed by the purchase, a firm but friendly mountain of a woman who as expected said little during the transaction. However the fate was not yet through with Heath and Esme this evening, for when they approached the exit doors they were greeted by a kindly old man, employed by Walmart simply to wellwish and say goodbye. And should by chance, an alarm go off, say, maybe he could check and see that the reciept for items pruchased matched the items in the bag.

As the alarm sounded after the sweet grandfatherly septuagenarian mumbled a sincere "have a good night!" Esme rolled her eyes and muttered, "Oh for fuck's sake," which it is true, was particularly apropos for this trip. She handed the doddering man the bag and the receipt while Heath folded his arms in exasperation. The couple blushed as the greeter exclaimed, "Gee, you've got all kinds of stuff in here." Which they did indeed. He was quite obviously just as embarrassed as the young couple and blushed profusely. However it must have been a Walmart policy or something because he then proceeded to take each item out of the bag and demagnetize it, following this up with a detailed scribbling on some notepad of each offending article.

Five minutes later Heath and Esme were laughing quite hysterically on their drive back to their Podunk bunk. Surely this wasn't the kind of story they could tell their friends, at least, not without a modest amount of impropriety. So they passed it along to me, and here I sit, having just narrated a story that by no means did I have anything at all whatsoever to do with.

Doctor Swinehart or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love H1N1

2009-04-28T11:28:00.005-06:00

blah blah blah swine flu. blah blah blah we're all gonna die. Blah blah blah ahh-choo?

But seriously, I'm enthralled by this media spectacle for more reasons than I can count. And I can't say that I'm entirely immune to the overexposed and relentless over-the-top coverage of what may be yet another in a long line of influenza bugs that continuously sweep over the globe. The early spin on this media fastball was that this flu was more dangerous because... well, why exactly was that again? Dig even a little bit below the surface and you discover the gross exaggerations and outright lies that have been spread, maliciously or not, and eagerly accepted by your average fairly well informed human being. 24 hours a go I actually thought there was a chance that my days were numbered and that I might actually die from this thing. Then my dear wife helped me come to terms with my obvious hypochondria. It seems I've read too many sci-fi "End of Days" pulp novels.

In one such novel, Stephen King's The Stand, a horrific portrait of a flu pandemic is illustrated in the story's earliest chapters. The army has designed a 'super-flu' that is 99.99% communicable and incredibly lethal. The fear of disease is swiftly circumscribed by a government response, equal parts cover-up and violent suppression until things fall apart and the center doesn't hold. (See, although in a completely different context, even King knows you can't trust the media...) However the spread of the virus must have been researched very carefully because the recent strain of influenza has spread in an eerily similar manner. In the novel a few cases in Texas end up spreading first to NYC and California, popping up in isolated towns in the midwest before blanketing the country.

It is very obvious that the kind of latent fear of death and disease that makes this horror story so effective is the same one that has led the media to blow this thing up to elephantine proportions. News outlets offer us a service, at a price. The want us to follow current events, but most of all they want ratings. And people will tune in to this kind of story, at least for a while, because it is downright scary. It is frightening to think that in our modern age of superior health care, there are things that can sweep up over night and kill people. Never mind the fact that nobody outside of Mexico has died, and that those fatalities might be the result of extreme poverty. It is scary because it appears downright unstoppable. One can take all the proper precautions, but this might very well be one of those 'if you're gonna get it, you're gonna get it' phenomena. You know, the kind of flus that are out and about every year that kill people just as easily, but that everybody has seemingly forgot about.

I loathe disease. It creeps me out. I am a complete germophobe and am continuously washing my hands, spraying my work keyboard, mouse and phone, which cowrokers occassionally share, with disinfectant. I always get my flu-shots. Why is this? Because the flu is annoying as hell. Two weeks of feeling like shit? Where do i sign up? But I'm not going to go so far as to stockpile Tamiflu and bottled water (although I offhandedly suggested the very same to my wife the other night). Maybe I'm not entirely convinced as I thought.

What is stunning is the amount of misinformation out there that is greedily gobbled up and spewed out all over the place. The very name of this bug, for instance, is completely inaccurate. People aren't getting this from pigs. But that won't stop them from costing the pork industry millions of dollars in losses. Seriously people? You think you are going to get sick from eating bacon? Cooked bacon? More for me then. From what I've read the strain is a new combo of swine, avian, and human influenza that is passed from person to person exclusively. Many have hollered that it shouldn't be called swine flu at all, but perhaps 'novel' flu or as one wag has put it, 'media' flu.

The one good thing that I can see coming from this is that maybe, just maybe people will stop being quite so gross for the next few weeks. Masks here and there, sure. But hands being washed too. Coughs and sneezes being covered up. You know, like actual human beings. Funny how it sometimes takes a virus, something scientists aren't even sure to classify as alive or dead, to achieve this.

You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry

2009-04-22T10:05:00.003-06:00

Hell, I wouldn't like me when I'm angry. Which is fine since I rarely get all riled up. Once in a great while. Most people are surprised to hear I can emote anger as I am generally cool as a cucumber (a vegetable renown for its calm handling of tense situations). But this morning I nearly flipped out. That's actually exaggerating quite a bit, but my dander was certainly up. And all because of a stupid bagel.

I was running a bit late because I had elected to go to the gym this morning, and I still needed to stop and get something for breakfast. A bagel sounded perfect. Now I like my bagels (as I like my women?) lightly toasted with nothing on 'em (Zing!). Normally an easy thing to procure (again, we're talking about the bagels, not women). However at the Hyde Park Bagel Dispensatorium there was a dreaded new person working the line. If that wasn't enough, this coffee shop has the ridiculous practice of relaying what the customer orders at the register to someone else who actually fixes the sandwiches, etc. Ever play elementary school game 'Telephone" where one person whispers a phrase in their neighbor's ear and they pass it on and so forth? Yeah, that is slightly more effective way of accurately getting a message across. The following conversation took place immediately before I ordered:

Jill Q. Customer: "Yeah, I'd like a regular coffee and a plain bagel with everything."

Register Monkey: "That'll be $4.73. Hey New Employee, I needa plain bagel with everything."

(Fairly Incompetent) New Employee: "With Everything? Like everything?"

Above this riveting drama is a large menu with various suggested fixings. One of the options is, 'Everything.' Now 'Everything' does not actually mean everything. It is tricky like that. Because nbody actually wants a dab of each kind of cream cheese combined with several forms of breakfast meat and eggs and so forth. I could actually feel the stiff breeze from everyone in line behind me rolling their eyes.

Needless to say I had high hopes that (Fairly Incompetent) New Employee would be able to fulfill my much more simple request without any hang-ups. However as I waited for the bagel to go through the toasting shute, and the other folks behind me placed their orders it dawned on me that perhaps my order was too simple. Surely no one just orders a plain toasted bagel with nothing on it. Already exasperated by the comedy of 'Everything', I began to lose my patience as my bagel dropped down, and before I could say a word, it was generously schmeared with a healthy dollop of seemingly randomly selected peanut butter.

(Fairly Incompetent) New Employee: "Plainbagelpeanutbutter!" (she announces to the gathering crowd of customers waiting for their order) I purse my lips and look to the side, disevowing ownership all the while knowing that this reject construction is meant for me.

Bagel after bagel is made correctly (astonishing!) and I continue to stand, patience slowly simmering away like so much coffee left on the burner. Not gonna make it to work on time, but suddenly this doesn't matter. All that matters is my fascination with the fact that someone could be so bad at something relatively simple. With no system of checks and balances or failsafes there is no way my actual order will be completed unless I speak up. Thankfully the Register Monkey, a very nice person actually who knows my order by heart, sees me still standing there and sighs, apparently this sort of thing was happening with some frequency this morning,

"We got a plain bagel just toasted back there?"

No, no they did not.

But one was hastily made, and I walked away with what I wanted. And I assume they had what they wanted as well, you know, aside from efficiency, namely, my money and their limbless corpses not strewn about their establishment.

Yee Olde Work Email Spam Comedy Hour

2009-04-20T08:29:00.005-06:00

Let's lighten the mood a little bit, shall we?

It's always fun for me to return to the store after a nice relaxing weekend and take a look at the old work email. Why? Because my work email is a spam black hole. No spam can resist it's immense gravity and as a result I get quite an assortment of intriguing fare. And man have some people gone a long way to make sure their spam doesn't get filtered out into my junk folder. There appear to be a great many creative (and hilarious) ways to achieve this desired outcome. These include the use unfamiliar euphemisms in place of more common blacklisted words, incorrect spellings and odd chunks of concrete poetry, which I can only imagine help the email reach a predetermined requirement of enough different words to defeat various filters. The end result of course is a chuckle or six.

Some great email subject lines:

"Hoist Your Sexual Times" (with "the assistance of Good Medicaments,")
Oh boy, this one made me laugh. I'm sure 'hoist' has been employed as a sexual innuendo as long as there have been masts and rigging, but the addition of 'sexual times' kicks it into another gear altogether. And finally, the inclusion of some fancy English like 'medicaments'? Inspired.

"Empower Your Sexual Experience"
A minority group can be empowered. A political cause that desperately needs some legal or financial backing can seek to become empowered. Sexual experience? I'd love to see the legalese in the draft of that document.

"Your Power Will be so Strong that You will think you are Sleeping."
Um, I'm not quite sure that reads how you want it to read, Mr. Spam-bot.

"Raise Your Darling Bed Event"
This one actually makes syntactical sense. Mostly. But the hoops the author of this gem must have had to run through to make it 'see print.' I'm pretty sure nobody has ever called what happens in the bedroom a 'bed event' and to couple it with a snuggly word like darling, well...

And last some concrete spam poetry:

The wasn't any reason for the malfunction
Woman was on bad terms with her husband
he drinks.
Foreplay PPPlay it right!
In a different way, namely:
from the wild game a pleasant
middleaged man who, in spite of his better
have some supper
Pierre's face lightened than her form.
High cheeks had she
and a face strained voice that sounded like a dirge.
It imposible to describe the expression to be correct.

All I can say of this monday morning ritual can best be summed up in yet another borrowed spam tagline:
"satisfaction result assured!"

Where Does Your Honor Lay?

2009-04-15T11:53:00.004-06:00

Independent as fuck!

You've probably seen this phrase, most likely embossed in neon on a sticker affixed to a skateboard, streetlamp, or an otherwise "alternative" retailer's storefront window. It can mean various things, and i do not mean to suggest i am comprehensively aware of them all. But I do have a certain perspective, having worked for several years in an independent bookstore. I take a great amount of pride in where i work, and what I've been able to accomplish. And I've only just begun to understand the challenges and benefits of being independent.

Independent bookstores are dying, there is no denying this. Curiously, big chain bookstores are also doing downright poorly as well, but people have to be getting their books from somewhere, right? Turns out Amazon is that somewhere quite often. Amazon is wonderful for a great many reasons, some of which include information gathering, price discounts, and used goods. Serving a buying public in the hundreds of millions, Amazon purchases its products in massive quantities, often on consignment (i.e. under the premise that the goods are theirs forever, even if they do not sell). As everyone knows, the more of something you buy all at once, wholesale, the less you pay for it, and this is essentially how Amazon can offer such great prices.

An independent bookstore is a small operation, and cannot purchase things in large quantities. As such the products we receive are more expensive and need to be sold as such if we hope to break even, let alone make a profit. But this leaves us with a huge conundrum. Why on earth would anyone ever buy something through us, that they can get for cheaper elsewhere? In the end, we cannot hope to compete financially, but we can compete in the community, and that's where the 'Independent as Fuck!' attitude comes back into play.

Amazon is great in a lot of ways but it isn't a place and indie stores have some advantages. Some of these are tangible. You can't go to Amazon to see your favorite author give a reading. Some are less readily observable, and bit more, well, how can i say this without sounding like a bleeding heart liberal... economically moral. It is a difficult argument to make, and i do not even pretend to think that i can adequately explain myself here, but i will give it a try.

Every penny that comes in our front door goes to purchase more books for the store (and to pay our modest salaries etc.) With all of us living and working in the community, much of the money we make goes right back into the restaurants, bars, stores and venues around us. We also give small sums to various local charities and charge sales tax that goes to fix roads, fund schools, etc.

(Except in New York) Amazon does not charge sales tax. And with revenue in the billions, that's a lot of lost funds that could be used for all sorts of important things. As a 'store' that is not a place, Amazon does not give to your local charities. how could it unless it gave to all of them? So there is a whole lot of money coming in that has to be going somewhere, right? Amazon may even be very fair to it's many employees, I do not know. But what I do know is that the founder, Jeff Bezos is worth 6.8 billion dollars, and he is just one of it's board members. I'm sure that kind of corporate financial underpinning can make a great deal of good things happen, but that kind of accumulation and consoldation of wealth strikes me as exactly what your local community does not need. Surely some of that 6.8 Billion should be yours, yes? But then again you did not earn it, in fact, you may even have saved significant amounts of money by purchasing goods on Amazon for far less than you could elsewhere. you see how complicated this gets so fast?

I try and look at things as fairly as possible. This is less an us versus them scenraio, and more of a choice. You have a choice to buy independently, and a choice to buy from some entreprise like Amazon. It is not necessarily good versus evil, but do know that your choice has repercussions. Should you need to save those extra dollars by all means, do what you have to do to get by in increasingly difficult times. But also know that if you can afford to do so, shopping independently has its advantages. And a great many folks will benefit from your decision, not just a few.

The Thing in the Basement

2009-04-10T13:11:00.005-06:00

Basements are gross. They are dark, cluttered with crap you don't even want to keep upstairs in your closets, let alone out in the open. They usually have big clattering appliances like washers, dryers and hot water heaters. And more often than not there's a funk. A basement funk of stale air, the vaguely septic quality of water moving through the plumbing and on the other sides of the walls and floor, and of forgotten things. And if your landlord is our landlord, you get to look at that hideous painting which was banished down there years ago. blech.

Speaking of our landlord, she's awesome. She's the sweetest lady, living right upstairs, often out of town, leaving us silly little notes and things. She sends us emails warning about attempted robberies in the neighborhood (it is Chicago after all) as well as letting us know the dates of various art fairs in the area. But she is also sort of absent-minded. Case in point: repairs.

The inner doorknob of our building has been hanging by a thread of a screw for several months. Our furnace has kicked itself off several times for no reason--the temperature gauge has gone a little soft in the head and sometimes thinks it's hotter inside the furnace there than it really is. Our bathroom was plagued with clogs of the non-human variety (a bunch of sand and silt had built up over decades deep in the pipes) and now the opposite has happened just under the kitchen sink in the basement. A pipe elbow that looks to be at least 50 years old (probably much older, the apartment dates back to the late 1800s) finally blew out.

At first the hole was the size of a pin-head. Then a dime, followed by quarter and half dollar. Now the water just flies right down our sink and out into the air between our dryer and furnace. Spraying bits of chicken and asparagus and all sorts of food particles that had built up inside over the years. All that filth is laying in a pool that drains slowly into the floor. Needless to say the funk has grown more powerful than can be imagined. Doing laundry has turned into a whelk hunting adventure in Ireland, replete with tall boots and rain gear.

But its getting fixed next week. It only took a month or so. *rolls eyes*

Clash of Kings

2009-04-07T13:23:00.006-06:00

I heart George R. R. Martin. There. I said it. In particular I love Martin's epic 'high fantasy' series the Song of Ice and Fire. I write 'high fantasy' in scare quotes because it seems that wherever I read this descriptor it is employed as defense against lowly ole genre fiction. I for one have nothing against lowly ole genre fiction. I like my pulp just as much as I like my Proust. More helpfully I think, is the kind of sci-fi/fantasy that 'high fantasy' implies. The scattered and often underwhelming forces of a few Good eggs versus a seemingly unstoppable tide of Evil. We're talking a broad scope, insurmountable odds, hundreds of characters, and thousands and thousands of pages. Tolkien is often the name folks cite when invoking 'high fantasy'. But Martin's world of Westeros, while it does contain fantastic elements, seems much more focused on people and how they deal with each other.

I have just finished the second volume of the saga, A Clash of Kings. Like all good sequels, it builds off the foundation without rehashing whats already come before. Straight out of the gates we're introduced to characters who previous played minor roles now creeping to the forefront after the treacherous political moves of Game of Thrones decimated some the kingdom's more honorable figures. While there was war in Thrones, there is carnage in Kings. Loosely based on the War of the Roses, Martin's epic features several rival families all clawing and stabbing to rule a continent. There is incest, backstabbing and blackmail aplenty. There are bitter sibling rivalries. There is religious fundamentalism. And there is Martin's trademark; no matter how important you think a character may be, nobody is safe.

Unfortunately I'm way behind. There are 2 giant-sized novels to go, and fifth due out in September. L has read everything that has seen print, and smiles whenever I mumble 'Good Lord' under my breath as my fingers rifle through pages. She knows what is in store for me and it's time to catch up.

Know Your 2009 Cleveland Indians

2009-04-01T07:28:00.005-06:00

Major League Baseball is just days away. 5 if both my math is correct, and the world continues to revolve around the Sun in the same speed and frequency for the next week or so. After that the Sun can do whatever the hell it wants. I mean, it should probably go on nourishing all life on this planet and everything, but if it wants to put a Kenny Chesney album on it's thermonuclear Ipod, who am I to frown upon a celestial body's taste in music.

Considering the fact that a majority of my readership isn't interested in baseball, or if they are, not in the Cleveland Indians specifically, I thought I would write a little piece introducing some of the players on my favorite team in an unorthodox manner. I've tried to gather some unusual facts on these men to retain your attention. The accuracy of some of these statements is certainly contentious. However if you are thinking of hitting the brakes and running off to your Twitter, now would be the time. And away we go...

Asdrubal Cabrera. Nicknamed "AstroCab" or somewhat unfortunately, "Droobs". Cabrera plays second base and is just 23 years-old. He was born on an oil-rig off the coast of Puerto la Cruz, Venezeula. In fact, 'Asdrubal' is Spanish for 'Petroleum Child' and his outstanding defense is just as slick. *rim shot*

Victor Martinez. Curiously, Victor has no known nicknames and demands to be called by his first, last and middle name (Jesus) at all times, which I will immediately fail to maintain. Vic is the Indians primary catcher. Baseball Insiders call playing this position 'donning the tools of ignorance' which is largely because catchers in general are incredibly stupid.

Kerry Wood. This oft-injured former Chicago Cubs relief pitcher will serve as the Indians closer. It is said that his right arm, from rotator cuff to the third joint on his middle finger is composed of chewing gum, rubberbands, sawdust and a surprising number of small tacs. What would hamper a normal man only increases the velocity of Kerry's devastating fastball.

Shin-Soo Choo. One of the majors few Korean born players, the "Choo-Choo Train" is actually still required to serve in the Korean military and may miss some MLB time in the near future because of this stipulation. Or he could just change his name to 'Dan Heimerdinger' and go into the witness protection program. I hear they have excellent house-boats.

Anthony Reyes. This starting pitcher joined the Tribe late last season after spending too much time in the St Louis Cardinal doghouse. This isn't strictly true, however with his pitiful salary of just under $400,000, Anthony was unable to afford a large home and was teased mercilessly by the team, particularly manager Tony La Russa who refered to his 7 bedroom riverfront apartment as a doghouse.

Carl Pavano. Another of the Tribe's new starting pitchers, I need not make up anything silly about this man, Wikipedia has done the heavy lifting for me: "In 2006 the Yankees expected [Pavano] to be healthy but he began the year on the disabled list after brusing his buttocks in a spring trainging game. Pavano would subsequently miss the entire 2006 season." That's one hell of an ass bruise.

That's if for this edition of "Know Your 2009 Cleveland Indians." I hope you found this as informative as I did.

The Sweat Descends

2009-02-02T13:02:00.005-06:00

On Saturday night I had a beer in a church. The Epiphany Episcopal Church to be precise, on the outskirts of Chicago's west loop. A fantastic venue for a concert and my favorite band in the world, Les Savy Fav, did not disappoint. Oddly enough, the beer tasted just like regular beer despite being sanctified, at least, locationally.

Walking inside I was greeted by the ticket folk, then allowed to enter the nave where tables were set up in the back corners hawking beer and water and hard liquor. The pews were removed and jammed against the walls where people were tossing their coats, hats and winter gear. About 400 people turned up, which is of course an estimate, and I was surprised by the number of women in the audience. probably close to 40/60, which is simply unheard of at these kind of shows. So either Chicago women are turned on by a front-man with a great big beard and belly (I can't say I blame them, Tim is quite charming), or just love great music.

The bands (LSF was accompanied by Jai Alai Savant) performed upon the raised chancel which was backed by a large floral mural, vaguely edenic, with a bunch of saints and our Lord and savior. There was barely any dressing of the stage although I'm not sure if it was prohibited or even necessary in the first place with such are great background. A bunch of lights were all that was needed to illuminate the murals, band, and audience in turn with your typical supersaturated concert reds and greens. Jai Alai Savant proved to be skilled and cheerful openers, and did the trick of warming everyone up. By the time they finished up I was in a knot of folks located just right of center, four or five people deep from the band.

Tim Harrington came out dressed as a priest, an outfit that didn't last long, which he used to deliver a somewhat boring if not blasphemous prayer akin to 'rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub.' And when they began to play the crowd went apeshit, at least where I was standing. You know everything is well and good when you leap up and gravity doesn't restore you back to earth because everyone else is jumping and pressed up tight together. Tim did his audience participation thing, jumping down into the crowd and wandering about, sometimes mucking around quite deep, which can be disorienting for folks, since it seems like many people focus soley on the singer, and you have much of the audience in the front with their backs to the band while other concert-goers, by far the minority, continue to cheer on the rest of the musicians.

I've always thought of Tim as kind of an overgrown toddler, who is fascinated by everything and gets easily distracted from the music by alternately being a showman and audience member himself. At times it seems to exasperate the rest of the band, I noticed the bassist, Syd giving knowing glances to the tech guys, as if to say "It's just not worth reigning him back, just let him go." At one point Syd had to remind Tim what song was next, but at least he received a delighted, "I love that song!' in response. But in general Syd and the rest of the guys seem content to be, well, not forgotten, they're too skilled for that.

As always there was a lot of physicality in Tim's showing off. the tight clothes, the wigs, the near nudity, at one point he wore a green spandex number with leopard fringe that Harrington claimed was taken from a rapper named 'middle weezy' or 'medium-sized jeezy' or something like that. And his crowning moment came in the audience where he knelt down in front of the guy next to me, unzipped his fly, and tucked the mic in the hole and began to sing his lyrics as if giving head. As many as a dozen or so cell-phone cameras were snapping pictures and recording the moment for posterity.

My only lament was that I am old and very quickly became pretty beaten up and broken down, just halfway threw the set or so. Before that I was nearly hysterical, as were those around me. Tim even gave us a shout saying, "You guys ought to spread out through the rest of the crowd." Sadly I couldn't keep up. I was dehydrated before things even began, and when I started seeing stars I thought it best to get some air. I watched the remainder of the show from the sidelines, with people gently bobbing their heads and singing along.

Yet i must have been doing something right. It's days later and I'm still sore.

The Ferd Who Ruined Christmas and Most of January as Well

2009-01-21T10:09:00.006-06:00

I wouldn't say a monkey can do my job, but it's not like I'm welding jet engines together or taming lions or something. I'd say 25% of my job is meticulous organization, another 25% research, and the rest all public relations. Because honestly, sometimes I feel like I am this place's presidential press secretary. I've learned how to soothe people, smarm my way into getting what I want, and deflect questions so deftly that the person asking them ends up asking something totally different, and usually is happy with the answer they weren't looking for in the first place.

But sometimes I wish I had a monkey's sensitivity. That I didn't worry so much about what other monkeys thought, and could just respond in kind to the screeching and poop-flinging that inevitably comes my way. Case in point: the past 4 weeks.

The situation is complicated and silly, but in the end, simplistically stupid. We get stuff for people. Sometimes we end up failing to get that stuff on time and the people get mad.

Last October I began fielding orders for books needed in January. It's particularly important I receive orders for foreign titles early, as they have to cross the pond to get to us. Well I placed the foreign orders in November thinking all was well, that the books would be in by December. Because that is how a normal organization works. You acquire things from other people for a fee, then sell said product for a profit. Well, when December came around and still no foreign books I began to get worried.

Turns out our man paying the fees wasn't actually paying them. "Got to pick your battles," they said, referring to the fact that we were doling out what $$$$ we could to whom we could when we could. 'Stupid recession,' I thought to myself, but surely they'd get around to paying folks who needed a lot of extra time, right? Not so much. And since certain foreign countries take extra long amounts of time off for the Winter holidays (a month!? Can I live there?), my books were never sent out until January. As in when the classes they were needed for had already begun.

So for the last 3 weeks I've been fielding calls that should never have been necessary in the first place from white hot angry professors, confused secretaries caught in the middle, and uppity TAs trying to play hero calling to find out when their books might arrive. And I have absolutely nothing to tell them. I've endured dismissive exasperated shrugs, a truckload of yelling, cursing that would make a teamster blanch, and perhaps worst of all, polite little professors saying things like "I'm just dismayed by all this" which is somehow much worse than Mr. Named Professor popping his top like some sort of King yelling "off with his head!"

And it all could have been avoided. If the distributors were paid on time. If I'd emailed the professors and told them there was problem back in December when i first found out (see I'm partly to blame after all. But what could I have said besides your books aren't here? people usually require more information than that, and i wasn't comfortable defaming my place of employment or others who work therein). If the damn books were just here when they were supposed to be.

But in an odd twist of irony, if the books were actually here, well, I wouldn't have much of a job to do, would I.

Dream Cheating

2009-01-20T09:26:00.003-06:00

Last night I dream cheated on my wife. Relax, it was rated PG-13. And didn't make a whole lot of sense. But for the purposes of giving Dream-L the details so that she can hunt down and kill the woman who 'stole her man' here's the low-down.

I was in college or more likely high-school and my class was holed up in a big fancy hotel for some sort of academic conference. I remember taking rides up glass elevators and there were security dudes in black suits all over the place. Also my brother was getting married, only in the dream my brother was older than me and most likely my cousin Kevin. I spent a long time in the cafeteria eating pizza.

We were then assigned small groups to work on our projects which were kind of like biographies. I'm pretty sure mine was on populist statesman William Jennings Bryant but it might also have been on the Arizona Cardinals all-pro WR Larry Fitzgerald. Anyhow, we had to present our reports as partners, and a short girl in a vintage concert t-shirt with very short black hair picked me and we went to her room to practice. Then she seduced me with indie-pop. I still remember when she handed me the CD (CDs, how quaint!) and the band was called Chase and the cover looked kind of like the Shins 'Chutes Too Narrow'. They sounded pretty good too. Then she totally kissed me.

So there you go, L. Sick your dream-self on that hussy who dreamkissed your man. I'm sure there will be little left of her when you'r through.

Naked Mitosis

2009-01-16T10:51:00.004-06:00

CNN is an evil bastard who pretends to be above the sensationalism of the 'lesser' news outlets but then puts this kind of article link on their front page:

Teens' naked cell pix draw porn charges

Now, I check CNN a few times a day to learn about Barack Obama's recent purchase of a slimjim and a pack of mentos as well as any odd air-travel happenings (which it appears occur everyday, by hero-pilots and 'crudball' dudes trying to fake their deaths). Sooner or later I'm going to see the link that contains the phrase "naked pix." I'm not made of stone. Although I am either incredibly niave or there is something wrong with that title blurb structure because initially I thought some high-schooler had drawn cells in biology class that had boobies and penises and stuff. But apparently kids aren't that wierd and are just hormonal and kind of slutty (shocking?).

Again, too bashful/afraid to actually click the video link I cut and paste the title into google so that i might at least read about the discussion of this story. And people delivered. The most interesting discussion I found was this. My favorite comment has to be from 'XopherMV':

"I think it is ridiculous that she's facing the ADULT charges of CHILD pornography for photographing HERSELF.

Either she's an adult or she is a child. The prosecutor can't have it both ways."

Indeed, a real LOL moment. However this only goes to reconfirm the notion that when/if L and I actually have our hypothetical children and any of them happens to be girls they are certainly not going to be allowed to leave the attic until they are maladjusted 40 year-olds.

Oh and right. So totally not going to do my typical google image search for an appropriate pic to upload for this entry. Not happening.

Cold out There, How Could is it?

2009-01-14T09:14:00.003-06:00

It's so cold that after a half block of walking my jeans feel as if they are made of cold rolled aluminum, the kind they make heating and air-conditioning ducts out of.

It's so cold that after a full block of walking, it feels as if the Icy Hand of Death itself has reached inside and is wringing my bladder.

It's so cold I went through 3 faces on my walk from the Jeep to the building I work in. My own face, which crumbled away only to be replaced by the Efron face (I wanted to be pretty, however I quickly learned that this was not effective against the cold), which failed and was replaced by the Jake Gyllenhaal face, which I thought was masculine enough, yet it too failed. Now i have the Eastwood Grimace, which has actually made the cold tuck its tail between its legs and run away like a little girl... for the time being.

It's so cold this makes my winters in Buffalo feel like winters in Kuala Lumpur.

It's so cold I had to frighten a family of abominable snow people from squatting in the Jeep overnight. They don't like fire, or coke zero, apparently.

It's so cold they found Jake Frost dead of hypothermia on the near west side.

It's so cold pigeons will actually crystallize if they fly 3 or 4 stories up in the air, plummeting to earth where they shatter like that robot guy in Terminator 2. All of the pigeon peices will one day pool back together in the sewers of Northern Gary where a 300 foot tall Pigeon King will wreak havoc on the populace, eating babies and pecking away the eyes of all the monuments and statues.

It's so cold that hot no longer exists, mild is in critical condition, warm is being given its last rites, and chilly moved to Florida to spend its remaining days voting republican and messing up the electoral college in peace and quiet away from its annoying grandkids.

It's so cold that everybody died. true story.

Awkward thy name is Douglas

2009-01-07T10:38:00.006-06:00

I've never considered myself socially adept. I'm not smooth, I don't finish sentences, I'm easily distracted, and prone to pauses. Mostly because I over-think, and over-analyze everything. This effect is multiplied a hundredfold when I am around others who share my special disease or when I am around persons of the opposite sex, especially when I was single. The effect is somewhat dulled if I have drank either excessive amounts of caffiene or just the right amount of alcohol. All in all I seem to have a gift of steering the most casual, normal, everyday situation straight on down to Awkwardtown.

Case in point:

Yesterday, a girl I work with was hurrying to leave. I was fairly busy and the rest of the store was nightmare of customers. She is not the type to say goodbye, and neither am I. But as she walked by my desk something fell from the bundle of wool and Ipod accessories she was juggling for the door. It was some sort of plastic ringer, possibly for an earbud or peice of protective casing? I was inexplicably fascinated by it, as if it were made of precious metal (keep in mind it had been a looooong day). Anyhow, by the time i picked it up and remembered that it was a human being's possession, probably something that helps another something work properly, the girl in question was barely in 'embarassing shout' range, let alone 'I have any decent shot of running you down and embarassing you in person' range. And did i mention this is the type of shy person who rarely says goodbye?

So I set it on my desk, figuring I would just give it to her when she next worked. But then the over-thinking began. How could i just give it to her? Did she even know what it was? Was it important enough to have saved in the first place? Did she even know it was missing? How did i know it was hers, and yet still hadn't been able to let her know she'd dropped it when it originally happened? In short: how awkward am I, really?

In the end, i played the anonymous good samaritan. I saw her drop her bulging canvas bag full of scraves and hat and winter bundlings near my desk and I simply remembered the plastic doodad, and dropped it in her rucksack. Hopefully she found it and it healed her device of its problems. Maybe its still bound up in her mitten. I don't know. But hey, at least I wasn't all awkward about all of this, right?

the 100 greatest challenge

2008-12-10T14:24:00.005-06:00

I've always been a huge fan of lists. Little did I know, but shortly after I met Croftie I found she was very found of a particular list. She had been steadily marching through the 100 greatest novels of all time, but I have made up some ground. Together we are unstoppable.

A code for below. The books I am certain that just I have read are in blue. Those I know Croftie has read are in red. Books we've both read are in green.

ULYSSES by James Joyce
THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
CATCH-22 (not entirely sure C has read this...)
DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
1984 by George Orwell
I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O'Hara
U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos (I've read the first volume)
WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell (again, read bk1)
THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren (began this but couldn't stomach it)
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene
LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac (hated it!)
THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
PARADE'S END by Ford Madox Ford
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm
THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell
A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
KIM by Rudyard Kipling
A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh
THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
THE OLD WIVES' TALE by Arnold Bennett
THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
LOVING by Henry Green
MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
IRONWEED by William Kennedy
THE MAGUS by John Fowles
WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
SOPHIE'S CHOICE by William Styron
THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy (think C started but never finished)
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington

That Barack Obama Sure Is One Nice Guy

2008-12-09T13:05:00.008-06:00

If indeed the power's that be monitor blogs, suffice to say I'm likely to be whisked away to some sort of detention center for the story I am about to tell.

Last night, to the surprise of nobody, least of all me, I was cruising around Hyde Park with Barack Obama in his black SUV with the bullet proof tinted windows. It was just me and Obama, 'chewing the fat' as they say, until the driver was forced to pull down the wrong alley and all hell broke loose. Suddenly, the other black SUVs that had been flanking us were nowhere to be found and it was like some scene out of a Harrison Ford as President movie. The windows around us began to crackle with the 'pack-pack-pack' of bullets being refused entry until enough got through and the driver was scagged. 'oh no!,' I yelled as I turned to the side to take any incoming fire that our good president might receive from my side of the truck. But this was all unnecessary as Barack had a plan.

Before escaping I went to help the driver and was told not to worry, he was merely a highly convincing robot. Obama and I then made our getaway, ducking and rolling out all action hero style before some sort of explosion destroyed the vehicle in a riotous orange fireball. The entire time our president elect was one cool customer, and all I could lament as we used a top secret path back to his home was the utter ruination of my shoes, befouled by oil and blood from the inexplicably bleedy robot driver.

Inside Mr Obama's home I found spacious, comfortably furnished rooms, fancy yes, but not the kind of fancy where you don't sit on the sofa. The kind of fancy where you maybe even put your feet up on the ottomans. For some reason the Obamas hadn't switched over DVD or Blu-ray yet and had a vast collection of VHS movies. I'm pretty sure Barack told me to pick one out that I could borrow while he went and got me a new pair of shoes from upstairs, you see, we're the same size.

Of course this was an incredibly lucid dream and not reality. I realized this when Obama and I left his place after some time and both transformed into vigilante werewolves, saving the Hyde Park populace from a plague of rogue timberwolves that had wandered down from Canada because of the severe cold. Unfortunately, I ended up losing the VHS copy of Big Trouble in Little China to the ravenous maw of a wolf.

However I'm left with the impression that Barack Obama sure is one nice guy.

Destroyer

2008-12-04T12:54:00.004-06:00

This post will likely win me TMI of the year. In fact, TMI is probably a little too cutesy a way of warning that the following might be, cue the italics and scary local news threatening music, too much information. Also, in fine Thunderclap tradition, we return to a scene detailed all too frequently in this blog. I'm talking about, of course, the men's bathroom at my work.

Yesterday was new urinal cake day. Where before there was nothing but a hollow white porcelain bowl, more and more musty with each passing day, now there is a cake, brilliantly pink, a color not found anywhere else in nature, sanitzing and perfuming the entire bathroom from its quiet resting place. And I know you girly readers will have no frame of reference here, but it is a powerful feeling that sweeps over a man, er, possibly just this man, whereby I am encouraged, nay, compelled, to try as hard as I possibly can to destroy said dainty pink cake with my urine.

It becomes a target, a beacon too attractive to ignore, a bullseye, but that bitch is tough. After several days worth of visits I'll manage to make a slight dent in its center, while the whole cake is diminished by countless others disgracefully directionless micturation. Gradually the days will pass, eventually I will be able to move the shrunken cake around with carefully placed stream, and I'll be honest with you, it's kind of fun. But back to the point, I am forced to destroy that damn cake from the center of my being, and nothing less than its complete eradication will do.

At least until the janitor decides to place another in an apparently endless supply of cakes back in the urninal.

A man's work is never done.

How to Disappear Completely

2008-11-28T08:41:00.003-06:00

As I sat down at my desk, got out my gigantic stack of coursebook orders, contemplated how much of a ghost-town the campus had become the day after Thanksgiving which led to me landing a precious parking spot right outside the store, ate my mini-wheats and drank my tea, set my Ipod in the little stereo-dealie here at work what song does the All-powerful Music Shuffle God choose as its first track?

let's just say the chorus of "I'm not here, I'm not here, I'm not heeee-eeee--rrrreeee" made me look around and wonder why anyone would be at work right now when there are so many Wal-marts to be despoiling.

We did it!

2008-11-05T07:46:00.001-06:00

You know those stories you read as a child, not those creepy German fairy-tales where kids get parbroiled and eaten, but the American children's stories where everything works out and you get this warm fuzzy feeling and drift off to sleep confident that everyone important knows what they are doing and that everything will be alright?

Yeah, last night that kind of story happened in real life. And for one night, Chicago, the city I live in, was the center of the world.

I'm in. I voted. I'm a believer. I believe anything can happen these next 4 years. I'm energized like countless others my age and older and younger. I believe in you Barack. and I still want to help.

Now tell me what I need to do to keep this going.

Chillax, Brah

2008-10-29T09:19:00.004-06:00

You know that guy in Full Metal Jacket who wrote that Oppenheimer quote on his helmet, "I am Become Death." Yeah, he was being an ironic asshole. Still funny mind you, but definitely in the assholic/ironic subcategory of humor. And somehow, I find myself slipping off the paths of the righteous to join him. I may not Become Death, but I am Become the Thing I Hate. Namely, a hipster. At least, as defined by what I find funny.

Not a big surprise, really. Everything esle in my life has hipster spray-painted and sequined and bedazzled all over it. But consider the following.

I enjoy the 'wassup' Budweiser commercials way too much. Far more than I enjoy the actual beer they were used to advertise. It cracks me up every time I hear myself say 'wassup' all drawn out to a work colleague that just came in. There are several things wrong with that last statement, and grammar and syntax are the least of its problems. Yes, I laugh at my own jokes. I'm (suddenly?) that guy. However this is mitigated (somewhat?) by the fact that i genuinely find it funny. Irony free enjoyment. It almost makes up for the fact that nobody else laughs or even smiles. The best I get is a pair of rolled eyes.

I could go into my borderline psychotic adoration of shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Mr Show, and Sea-lab 2021, but really, what's left to be said. If you don't understand their genius, no force on Earth can save you from a grim and dull hereafter.

I occassionally use acronyms like LOL, and their extended ridiculous relatives like roflcopter and LOLlerskates. Text speak to me is way too funny. Anyhting that makes you sound like a 5-year old with a learning disorder--sign me up!

I say things like 'brah' and 'chillax.' Again, not because I am making fun of anyone per se. I find it hard to believe that people actually said 'brah' at all really. They are like leprechauns or unicorns or compassionate conservatives (zing!, [see there's another example, I say 'zing!']), they only exist in theory, not in practice. So there may not even be frat-boys of this variety to begin with, let alone make fun of. But I find their words hilarious. I'm giggling to myself right now. Hehe.

I'm still a Wise Ass

2008-10-21T11:58:00.007-06:00

Marriage can't change everything. Or most things really. Evidenced by nuanced replies to the questions I've been getting from my friends and co-workers.

The first time I heard this it was from an Uncle. "So, what's it feel like to be a married man?" I replied,

"Fantastic!"

Friend #1 in quick succession, "How's married life treating ya?"

"Um, good?" Of course the question mark in my reply refers more to 'is this a sufficient answer?' than implying any sort of uncertainty to my marital bliss.

Friend #4 "So, how's it feel to married!" (with an insane amount of emphasis on 'married' as if it was some sort of mythical state that has been achieved by 2, perhaps 4 people throughout the course of human history)

"Pretty great!," said with a smile which at this point was still genuine.

Co-worker #7 "How was the wedding? What's it feel like..." me cutting them off hopefully not too impatiently,

"It was great! I couldn't be happier." said while not looking away from computer screen.

Co-worker #11 "hey Doug, congrats. Say, how does it feel to be..."

"Married? Hmmm. That's tricky. very hard to say. But i will try and explain. Imagine holding your immortal soul in your hand, it's the size of a grapefruit and luminous and ethereal and beautiful. Now grab onto that soul and crack it in half as violently as possible. Now have the person you love the most in the entire world do the same to their soul. Finally, take one half of your soul and sew it to one half of your partner's. make sure to firmly snuff out whatever halves you do not chose to merge. The new frankensoul is yours to share for the rest of your natural lives."

Idiosyncratic or Perfectly Predictable?

2008-10-06T08:48:00.005-06:00

Gogol Bordello
Bowie
the Fav
radiohead
Outkast
Queen
Britney
the kinks
Madonna
the Clancy brothers
Neutral Milk Hotel
the Backstreet Boys
Deanna Carter
the Smashing Pumpkins
Tribe Called Quest
the Jackson 5
Guns 'n' roses
De la Soul
the Police
james taylor
Arcade Fire
Johnny Cash
TV on the radio
Prince
the Beatles
the Pixies
Belinda Carlisle
the Strokes
Michael Jackson
Kansas
Kylie Minogue
the Postal Service
Bob Dylan
the Go! team
Beck
Huey Lewis and the News
Van Morrison
Weezer
the Beach Boys
Justin Timberlake
Bad company
the new Kids on the Block

a sampling of the artists on our wedding playlist. more to come...

Today I Looked Death in the Face and Laughed

2008-10-01T08:16:00.006-06:00

When I stepped outside today it was cold--colder than it should have been. Although it is really hard to guesstimate just how it's going to feel outside by looking out the window, past history and weather.com suggested mild with a touch of Autumnal crispness. Which made the shroud of debilitating chill that descended upon me bend so sinister it fronted the ominous side.

More ominous still, were the cackling crows streaming in and out of the large tree down the street. They were furious, or scared, or just having a good time, but noisily so and they caught my attention.

Then, in a sequence that could have been lifted from a Peter Jackson epic, my eyes fell from the crows circling above and glanced down the row of trees lining the sidewalk like a colonnade and there, at the very end of a long tunnel like space, in a black cloak which from this distance obscured any recognizable features, was a figure that frightened me to my core, walking swiftly away from me, or was it toward me? It was impossible to tell. The world around me appeared to go dim. The crows went even more nuts, and it felt as if my blood were slowing down in my veins.

Now I'm not exactly a spiritual man, I consider myself a moral and ethical man, but that is not the same and as far as Faith goes I'm a pauper. But I can't shake the feeling that what I encountered this morning somehow transcends normal 'real world' classification. As in i wasn't supposed to see it. I'm not sure what or who the black-cloaked figure was or what they were doing, but whatever it was it was deeply unsettling. And as much as I'd like to forget it, I can't seem to.

Clever Cats and Fatty-Fats

2008-08-13T07:55:00.004-06:00

I've long been baffled by our inability to slim down Barry. As far as cats go, he runs the gamut of standard cat traits, he's very bright, occasionally cruel (mostly to buggies and his carefree if not remarkably stupid sister Pickle), greedy and impressively stubborn, so initially i just thought he was too fond of his fat to let it go, even when we feed him the minimum of one half cup of dry food a day. It's not much, a half cup, in fact it looks painfully small, but we were told that is all an adult cat needs, even though most cats out there eat far more and usually pay the consequence.

Well turns out Barry has found a way of supplementing his diet. No, not from stealing from Pickle, which he sometimes does when he knows he can get away with it, and no, I'm not talking about 'cleaning' the knives I use to make peanut butter sandwiches in the morning and leave in the sink still coated with a slight layer of peanuty fatty goodness that are shiny and clean looking when i come home. No, last evening Croftie discovered that Barry has found yet another interesting source of pure delicious fat when she blundered out into the kitchen in the early morning hours to find him sitting on the counter, licking away at the the sides of the Olive oil bottle.

Adventures in Bookselling

2008-07-24T11:57:00.004-06:00

Today something odd happened. Which in and of itself isn't odd--strange things happen around here with alarming frequency. However this doesn't make them any less bizarre.

This morning a customer handed me book which she claimed was defective. The title: You never Call! You never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother. I glanced at the cover, the binding, no scuffs or tears or anything that might suggest botched manufacturing. I began to think the lady was pulling a fast one on me, trying to get another 10% knocked off the price for no good reason. I was about to skim through the pages but was intercepted by the somewhat impatient costumer, "It's on the inside," she says.

Hidden between pages 224 and 225 was a thin card with this inspiring, no so subtle bit of proselytizing 'literature' on it:

Jesus answered and said unto him, "Most assuredly, I say unto you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." (John 3:3, 10:1, 14:6, 6:47-51; Acts 10:38; Rev 1:8)

I have to admit, it made me chuckle. That someone would go this far for so little. Really? A born again advertisement/condemnation in a history of Jewish mothers? This type of book sabotage is unfortunately not uncommon. I once had to go through the entire History of the Middle East section and fix every title having anything to do with Islam because some kind soul had turned each book around so that the spines were facing inward. A stupid prank all in all, but a bunch of the books were actually mangled in the process, probably not a big concern of the prick who did the job. So yeah, I was now a bit concerned other books would be very lazily vandalized.

But upon further exploration I found that the card wasn't simply stuck in the book, wedged down so it wouldn't fall out. It was actually pierced by the threads of the binding. Apparently the printing facilities for this particular press have at least one passive aggressive anti-Semite working very not-so-hard to get their message across to as small as segment of the population as possible. People sure have an odd way of following the edicts of their God. I just wish so many of them weren't so annoying about it.

Lost in the Sound

2008-07-18T12:57:00.004-06:00

I'm in the middle of the greatest music Summer of my life. No, it's not because of Miley Cyrus or that song about girls kissing girls that has Moms and politicians frothing with fake outrage across the country (because impressionable young girls should avoid the pitfalls of fake lesbianism, no doubt). It also has nothing to do with any actual new music coming out, or albums I've been waiting for years to finally arrive (although the recent Wolf Parade album does fall in that category). No, it's because of Chicago.

Chicago brings the music. Earlier this year I saw Gogol Bordello for the Nth time. Then the aforementioned Wolf Parade at the surprisingly stodgy House of Blues. Now it's festival season as Pitchfork and Lolla come to my city to entertain me. That's right, its a personal favor. Others that will benefit from this, you're welcome. Having grown up in Buffalo and schooled myself in Syracuse, having all kinds of crazy big artists knocking on my door was something of a rarity. Now, I have to beat them away with a stick. yes I'm talking about you, Vampire Weekend.

In little under 2 weeks time I get to see my two favoritest bands in all of creation. One is largely responsible for recalibrating my musical taste from exactly nothing (I didn't really listen to music before going to college) to something, the other broke my head and showed me what music could be if you filled it with equal parts fun, art, and noise. I'm talking about radiohead and les savy fav respectively.

The latter is performing this weekend on the final day of Pitchfork and they are bringing all kinds of great music along with them. the Hold Steady, Spoon, the Dodos, '!!!,' are just a few. Of course being Pitchfork I don't know most of the bands performing, but that just means more new stuff to see and experience. Also possible sun poisoning. But you take the good with the bad. And seeing as Les Savy Fav put on the greatest concert of my life (back when Pitchfork Fest was the Intonation fest 3 years back) I am a little bit excited.

Then on the first day of August i get to see Radiohead in Grant Park. With like a billion other people, but who cares. I saw them in northern Ontario in the middle of nowhere 5 years ago and it was wonderful. there wasn't a town for miles let alone a city, and as the show crept towards its conclusion a gigantic reddish orange harvest moon rose up in the sky as a back-drop to the stage as if scripted. This time there will likely be less moon and more frat guy, but the band will have twice as many songs to chose from, so there's that.

So yes, lots of standing around in the sun with strangers, listening to music, and having fun. And seeing as this might be the last full Summer spent in Chicago, it couldn't have come at a better time.

Because it's the Law (and sometimes even when it isn't)

2008-07-14T13:10:00.004-06:00

On Sunday morning, freshly yoga'd and slept-in respectively, Croftie and I were making our way to the Jeepie Jeepie when we passed by one of our unsettlingly friendly neighbors who had some bad news.

"Looks like you got a ticket," he says, among many other things, he's unsettlingly friendly after all. The saving grace, he has a cute dog named Hemingway who is sort of in love with our cat Pickle. Their torrid 'through the window-pane' love affair should be categorized among the most passionate of all time. But I digress.

upon hearing those unfortunate words, I'm like 'No." Croftie gets quite rattled, but to her credit she does not let it show. We move along to the Jeep and sure enough, there's the ticket. Croftie inspects the note and finds that it is for an "Out of Date License Plate Registration Sticker." Sure enough, down below is a JUN 08 sticker on the plate.

But lo! a few months back Croftie got a letter in the mail with a new registration sticker. One designed for the front windshield instead of the plate because too many folks were going around stealing them. CT, it appears, is one of few states to do this, seeing as every other out of state plate in our neighborhood, and there are surprisingly a great many, had them. But Mr/Mrs. Chicago Beat Cop was not aware of this, and issued us a ticket, because our possible violation is something that really must be curbed and spent time on, not, you know, actual crimes or anything.

Does it make me sleep a little bit better at night knowing our neighborhood's parking transgressions are being vigilantly curbed? No, no it does not.

Unrest

2008-06-27T12:07:00.004-06:00

Its been a long while since my blog was in any way titular. You can either use this sentence to stop laughing, or, if you are more mature than I am, use it to wait until I'm done chuckling at my own joke.

So todays topic will fall under the Zombie rubric. Or, more specifically the Undead. I have a disturbing fascination with all things undeady, which was probably conceived when i was little and was absolutely terrified by horror movies and would lay awake for hours, trying to calm down and come to grips with my own imminent doom. My parents repeated, "they're just movies--they're not real," over and over, but their logic is flawed, because at night, in the dark, a child's bedroom is home to a great many things that have no relationship whatsoever to reality. Eventually, as a class A nerd, I through the full weight of my overactive imagination at the problem, and used the movies own logic systems against them.

Many monsters have a simple set of rules that govern their behavior, and equally simple ways of being vanquished. Laying in my bed I knew a vampire couldn't hurt me because it couldn't get inside without being invited, and if my sister was dumb enough to let one in, why, the crucifix that hung on my bunk-bed shelf would protect me.

However there are an equal number horror stories where logic and rationality are what is directly under siege, and an overactive imagination can only strengthen their evil power. Ghosts, for instance. For every 3 or 4 ghosts that wanted revenge or were improperly buried, there was one or two that just haunted stuff because it was cool. And god forbid my kid brain start to ponder the problem of evil, and come to the understanding that not only was Evil omnipresent and everchanging, but that it was necessary, because how else could we be Good?

One solution was to trick them, to become one of them. To masquerade as one of their kind, because I didn't really want to eat brains and murder and end the world as we know it. But there were plenty of neat-o things the Undead can do, and it wouldn't be a half bad gig, all things considered. So with no further ado, the benefits and costs of being various kinds of Undead:

1. Vampire.
pros- get to change into wolves, creepy mist, or a bat and fly around all over belfries and stuff. Cool capes and fancy pants. Women get all gaspy and hot and bothered when you just walk in the room. Immortality.

cons- Damned. Extremely limited diet. dealing with punk ass slayers. Goth look is a bit tired. Immortality.

2. Ghost.
pros- float through things, move things ever so slightly, generally harmless mischief making. Slick translucent white appearance.
cons- Usually been wronged in pretty fucked up ways. Bound to the clock and calendar, appearing at specific times and places. probably cold a lot of the time.

3. Mummy.
pros- likely were a pharaoh or some other noble personage. Get to take your time (mummies are never very fast). Have all your possessions right there, and if they've been despoiled, well, Scavenger Hunt time!
cons- tattered garb catches on all manner of stuff. Kind of dusty and dessicated.

4. Zombie.
pros- get to hang out with all your friends, be mindless. All you can eat. Get to do a great bit of shambling. impervious to harm save blows to the head and fire.
cons- don't ever really get a chance to sit down, rest. if zombies 'win,' they will eventually run out of food, what then? Constantly losing limbs, hair, physical cohesiveness.

all this and its still not time to go home from work.

Dread Pirate Hillbilly

2008-06-06T09:52:00.004-06:00

And yes, if the Simpsons taught me anything its that they prefer to be called Sons of the Soil. But that is not the word that was used to describe my appearance this past Tuesday now was it?

Keep in mind I was asking for it. The following things all more or less scream 'bumpkin' or at least don't scream 'latte-sipping Prius driving America-hating Elitist':

jeans.
red and blue plaid shirt.
old baseball cap worn forwards.
long hair in back, not too combed.
6 days worth of not shaving.

In short, a colleague of mine, whose first language was not English told me quite bluntly that I looked like a Hillbilly. All i need is a jug of something with XXX written on the side and a shot-gun and I'll complete the stereotype.

West Virginia or bust.
(btw, the above image was one of the first to pop up when I googled 'plaid.' scary!)

Power Animal

2008-05-30T12:13:00.004-06:00

As far as pointless work conversations go, this one was actually interesting. Someone was chatting at the front of the store about totem animals, as in if you were a shaman or something and had a choice what animal would best represent you. The conversation then meandered to Fight Club's 'power animal' sequence, where Ed Norton is in 'his cave' and his power animal is a penguin. Eventually the track led to if you could actually be any animal in the world, what would you be? (yeah, business was kind of slow today...)

I chose a duck.

For the following many many reasons you can see why this is a superior selection:

a) I get to fly.
b) If a mallard, I get to be pretty one, with cool long feathers off the side of my head. (see picture above)
c) I totally get to do that upside down underwater move where my tail and feet are all wiggling straight up in the air.
d) if a girl duck, I totally get to lead those cute as hell duckling parades across streets near the park.
e) I get to eat bugs
f) water-proof.
g) quacking sounds cool and isn't annoying at all.
h) get to hang out with your friends and swim all day.
i) multiple layers of feathers make me impervious to the cold.
j) migrating is both impressive and an environmentally friendly way to travel.
k) if a cartoon, surprisingly immune to shotgun blasts + my bill will do that neat spinning around my whole head thing.
l) webbed feet.
m) adorable waddle while on land.

need i go on?

Brunch, Bro-style.

2008-05-27T09:25:00.005-06:00

Sunday, here in the City of Wind (and snow and tulips and bears) there was a humongous bicycle event along the lake. Bike the Drive it is called, after the mode of travel and the means, Lake Shore Drive (which is abbreviated LSD with the occasional hilarious consequences [at least to me] as in, "oh, yeah, I'll be there in a few, I'm on LSD"). Anyhow, the Croftster and myself often brunch it up at a certain place which happens to be located near the finishing point of Bike the Drive. Thus our already jam-packed weekend eatery was even more packed with jam, er, people. some of them sweaty and dusty with post-bike related hunger.

But the single most revolutionary aspect of this particular dining experience were the number of men eating brunch together. sometimes, just two of them in a little side table, tiny little coffee cups in hand. eating like there was nothing wrong with two dudes going out for omelets on a Sunday morning. it was Brunch, Bro-style.

the day the crazy guy at work was arrested

2008-05-13T10:02:00.004-06:00

understatement of the year: people are freaking weird. yet this weirdness is exacerbated when you put lots of different people together. like at work. there are any number of truly strange individuals in your office or firm or fastfood restaurantorium, but seeing them all together let you really get a good sense of whose freak flag flies highest.

Gorbachev was that guy at my work. That's not his real name of course, and I say was because he is no longer employed here. because he was arrested. and fired. and now there is a restraining order against his ever setting foot in the building or the immediate blocks around it. Police thought the restraining order was a good idea considering what Gorby did to get arrested in the first place. but before that, some back-story.

Gorby had worked here for ten years or so. Kind of a lumbering guy, big and slow moving, useful in physical tasks like moving stock around and stuff like that. He was also counted on to shovel the walk and take care of what little grounds needed to be taken care of, and since he got to work as early as 6am, this proved useful for everyone else. But Gorby wasn't all there 'upstairs.' Any brief conversation with the man would tip you off. He was constantly talking, to himself and anyone he was around. It was an anxious voice, like he was nervous all the time and felt he needed to talk or make jokes to relieve tension nobody else felt, well, until he was around.

And his jokes were never mean-spirited and almost always only funny to him. I don't think he had a mean bone in his body, or didn't, rather, before the incident. You see Gorby liked to play pranks on the other tenants of this building. If they put up fliers on the communal bulletin board in the elevator he would deface them, always subtly, like he was afraid of getting caught but just couldn't help himself. From time to time mail would get delivered to our office which was not for us, which was for someone many floors up, and once this mail included several heavy boxes. Our boss told Gorby he needed to take these packages to their rightful owner, and Gorby resented this deeply. Not that anyone knew this right away, he never said a word, just smiled and went to his task. yet if you were a fly on the wall of whatever hallways he was lumbering down with those boxes, one by one, I'm sure you would have been privy to a very long and random stream of disgruntled consciousness.

So Gorby decided to exact some revenge. Over a period of months, he would often pillage a control box, or circuit board (mother board?) on the floor of the person who so deeply wounded him. He would unplug wires and tangle them, plug them in the wrong slots, and this caused all kinds of network problems for the entire floor. Not exactly a smart prank, even though he often did this well before anyone was in the building, let alone on the floor in question. Seeing as it was not even on my office's property, it was all the worse. Eventually the tenants planted a sting, purposely broke the circuit panel door so that it had to be pried open, then watched as Gorby came by, fiddled, left, came back with a screw-driver and levered the door open. he then began to messing with the wires and with that, the trap was sprung and the dude was arrested.

His original statement? "I just saw that the wiring were broken and was trying to fix it." Only after a half hour or so did the strange revenge drama come out. Needless to say, he was fired on the spot, and not just because he committed these acts against the same people we rent our space from (awkward!). We then got an disconcerting message on our intra-email system warning us to keep a look out, and to call the police if we saw Gorby anywhere near his former workplace.

So, for the past week I have perfected my drop and roll into the adjacent room. I have my back to the front door and if anyone came barging in with a rifle or anything, well, it's nice knowing you all for as long as I have. I am left only with the memory of on old prank he perpetrated on a colleague of mine on Halloween. From what I heard Gorby snuck into this guy's office wearing a Reagan mask and carrying a 2x4. he then lurked in the corner before the guy came back, sat down, and saw him in the reflection of his computer screen. I still remember the scream of terror.

Emmett's Voice Silenced By the Playwright

2008-05-06T07:37:00.004-06:00

Simply put, the "Ballad of Emmett Till" is one of the most overdone puffed up pieces of theater garbage I have ever seen. Which is a shame because for much of the first half of the performance the audience is treated to a wonderful bit of storytelling full of uncompromising acting. Then the lights go dim and and when they return the playwright transforms a simple and brutal story of ignorance, racism and murder into a Grand Message piece so full of its own righteousness and self-importance that it is almost impossible to remember the stuttering boyish enthusiasm of our deceased protagonist. At some point early on in the second half Emmett's voice is silenced and only the playwright's remains, bombastic and abrasive.

Ifa Bayeza tells us in the notes to the performance that the "Ballad of Emmett Till" was born out of a single act, excised from a different play that never saw the light. This one act is devastatingly moving, a charming back and forth between Emmett and his mother, and bears a seed of tremendous promise. Yet the farther the spins away from this early movement the worse it becomes. I am told the play was originally an elegant and concise if not brutal 90 minutes. The play the audience was treated to last evening was closer to 3 hours and sags under the unfortunate extra baggage.

One need not look any further than the ridiculous pomposity of the play's title. Why ballad? Ballads are romantic and simple, light and popular and short. I cannot think of a list of things that have less to do than the drama about to unfold on stage. Yes, there is singing, but the songs are much more spiritual, or at least attempt to be. The only romance in the play are the potential relationships snuffed out of Emmett's future and as such are far from light or simple. I am not going to speculate on how the title could have been reworked, all I know is that the final product feels like it wants to be simpler, more minimal and that this conciseness would represent the core of this play much better.

The set is also emblematic of an odd minimalism gone amok. What could have been a very powerful piece of support has one or three too many additional elements. The large fragments of a massive wall are suspended at various angles across the rear of the stage and appear dangerously close to coming crashing down. Yet these same pieces also look formidable and forbidding. As a result, the combination of staunch impenetrability and inevitable peril is wonderfully evocative of the nature of race relations among many other themes present in the play. It is a terrific bit of minimalism but of course, like everything in this play, we couldn't have it as is. No, we need huge projections crisscrossing the walls to bludgeon the audience with things they could surmise from the action on stage. Oh, well now i get it, they are out near a stream, because of all the rippling water lighting effects. I never would have gotten that from, say, the fact that the characters are all fishing. All the while the center of the stage spins round and round needlessly. Perhaps if this was some sort of metaphor for no matter how much things change, they always stay the same, but it can't be since the playwright's message is so adamant that the events of this performance have changed the world irrevocably for the better. So why must everyone just keep spinning in place then?

It is not just the set that is confusingly overcomplicated. Key details of the trial and legacy of Emmett's murder are muddled via artistic, and I use the term loosely, flashbacks that splice moments of the lynching itself directly into the action of the trial. You can imagine the technique, corny lighting effects which single out characters who then bellow out their impassioned lines from that fateful evening, and when the lights return the characters are once more sitting down once more in the courtroom, cool and calm. The effect is to water down both the simplistic violence of the lynching as well as the convoluted rhetoric of the trial by having the two needlessly coexist in the same place. And all the while the shade of Emmett prowls the stage, constantly pleading with characters who cannot see or interact with him, his continued presence diluting the loss of such a cheerful kid. I can only imagine how powerful a second act we could have had if only Emmett had stayed buried and the only interaction we'd seen was the shudderingly powerful reaction of his mother upon seeing his mutilated face in the open coffin. Nothing is more tragic than a innocent voice silenced too soon.

And that is the true tragedy. A simple fun-loving boy is transformed from a foolish kid into a messiah. In the second half of the play Emmett is a gigantic megaphone but his voice is not his own, nor is it the voice of those who championed his cause, but a singular and rather shrill voice of the playwright convinced of the worth of her vision. Ifa Bayeza seems unsure whether or not she wants to discuss all of the heroes' remarkable works inspired by this awful event or describe the despicable event itself and instead muddles the two together. Emmett Till may have well been a martyr, but he died without knowing what he would eventually become a part of. The saddest thing of all, and the point entirely missed by this trumped up production, is that Emmett never even had the chance to be the hero this play so desperately wants him to be.

I'm Sorry Sir; You Do Not Exist

2008-04-28T12:02:00.005-06:00

Concisely put, I'm getting tired of this. I'm tired of being told I don't exist. I assure you, mister suit-selling guy, I do exist, in fact I am standing right here.

or at least I was. Over the weekend the Croftie and I decided to get my wedding suit on. A friend of hers got a great deal from some swank place that has a store downtown as well as in the north and clybourn area. We went the clybourn route, because it was reasonably nice out and we could walk there.

Upon entering above mentioned merchant place we were greeted by a guy I'm going to call Regis. Regis was a nice enough young man who was wearing a suit that appeared to be made of a carpet in some sort of 60's non-shag mode. He also had a sizable pimple on the bridge of his nose that looked like it would rupture if he so much as lightly sneezed. But Croftie and I were flying blind. All I had in my head was a color, the only color I invest in, blue, possibly navy, perhaps closer to midnight. Regis dutifully scrounged us some offerings and i was shocked by both their non-affordability and non-fitability. In these suits I would not only be broke, but broke-ass busted.

So Regis's friend, whose name i never got but whose physicality bordered on Andre the Giant-esque, was called over with his measuring tape. Andre the Giant Tailor measured me, all the while looking respectable if not precisely good in a preposterously large suit. Andre the Giant Tailor barks out some numbers and tells me;

37 Long. you don't exist.

But... I DO exist! I swear. Its just i don't have the bulk of the modern day man. what with his HGH and his Doritos and his general American bulkiness. Its more an issue of proportion. Most 6'+ guys have broader shoulders than i do. As even my pediatrician told me when i was 14, "You're a tall drink of water.' Tall maybe, but i suppose the 'drink of water' part means I'm a slender nancy boy.

Andre the Giant Tailor then suggested I go get a suit made custom. Or else I'd never be really happy. Regis told me to 'pump some iron.' I just went somewhere else and got something much nicer than anything they had for significantly less.

Cult of the Nerd

2008-04-23T12:06:00.003-06:00

I used to think things that were unreasonably popular should be avoided at all costs. The list, when it was originally composed in my freshman year of college included:

dave matthew's band
robert de niro
star wars
chinese food
White Baseball Caps

To name just a few. All this misdirected loathing despite the fact that radiohead, which i deified at the time, were roughly just as popular as DMB; i hadn't yet seen any of Bobby's earlier films (taxi driver, raging bull, et al.); I'd already seen and liked Star Wars when I was very little; I'd never even actually tried Chinese food (even I don't really know how that was possible) and had a hair-cut that really in all honestly should have been kept hidden 'neath a cap.

Yet these things were popular for a reason. DMB is user/radio friendly (and totally crapped all over a bunch of Chicago River tourists); Bobby, despite his late career mistakes is unquestionably brilliant; Star Wars is like totally a parable of our times, man; Chinese food is delicious; and fashiony things, well i can't quite explain those.

Then there are things that people purposely like because nobody else likes them. I guy i work with told me recently who purposely reads obscure novels not because of their possible worth, but just because nobody is reading them. Being skeptical of the howling masses is one thing, being a contrarian ass is another.

And yet somewhere in the middle, are pop-culture pieces that always deserved more, but ended up getting relatively less attention than one might have guessed.

These things/phenomenas are sometimes classified under the 'cult' heading, and end up being all kinds of misunderstood. Mostly, because cult tv shows, movies, music, and art suffer from the downsides of both the tremendously popular and the universally despised. Fans of cult things make the products in question seem more ubiquitous than they really. Think of a politician with very loud and sometimes offensive proponents. The quality of person spoken for somehow gets muddled up behind a tidal wave of hot air.

As such cult phenomenas suffer from an odd form of over-under exposure. People who know nothing about the product are put off by the reverential behavior of the proponents, figuring that they would have gotten into it if it were really that good. And a particular breed of fan(atic) might feel like the show they love isn't loved enough and act even more rabidly devotional, feeding a uroboros-like cycle of cult supply and demand.

All this is on my mind because of the show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and one of my best friend's perfectly reasonable/unreasonable avoidance thereof.

"Buffy" is a good example of a cult hit, although it might even have transcended cult at this point as some of the show's key points have entered a more broad cultural lexicon. yet its fans are typical of other cult fans, "whedonites" may as well be a synonym for disturbingly reverential fan-children. Its one thing to admire and another to blindly worship. But i can attest to the show's quality, I've seen every episode and never really spoken about it in a public forum until now. So, like, my devotion is reasonable then? whatever.

The point is I have a somewhat unique perspective. I watched the show's first few seasons in high-school, then watched nothing for years--I watched virtually no tv shows in college. The show went on without me and quietly ended while i wasn't looking (the nerve I tell you). However, I recently found myself renting the entire series, disc for disc, from netflix. Along the way I got to both remember why I had liked it in the first place and then find new reasons and ways of appreciating it that i wasn't capable of before. And I'm not the only person who might not fit the bill of a Whedonite--I happen to know of a stodgy old professor here at the University who is a complete nut for Buffy, and you would never know it from the look of them (or the subject matter they teach or from they themselves, assuming they'd rather not want underclassmen to know a few things about themselves).

So what did we learn here today, class? Skepticism is good? maybe! You can't judge a tv show by the quality of fans it pulls in? Um, sure! Buffy totally roxxorz!!!!? Er, yeah, all of that too.

How Many Assholes We Got On This Ship, Anyhow?

2008-04-22T09:32:00.010-06:00

My mind has been focused on work lately, and not in a good way. Yesterday was a struggle to find anything to do, mostly, and ironically, because I've attained a position where lots of things I used to do are considered beneath me and are left for part-timers and others to do. In other words, since I make the big bucks, its more important i do the important things, of which there is currently a dearth. A dearth i say! a dearth.

Its one of those, if I got paid less, I'd have to do more situations, and please don't feel like i'm either bragging or complaining. Its niether, really. A huge part of me likes the fact that i can come and go as I please, read this or that on the intry-net and compose inane posts for my blog. But another equally large part of me is uncomfortable being paid at all for doing next to nothing, and this brought me to the following conclusion. The worst type of work behavior, bar none, is the guy who criticizes others for doing less work than s/he does. The big talkin' work hypocrite. let me 'splain.

The whole constellation of most annoying work behavior originated out of many things, mostly an article i read (dreamed up?) where one of the most popular grievances was food smells. Most often they were bad food smells, like burnt pop-corn or strange ethnic/vegan/organic foodsmells wafting into one's workspace and disrupting one's peace of nose.

I can relate, I've had to work with plenty of stink-eaters, but this issue goes both ways, because its equally distracting to others when your food smells good. Just ask the croft. She gets comments from co-workers several times a day regarding the nice smelling qualities of her snacks'n'snacks. But in the end, peeps gotta eat. So this is a wash for me. I then tried to think of inexucsable behavior, something that not only shouldn't exit, and does, but both affronts the subjected as well as making the subjector into something of a huge asshole.

Which is how i landed on the "I work more than anyone else" hypocrite. Because everyone, everyone has down time, when they've just completed a project, or are in between things, or just need 5 minutes (or hours) to not work for once. Everyone does this, even the most necessary of public servants. There aren't always fires to put out for every firefighter. Sometimes nobody's spine needs operating on for every spinal surgeon. And a lowly merchant may not have anything to merch every second of the day.

yet some people in authority have huge problems with this. When you are working hard, everyone else seems to be slacking off, especially one's subordinates, and you just want to give them an arm-load of something to do, even if they aren't trained to do it and would completely fuck it up. Its petty, but most people have had this superiority complex, and lots succumb to it and all of a sudden become the biggest jerk in the office. because the most reasonable amongst the accused are going to realize that said braggart is going to find himself with some downtime at some point, so just chill already.

And this attitude is a direct front to the most common rule of thumb for nearly every organization that employs human beings, i.e. everyone does just enough to not get fired or run the business into the ground, and sometimes, when push comes to shove, maybe even just the former.

When i was home from college after my freshman year i took a job a beverage distributor. The place was alternately radically overstaffed and drastically understaffed. Somedays everyone would just sit around playing cards. other days you had to bust your hump, wheeling kegs out to cars. Everyone knew how things worked and felt like they were being remunerated properly (more or less). But if you suddenly got up while everyone was taking it easy and tried tidying up or moving stock, you'd immediately be excommunicated as a show-off loser brown-noser. Similarly, if you slacked off during the busy time everyone would yell at you for making them work harder (and in this instance that seems perfectly justified seeing as everybody did more or less the same thing together).

I guess the moral is just because its work and they are paying you to be there doesn't mean you should suddenly lose all self-awareness and treat others like assholes for reasons that if you just stepped back and thought about it a little would reveal to you that we're all in this together and our patriotic mission for decreasing workplace assholery starts at home, with you yourself, not them.

Well I Wouldn't Say I've Been Missing it, Bob.

2008-04-17T09:17:00.004-06:00

The past week, coming on the heels of a whirlwind vacation/wedding planning extravangapalooza, has been a blessing in that my average work day has basically consisted of the following rough outline:

8:00am, eat breakfast while reading my comicbook websites (newsarama, IGN, comicbookresources, etc). They are like my soap-operas. I needs my stories!

8:30am, as the store opens, i try to improve my sluggishly underperforming fantasy baseball squadrons. wtf CC sabathia!?

9:45am, visit and loiter in the Onion's AV Club.

10:30am, check my work email, yep, still empty of everything not containing the improper phrases "take her to seven heavens," "Make God in the bedroom," "I'm bored/tired and am using my friend's email address and would like to show you some pictures." All spam dead giveaways, except for that one time a professor assigned that classic University of Chicago Press work: Making God in the Bedroom: From Aquinas to Pope Benedict the 16th, or, How Religion Took Her to Seven Heavens While America Was Bored/Tired and Using His Friend's Email Account, by Arthur Bangability, 2005

11:15am, refresh "Oline In the City" for the 1,113th time.

11:30am, leave to 'go buy lunch' even though i clearly brought one with me that morning. Hey, it's like paradise on earth outside, well, minus the hurricane winds and schlumping U of C coeds moaning under overstuffed backpacks like 18th century child mining-slaves.

12:00pm, take lunch, play online card-game Hearts. lose horribly. Damn you BitchQueen of Spades!

1:15pm, ardently defend the goddam Cleveland Indians on the ESPN MLB Forum from upstart Royals fans claiming that with 150 games left, the season is over. (but on a more serious note, wake the fuck up, Tribe! This Fall was supposed to be a delirious trifecta of getting to marry the only woman silly enough to say yes to me, the election of a Democratic President (I just don't care anymore Dems, just pick a candidate already!) and the obligate Tribe World Series Championship (over, let's say... the Phillies).

2:00pm, stare vacantly into space.

2:30pm, yep, still staring.

2:55pm, read a strip or two of my favorite web-comic, 8bit theater by brian clevinger. so funny.

3:13pm, decide that I don't deserve to bleed any more money from my employers, leave early, fill up the gas-tank for $85.30 and reconsider leaving early ever again and working for 60 hours a week instead, just to fuel the Jeep.

-----
what's that? it's only 10:40am still? hmm... wonder what Oline's doing over on her blog...

The Betterments

2008-04-15T07:26:00.004-06:00

Last night I had a terrifyingly realistic dream. And it went on forever, a full-length feature film and then some. It was equal parts Village of the Damned and Pleasantville with a little Cronenbergian body horror mixed in as well. In it I was a teenager in an idyllic small town where a new medical practice moves in. The sign is simple and almost fairy-tale direct: Betterments. The doctor boasts that he can correct what is wrong with everyone and since everyone is unhappy with something about themselves, his business doesn't take long to grow. The doc really exploits people's insecurities and there is a slick small town advertising campaign and everything.

In the dream my father (who isn't my father in real-life, like i said, this dream was like a live-action movie where even I am an actor playing me, if that makes any sense) is one of the first to go in, his big toe is banged up and he has surgery to fix it. The thing is, the guy running Betterments not only fixes the problem but also manages to secure some sort of control function over each patient. At any moment the doc can take over one of his patient's free will. And this is just the beginning.

The dream meanders along with me the happy go lucky center, I'm often hanging out with my sister (again, not my real sister) and we begin to get suspicious, especially of Dad. But since in the beginning there is no real reason for the Doc to use his control, its impossible to prove, but we keep catching glimpses of this puppeteering at work all over, most times in the most benign fashion. Finally our mother goes in to see the Doc about 'night blindness' or something stupid like that and there is this skin-crawling sequence where my sister and I walk into her bedroom in our house which is more a horrible funhouse at this point, with impractical angles and doors everywhere, Dad is a carpenter and this odd housework is part of the whole mind control deal, or perhaps an unintended side-effect, and we walk in and mom is facing away from us. She turns around horribly slowly and stares at us with this creepy sedated smile and both her eyes are strikingly different colors, one a bright light purple the other a greenish brown.

We run screaming out of the house and the latter third of moviedream has us playing the Running Man because now most of the town is under control or eliminated or too stupid to care otherwise, and now all sorts of secondary abilities in the patients start cropping up. Everyone who has been operated on can communicate with each other telepathically and have super strength and other heightened senses depending on what surgery they had. Along the way my sister is horribly murdered by this big bald thug who has obviously had brain surgery or something and is really slow moving but implacable.

Somehow i end up building a case, getting audio and other files against these people and there is one extended moment where I'm running from Dad and half the town and end up hiding under this filthy porch and a bunch of them are sitting above me talking about how they will find me and kill me, that i know too much and that it was my fault that my poor innocent sister was killed and that my mother is worried sick about me and how this doctor's procedure will spread across the country and the world.

In the end I'm captured (of course this would go the 1984 route) and just before they are about to kill me I let them know its no use, that I have already informed the proper people but everything is now ambiguous, i don't quite know if the people i sent things to got them or if they can be trusted. And the moviedream ends with my neck being broken (same thug as my sister) and the camera just slowly zooms in on my wide open eyes, starting from many feet away and my whole body in view, head at an impossible angle and the feet of everyone walking away from me in all directions, the camera zooming in until its just my unblinking eyes.

creeeeeeeepy.

Gary Snyder, You Asshole.

2008-02-12T10:45:00.001-06:00

I keep noticing this odd subliminal phenomena and wonder if I am the only one. I've tried this a couple of times with mixed results. The most recent time was unintentional and happened last night. I was sitting on the couch with a novel when I started into a conversation with the Croft. The book's back cover was facing up and the words of praise in bold ink were visible, but only if i looked down. I was looking at the Croft, but when i spoke to her I began to use words that aren't normally found in my vocabulary. Most notably, I said the word 'Marvelous.' 'What a strange thing to say,' a part of my mind pointed out, and then I looked down and not one but two bold Marvelouses revealed themselves.

My question is this, was my brain suggestible to the words I wasn't even looking at directly? Was the fact that these words were in my cone of vision, just not being actively read have something to do with the fact that i used marvelous in a sentence? Jus how impressionable is the mind? Because this definitely is not the first time this has happened to me. Its really best that I don't even have so much as a newspaper nearby when I talk.

All this started me on a paranoid line of thought that wondered just how much every little thing I see and hear effects me deep down. Are all those shitty pop songs I've heard over the years secretly informing the way i write? Do the thousands of advertisements I've seen in my life have a sinister influence on my sketches? And does the repetition of these cultural ephemera add to their suggestive power? Because I've read the line "Read the Poet Gary Snyder, a True Elder, A Modern Age Thoreau" on the wall of the men's restroom at work so many times it has become some sort of mantra. I have no desire to read Gary Snyder, am not even sure what a True Elder is and am pretty sure Thoreau is a modern age Thoreau.

But i can't get it out of my head, I'm stuck with it, seemingly forever. Deep inside, where the knowledge of how to start a fire in the wilderness or tie a sheepshank knot or something useful and potentially life-saving, or a romantic memory might lay to make me smile on a day where things are going fairly shitty there lay that stupid bathroom graffiti. Far from wanting to read Gary Snyder, suddenly I hate him. and Thoreau. And my True Elders. Whoever the hell they might be.

shimmy shimmy shake

2008-02-07T13:31:00.000-06:00

love what TCM is doing the month before the Oscars. Nearly every night you are guaranteed a great movie. Last night it was Vertigo. A few days ago it was Sunrise. Made all the more poignant when interspersed between blocks of American Idol and Project Runway (we're not complete snobs, after all). makes the DVDs in my netflix queue grab their own shoulders and shiver in the cold. It also makes me remember the sheer number of great movies I haven't seen.

Dems the Breaks

2008-02-06T12:08:00.000-06:00

I'm not an explicitly political person. I keep up with the news, try to be as informed as possible, but it's not my thing--in the scenester sense. I suppose nobody is that definitively categorizable but I certainly know folks whose religion defines everything they do as well as others who have built a lifestyle out of the music they listen to. And there are definitely folks in my life who have done the same with politics. This must be their favorite time of the year. Especially if they are Democrats.

I'm a Democrat but I'm probably more of a Liberal than anything else. People often conflate the two, and the latter has gained an especially demonic undertone under the current administration, but nothing is that cut and dry. Yes I'm for environmental protection but I'm not mega-passionate. I'd make a terrible environmentalist. I'm pro gun control but thats only because I don't think regular folks should be allowed to purchase and own weapons that can bring down small air-craft. Many of the 'sides' I've taken have been chosen because of extreme options. In the most recent example, I basically agree and would very much defend the second amendment, but keep it reasonable folks.

Same holds for abortion and the sanctity of human life. In my heart I believe people shouldn't have abortions, but I would never want there to be a law that makes it illegal. If i was a woman who was raped I'm pretty sure i wouldn't want bear a child as a consequence. Mostly I'm of the Juno school of thought. If the child was unplanned and might be detrimental to the quality of yours and its life, there are plenty of folks out there looking to adopt.

Yet there are ways in which I don't agree with Fox News defined 'the liberal agenda'. I thought the war in iraq was the stupidest thing ever and remember getting into some of the worst arguments I've ever had with my parents because of it. I nearly let it ruin an entire Christmas visit. In retrospect I was right, you can't really argue otherwise, but the idea that most Liberal's hold that we can just skip town out of Iraq in 6 months is preposterous. Preventing a war before it starts is one thing. But since we're there we may as well follow through with some of the more positive things the war was fought for. Leaving now would negate thousands of deaths and leave a country in no condition to stand up for itself. Its our responsibility--whether it should be is a different and at this point, completely irrelevant question.

I didn't begin this to talk about my political beliefs (by the way since you're asking I'm anti-death penalty, pro universal health care, think the economic stimulus package is huge joke that will only delay the descent to rock bottom, and even though I don't make a hell of a lot of money, I wouldn't mind paying more taxes--along with everyone else, proportionate by how much you earn for a living--so that we could actually mantain our basic infrastructures [bridge collapse in Minnesota/Hurricane Katrina anyone?] as well improve schools and the arts. Like i said, Liberal) but to talk about my thoughts on the democratic race for the presidential nomination.

I met Obama a few years ago at the bookstore i was working at. He wasn't yet a Senator then but was a kind of a local celebrity. He had 'something of a big deal' tattooed all over him. I was excited when he entered the Senate but had mixed feelings when he declared his candidacy last year. I thought it was too soon and for the most part I've been proven dead wrong. During the early primaries I waffled between Obama and Clinton (I actually preferred Dodd and Biden, not that they had a snowball's chance) because of Clinton's ridiculously good public speaking skills and my fear that her enemies will be able to attack her easier than Obama. Its pretty much a crap shoot as far as their actual policies. There are differences but not enough to effect my vote. What matters most to me is who stands the best chance to defeat the Republicans and most likely John McCain. here's what keeps me restlessly flip-flopping (not a pejorative this time, Conservatives).

1) Clinton has really powerful, well entrenched friends as well as lobbyists all of whom want their wills to be executed and will do everything they can to get her in office. These colleagues (desirable and undesirable) are part of the game and will be an effective weapon against anything the Republicans can throw.

2) Clinton's enemies are legion. To some folks her personality is grating and they just can't get behind her. Some even 'blame' her for her husband's tresspasses as if she was a better wife then he wouldn't have strayed and that this proves she's a weak person or some tripe. My step-father is a moderate republican and has a blind seething almost inexplicable rage of the woman approaching Newt Gingrich/Ann Coulter territory. Otherwise decent people like him will be relentless in denying Clinton. I just don't think there are very many people as adamantly opposed to Barack.

3) As such, it appears Barack has a better chance of winning independents and even luring the stray Republican or two. He is also strong in the south, a typically Republican bastion.

4) i think Clinton is actually more Liberal than Barack and every time I've seen them debate head to head I lean back toward Clinton.

In the end I'm backing Obama, I think he'd be a lock against any republican, particularly McCain, but if Clinton wins the nomination I'd be plenty happy--so long as she come through in November.

Invisible Syllabus

2008-01-31T10:38:00.000-06:00

The teacher in me, that quiet voice that likes to kindle knowledge and mildly reprimand, often passes the time by inventing syllabuses for classes I will never teach. This is not because the classes themselves could never exist. Well, not really because of this. More because I can't really see myself teaching, not at a university level at any rate. And my invisible syllabuses tend toward the college level.

The one I've spent the most time playing around with is an English Lit class based around the "Monstrous Novel." It would be anchored by Moby Dick, which in and of itself would take most of the weeks of class to read in a satisfactory way. But I would then include other 'takes' on Moby Dick, in particular Dan Beachy-Quick's book of poetry called Spell which is a reinterpretation of the novel. I heard Beachy-Quick (awesome last name, perhaps top ten in the history of last names) give a reading of this book when I was still slumming it at the U of C. It was neat to hear, if not a bit of a struggle to read. But rich in the poetry-esque multiple readings type sense. I think students would have fun with it.

I would then make my hypothetical students listen to Mastodon's album Leviathan which is a metal concept album based around, you guessed it, Moby Dick. Or maybe I'd push them one step further and have them listen to Blood Mountain the album Mastodon released two years later which shares many of the same themes. I don't know much about music theory so it'd have to be mostly a discussion on the lyrics, which are engaging enough on their own.

I'd end the course with an old favorite, Danielewski's polarizing House of Leaves. A monstrous novel if their is any, it owes much to Melville but also pushes things even further, on what a novel can and can't be. I think the course would be really fruitful, and in some alternate reality somewhere where I've gone on for a PhD, I'm teaching this to precocious college sophomores.

organized retardation

2008-01-24T12:17:00.001-06:00

Yesterday around lunchtime i received a series of depressingly scary messages from the Croft. It seems she had a bit of a run-in on the bus while traveling to work. It all started innocently enough, as most things do, with hermaphrodites. After tearing through some sort of Sedaris, I recommended Croftie read Middlesex next. Dutifully she carried said novel into the public sphere where an apparently harmless looking woman engaged her in crack-pot conversation.

Turns out harmless blond woman was sexually assualted by a hermaphrodite. Who was a member of a clandestine team of 'group stalkers.' Now group stalking is one of the silliest things I've ever had the misfortune of learning about. Simply put, there are bozos out there who are neurotic enough to think they are being stalked not by one person, but an organized team of individuals who have apparently so little to occupy their time that they single out random people and systematically ruin their lives.

They move in next to you and turn their televisions up really loud, especially when you are, get this, thinking about them! They walk by you on the street and when they are very close they will do something innocuous like hold up a pen. Because if people keep holding pens up in the air next to you its obviously a malicious plan to drive you crazy. Here's the thing, if you are noticing this type of behavior, theres' a fairly good chance you are already halfway to crazy-town.

But here is where things go from garden variety to batshit crazy. Not only do these organized stalkers mess with your mail, and work their way into your friend groups turning everyone against you, but they have strange telekinetic powers of mind control. They can mind control your pet and make them afraid to get off your bed. There is also something to do with a plot to burn your infants and American Airlines is behind everything, and the number 666--also, the terrorist attack on the World Trade towers. It's all linked, and you, the victim of organized stalking, are so important that each of this seemingly endless string of retarded conclusions is a direct effort to target you. Its a global, bizarre postmodern breed of paranoia. It's also laughably funny, if it wasn't the describing the symptoms of larger, more realistic problems like clinical depression or carbon monoxide poisoning.

Don't Look Now

2008-01-22T08:01:00.001-06:00

Last evening Croftie took me out to the theater. It was opening night for Conor McPherson's Shining City at the Goodman and despite my lingering cold I was excited to go. I knew nothing about the play save for what little I'd gleaned from Croftie's magazine, that it was a ghost story of sorts, but without actual ghosts. Sort of. But not really. Or something like that. I don't know what I was expecting but I was definitely surprised, and in a good way.

Have you ever seen something patently ridiculous in a piece of artwork, a line in a poem say, or a single scene from a film and thought "wow, that really doesn't belong here"? It is impossible to see the last few seconds of Shining City and not feel the same way, however, sometimes these ridiculous 'extras' or indulgences just feel... right on. Let me try and explain this... these moments or segments have both the feel of something superfluous and yet somehow make sense and almost through their sheer ridiculous nature, tie themselves back into the whole. I'm probably not explaining that very well at all, but if you were to see the 'surprise ending' as the Goodman has advertised it, you'd know exactly what I'm saying. You might disagree with me about the piece fitting back in to the whole part of my equation, but thats what opinions are for.

There are some real powerful scenes in Shining City, most of them culled from an older married man's devastated psyche after he flirts with a younger woman and then suddenly loses his wife in a tragic accident. This man (played by John Judd) goes to see a psychiatrist who we learn has his fair share of issues as well, but the shrink helps the old dude to talk his way through the painful recent events of his life. Rather than let these moments inform his own life, the psychiatrist apparently learns nothing at all, tries to bury certain undesirable feelings and experiences of his own life and ends up trading places with his patient towards the end.

The ending turns out to be not quite a surprise, but it is good for a scare. There is more than a little of the film Don't Look Now and that's all I will give away. I jumped quite a bit and there were a few screams from the audience as well. I was nowhere close to scream out loud, not near the Wait Until Dark level of fright, but the hackles on my neck rose and I got me some shivers and that was fun enough. Croftie is not a big fan of the ending, but then she has a closeness to the play that I lack, she's been working in its proximity for months now, so maybe the novelty has kind of soured for her. She also rightfully plays the 'they packed too much stuff into one play' card, what with the ghosts, affairs, loved one's deaths, baby drama, and confused homosexuality. That's enough for half a dozen plays, but either way, a fun night and a moving drama.

Completely Unnecessary

2008-01-21T12:57:00.000-06:00

This morning I received an email from my mother. Like most of these letters, it was a forward. Now nearly all of my Mother's forwarded emails contain smaltzy images of kittens or animals doing zany things or transparent religious metaphors like footprints in the sand or ultra patriotic cartoons of Osama getting caught or some such. Today the forward had a warning: don't text and drive. The email then included a bunch of photos from a particularly violent crash. Mostly crumpled doors and the like. Then there was a warning not to proceed further because of the graphic quality of upcoming images. I figured, "this is an email from my mother, how bad could it be?" That line of reasoning nearly led to my special K and morning orange juice vomited all over my desk at work. These were not graphic images. These were horrific photos that no human being need see, ever, not even as a warning to 'don't text and drive'.

blech.

the sky is falling?

2008-01-19T14:08:00.000-06:00

Unknown Precip

6°F
Feels Like
-10°F

Updated Jan 19 01:45 p.m. CT

Watch the Chicago Forecast

UV Index:		1 Low
Wind:		From W at 14 mph gusting to 19 mph
Humidity:		47%
Pressure:		30.35 in.
Dew Point:		-7°F
Visibility:		7.0 miles

FREE weather on your desktop

So what exactly is precipitating that we can't qualitatively decide on what it is?

Showing a Little Too Much Thigh

2008-01-17T09:25:00.000-06:00

I have this pair of jeans, in a long line of jeans I've completely worn out, that has a sizable hole on the right side just under the pocket. The hole was formed by my carrying a large set of keys in that pocket which first tore a hole in the outer part of the pants which kept bumping in to various things, shelves, my jacket, my bag, etc and then ripped through the pocket itself causing the carrying capacity of that side to be decreased significantly.

So now, not only do i look lopsided with one pocket overstuffed with cellphonewalletchangekeyspenetc and the other empty but on the empty side there is the aforementioned hole that at times exposes my pale skin. It brings to mind a legendary photograph taken by the one and only Oline where I famously wore shorts perhaps a few inches too short. Incidentally when perusing the results of my google search for an image to affix to this post and using the request 'short-shorts' I maybe have gone blind or mad--perhaps both.

Most Listened to Albums of 2007

2008-01-10T07:56:00.000-06:00

Most listened to doesn't completely equate to 'best.' All it means is that these were the songs I selected most often--all fair and democratic-like. beginning at the bottom:

10. No Age Weirdo Rippers (Fat Cat 2007)
Probably snuck onto the list because its so damn short and I have to listen to the album 2 or 3 times before it really feels like I've just spent time with a whole record. Fuzzed out adolescent (read: not kid) post-punk, sounding like guys and girls who still like music and haven't gotten a chance to be cynical 20-somethings yet. The scene these youths have found makes me jealous, i wish I had been cool enough to be a part of one when i was their age. only problem being that if i had the only music I'd be able to sit through now would be so pretentious they'd have to invent new adjectives for it (maybe: fuzzed out adolescent post-punk... naw)

09. Gogol Bordello Super Taranta! (Side One Dummy 2007)
The second best live act in the world (sorry Oline!) gave me one helluva an album but it just wasn't quite Gyspy Punks Underdog World Strike. If past history repeats itself I'll be seeing these guys a few more times in 2008. And yes Oline, we'll hit the after party. we owe it to ourselves at this point.

08. Feist The Reminder (Cherry Tree/Interscope 2007)
Wow, all of a sudden I'm all contemporaneous and shit. In fact most if not all of the albums on this list were issued in 2007. usually half of my most-listened-tos came out years and years ago. *pats self on back* Anyhow, Feist clocks in at 8. And yes i bought it because of that damn I-tunes commercial and yes I still like that song even though its been over-played to the moon and yes there are a great many other songs on the album worth mentioning and yes I wish I'd heard of here sooner.

07. Girl Talk Night Ripper (Illegal Art 2006)
My favorite description of this album remains the 'Monty Burns' method of self-preservation. In the Simpsons, Mr Burns has so many diseases and infections and old age maladies that they all hold each other off in perfect equilibrium. Likewise, Girl Talk samples so many songs taking no pains to cover up any of his tracks (thats kinda the point) that he won't be sued simply because there wouldn't be enough money to spread out to all the various owed parties. Bear in mind thats not my analogy (I wish it was) but I can't give credit because I'm not sure where i read it. Oh, and all of a sudden 'ripper' in the album title is the new 'wolf'. weird.

06. Arcade Fire Neon Bible (Merge 2007)
Yeah Canadians! Yeah for seeing them in concert almost on accident! Boo for this obviously not being Funeral (an album with few peers in the 00's) but yeah nonetheless for this not being Funeral! Some real gems here, and I think this album has somehow become one of the most under-rated records of the year despite near universal acclaim. It has sophomore written all over it, but that's fine. I'll take it.

05. Pelican City of Echoes (Hydra head 2007)
Now we move in to the heavy hitters in the top 5. This album has been most digital for me, because i lent it out just a week after purchasing it and never got it back. The party in question knows who they are, and I'm pretty sure they actually lost it entirely, which makes me sad. Probably end up buying it again, and loning it out again, etc. A step forward from their last record which I lovedlovedloved, Pelican is my classical music. I play it when I can't have lyrics but need something with a stiff Metal backbone and wonderful arrangement.

04. Battles Mirrored (Warp 2007)
At pitchfork this summer I was walking back from my merch trip when i heard this incredible song playing from the second stage. I later learned that it had been 'Atlas' by Battles. A month later the album was mine and on my tinny work speakers the song sounded as good as ever. Much to my surprise the rest of the album followed suit. Along the same vein as Pelican and Holy Fuck and others, all of a sudden I've become the lyric-less instrumentalist guy.

03. Menomena Friend and Foe (Barsuk 2007)
Definitely the surpise favorite of 2007. Never saw them coming, those loveable scamps. And yes there is the review I never sent to JBB and all of the surrounding hoo-ha. Long story short, these guys should have blown up, but I'm slightly happy they haven't. For the time being at least.

02. Radiohead In Rainbows (download and eventual 'disc-box' 2007)
I wish i could properly show via numbers just how far ahead of the pack the top two albums on my list are. Let's just say if I were doing this on a points system, and i had 100 points to spread out on all top 10 albums, number 1 and 2 would have at least 80 of the 100 points. On any other year In Rainbows would have destroyed all other comers, and a very large contingent inside me still clamors for its coronation. It certainly has the largest number of my favorite songs of 2007 on it, at least 4, possibly as many as 6. I wasn't prepared for a Radiohead album this good. its been a while since they hit me like this. I still think they should do a dance-punk album, or a hip-hop covers album, but only sometimes. Most times I just pray for songs like these.

01. Les Savy Fav Let's Stay Friends (French Kiss 2007)
So much to say. First album (of new music) in 6 years from the best band in the world after they broke my heart and kinda broke up. Then there is the self-reflexive nature of the album, the "Let's Stay Friends" means so much more than it implies, the least of which is a clever recycling of the initials LSF from band name to album title. Everything i love about this band is on display here, the clever word play that itsn't so clever that it takes you out of the songs but clever enough so that when you read the lyrics you say to yourself "Zowee! that's a-spicy a-meat-a-ball!" or maybe thats just the little guy in my head that says that. Songs like "What would Wolves do" and "the Equestrian" just flat out rock, the one thing lacking from the otherwise brilliant Radiohead runner up. because at the end of the day I'm going to take punk over pretty every damn time.

Countdown to Christmas #10 (December 20th)

2007-12-20T08:07:00.000-06:00

There is a Christmas tie in the Men's room, hanging on the knob you depress to activate the hand drier. Its been there for a few days now, I don't think anyone is going to claim it. Been a while since the bathroom has provided me with any post worthy shenanigans... yet somehow this development makes me sad.

Countdown to Christmas #9 (December 14th)

2007-12-14T08:40:00.000-06:00

Back in the Olden Days when the Earth was new and there were no such things as animals or ducks and ghosts and demons populated the dark places of the world I wrote a wee little review of a peculiar and wonderful album released last Spring. The review was always supposed to grace the digital pages of Jack Black's Body. Sadly, that never came to pass. It was entirely my fault, and I take sole responsibility for JBB's subsequent slide into hibernation (pray, tell me it isn't a coma or death!).

The band's name is Menomena and their album Friend or Foe was fucking terrific. My sprawling (and somewhat terrible review, sorry editor ladies) won't be repeated here for it was promised to JBB and shall stay his/hers/theirs forever more. Just know that it kept me nice and happy during those bleak Spring months that have more to do with February than they do with May. And oh, the Oline. I just went back through my email box and searched for the key word Menomena only to find countless pleading entreaties to just submit the damn review, and it breaks my heart. Forgiveness?

Countdown to Christmas #8 (December 13th)

2007-12-13T11:53:00.001-06:00

Normally I'm an NPR guy. well, actually, normally, I'm a no radio at all, put in my favorite CD of the moment to listen to sort of guy. But I like to stay informed, abreast of the political situation, blah blah menomenablah. But sometimes I can't help but switch over to something a little more, shall we say, low-brow. Over the Summer Croftie introduced me to a morning radio show called Drex in the Morning (spelling... not sure). It is the drive-time show for the local top 40 channel (Souljah boy OOOOh! er, sorry) so its listeners are mostly teens, tweens, and folks who never managed to grow up out of that mind-set. And, i guess, slumming NPR listeners who have tired of the current piece on west Texan wind turbines and how they are going to revitalize old mining towns that zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Where was I? Oh yeah, crappy morning radio shows. Yesterday the topic was the supposed outrage over a state-wide law where it is illegal for persons under the age of 17 to purchase condoms. Callers spoke of how they were turned away at Wal-mart, or daughters who had to steal from their dad's stash (gross!), or 'cool' dads who handed out condoms to his sons like some sort of prophylactic fairy (er, double gross?). Anyways, the pro-condom side argued that here we have kids (yes, when you are under 17 you are a kid) who want to practice safe sex not being allowed to do so, that this will lead to an increase in unplanned pregnancies and the spread of STDs. Because it is not like a kid who has the opportunity to have sex but no resource of condoms is going to say to themselves, "Aw shucks, maybe i will just wait until next Summer."

The naysayers say that kids shouldn't have access because they are too young and too stupid and shouldn't be having sex anyway. While I agree with the too young and too stupid part, I know i was an idiot at the age of 16, I'm not quite sure a state law is the answer. Especially when teens are getting sex education in public schools. So, we're going to tell them exactly what their bodies are capable of and then tell them to hold on until they are older. Because kids never want to do the things their parents say they are forbidden to do. And the whole illicit aspect doesn't make it even more attractive to the same folks who would be inclined to do this sort of thing anyhow.

Now, my fictional completely unrealized and Croftie-unsanctioned daughter (let's call her Kit) will be chained in the attic until her 40th birthday whereupon she will be allowed to greet pre-approved suitors in the parlor. Okay, so that is a bit much, I'd probably make a good dad, or at least a decent one.

So yeah, let's get this straight, I'm a terrible, incorrigible prude. Not a judgy prude, just a prude to myself. I could care less what you do, but I was not ready for a long time for anything my peers in high-school were getting into (alcohol, sex, etc) because I totally bought in and thought that my soul was in danger of being eternally roasted if i had a sip of Bud Light or that a puff on a cigarette would lead me down the schute of oblivion to hardcore heroin use. So yeah, I wish kids wouldn't have sex, I wish they would just come to the understanding that there is no rush here, but i know damn well, especially in Small Town America, that teens are boredboredbored and that sooner or later the topic of sex is going to come up. Maybe they should at least have the chance to play it safe?

Countdown to Christmas #7 (December 12th)

2007-12-12T08:17:00.000-06:00

Over the weekend the missus and I partook us a film. I haven't been to the movie theater in a good long while, plans have been made, and abandoned, to do so--most recently with the Oline's requests for Western fun being demolished by General Ennui. Not on my part I should add, to use the Oline's descriptive words, I'm a fan of dusty mustachioed men as anyone else. So this weekend I saw the next best thing this side of a Western, the Golden Compass.

The movie was fine, the book was better, blah blah blah, how many more times can i write that before it loses all meaning, throws us all into a semantic void and rearranges the world into a Lacanian hellscape where words no longer bear any relationship to the things they used to represent. But it was fine. The acting was good, the story packaged as well as it could be into a film form making things a wee bit more expository I suppose, and oh all those 'location' shots of ships flying/sailing all over the place that Croftie pointed out sardonically after the 6th time. okay, we get it, the boat is a placeholder for time passing and spatial advancement and a chance for your Industrial Light and Magic folks to sprinkle tech dust all over create some slick CGI machines.

By far the best part of the movie is the Aeronaut Lee Scoresby, played by Sam Elliot. I simply cannot convey the amount of hero worship I have for this man, and that i covet his mustache with a biblical zeal. Someday, when i grow up and my face decides to sprout more than five or six blond bristles I will become a man and rock a 'stache so proudly it will end world hunger. Just you wait.

Countdown to Christmas #6 (December 11th)

2007-12-11T08:11:00.000-06:00

Over the years I have become able to hide (or at least shelter) the fact that I am a complete geek with varying degrees of success. Today... is not one of those days.

Last week i stumbled upon what might be the single most nerdling thing that has ever made me laugh out loud and then follow religiously. It is something called 8-bit Theater, written by a genius named Brian Clevinger since (roughly) 2000 and now in its 900-something strip showing no signs of stopping. Let me bring you down the slippery slope. Using a rating system where 1 equals 'embarrassingly but by no means hopelessly geeky' to 10 which figures as 'appallingly apocalyptically geeky' here is how the following transition works out.

Comics (in general) = 2 (mildly geeky) ----->
Internet or 'Web' comics = 6 (outrageously geeky) ----->
Pixilated 'Sprite' Web-comics = 8 (unabashedly, you just can't believe how geeky these are)----->
Sprite Web-comics whose material is gleaned almost entirely from Final Fantasy 1 = 10 (congratulations, you cannot possibly hope to manifest your geek to a higher level)

8-bit Theater is just such a web-comic. 99% of its images are from the 1990 Nintendo video game Final fantasy 1. These images are captured screen shots, manipulated in various ways to present characters and show settings, emotions, actions, etc. The characters are all drudged from the pool of those found in the video game and spun wildly out of proportion with absurdist humor and tongue in cheek self depreciative in-jokes about the silliness of things like Dungeons and Dragons and the like. In other words, you, reader, probably just wouldn't understand how hilarious this is unless you too are a guy who entered your teens in the early 90s, played video games (and maybe, *cough* D&D as well *cough*) and have a certain knowledge of the kinda stuff that goes on in the world of people who do like this stuff.

The story follows the adventures of a motley crew of heroes, and here i use adventures and heroes in the loosest way possible. There is an astoundingly dumb warrior named Fighter (after his character class, in fact all of the characters take their names from their class) who talks constantly of swords; Black Mage, a diabolically evil little man with a short fuse and tremendous power which is always mis-used; Red Mage, one big D&D in-joke; and Thief, a guy who is taking advantage of everybody else for his own financial gain. Among others.

It's pretty much impossible for me to do this sort of thing any justice, to show you how unbelievably cool it really is without, well, reconfiguring your upbringing, but hey, if anything deserves a shout out, this sure as hell does.

Countdown to Christmas #5 (December 10th)

2007-12-10T08:22:00.000-06:00

Having never read him before, and having never owned one of those nifty Library of America hardcover books, I decided to double up and purchase the Tales by Lovecraft. Now before I lay me down to sleep each evening I take a good few seconds summoning the courage to return to the Wawah, fail, read a comic book or two, and then dive into a short-story or two by Lovie.

Man was weird. And his stories--weirder. Also, a bit of a racist. I read some of his chronology appended in the back of the text and Lovecraft wrote some full blown "White is Best" essays and now I can't help but find hints at this thesis in his stories. I'm trying my hardest to not let this fact overwhelm things, because his work is definitely interesting nonetheless. And without much thought you can see just how influential his 'weird' fiction was for contemporary writers. I throw out the quotes because that word has become a genre somehow, and Lovecraft certainly has something to do with its conception. The problem, of course, is that 'weird' fiction has little in common with itself besides being mildly to shockingly off-putting. Aside from that, and the tendency to be fantastic or science fiction-y, weird fiction is a tag like Emo, one that gets used as a descriptor way too often and without much thought and in the end doesn't describe any one story/song so much as an idea.

Emo = Cthulu? Who knew?
Yikes, bad rhymes make for one uncomfortable exit.

Countdown to Christmas #4 (December 7th)

2007-12-07T09:28:00.000-06:00

Holy Fuck. Yes, that is their name. Oline and I first met their acquaintance via a large marquee. It is a terrible name for a band, as many have suggested, but it does catch your eye and stick in your craw like, er, spinach or something. And like Spinach, Holy Fuck is good for you.

I'll admit, when i first bought the dinged used album after seeing their incredible live performance, i was a bit underwhelmed. I even shelved it for several months before dabbling with it here and there. Now its crept back into my increasingly lyric-less rotation, helped no doubt by other current favorites like Battles, Pelican and !!!. (boy does that period look silly after that band name) Anyhow, I am now a Holy Fuck convert, having listened to their self-titled album many times, finding tracks that were 'boring' before interesting now. 'Cause there are a bunch of layers and a density that is quickly dismissed as an impenetrable wall of music at first listen. Granted, my co-workers don't always qualify this sort of thing as music, especially the 60+ year old Accounts payable Manager that sits immediately behind me. But fuck them! Gimme Noise rock!

This will be the first in a series of album articles as I countdown toward Christmas paying homage to the music that was important to me this year. Rather than do a year's end mega-list, I figure I will just do it this way. Of course it will likely spill over into the new year, but meh.

Countdown to Christmas #3 (December 6th)

2007-12-06T08:03:00.000-06:00

I read books. Most times i finish 'em. But often i don't. That's just the way it is. Sometimes I make it pretty far along and for some reason, some bright shiny thing distracts me say, or I forget to bring said book with me find myself with some down time and start something else only to find it more engrossing. So these 'once started' books find their way back to the bookcase after a short while, a short while where i tell myself every day that I will go back to them soon, that this momentary tryst with their rival is nothing at all, that's its their familiar and slightly tired pages I really want, etc. In any case, they find their way to the bookcase and sometimes take with them hidden jewels.

I'm a big fan of the unorthodox bookmark. Receipts, rave fliers, post-it notes, doodles, notes, souvenir concert tickets, old wallet-sized photos, birthday cards, I've used all of these and then some. So its always a surprise when I pick up a book i once started, flip through the pages and stumble upon an old familiar face that has nothing to do with the book in question. Sometimes the bookmark i find is very old friend, having led me through dozens of works or more only to be trapped greedily in the tepid clutches of an overdone 'masterpiece' like Love in the Time of Cholera (still haven't summoned the courage to return to that highfalutin mess) or just gets mired in something I really enjoy reading, just is too long or too clever for me to finish all in a row without dabbling into something else and getting distracted (like Borges' collected fictions or my Oxford World Classic King James Bible).

The other day Croftie picked up LitToC, read the first paragraph and grimmaced and nearly stuffed the novel back in its tidy grave in the bookcase before noticing a slight bump in the middle. She fluttered the pages and out fell a well worn flier from a canadian club, a place called the pub quartier latin in Montreal, a place i have no interest in going to but a place that saw fit to produce a flashy notecard sized add that subsequently accrued a wealth of memories for it saw me wade stoically through Moby Dick, helped me burn swiftly through Lolita and accompanied me on my Rendezvous with Rama. The flier is pockmarked and dog-eared, the glossy finished is gone in all but a few spots, a heavy creases line the lower right hand corner. Funny thing is... I remember making those deformations, or at least remember when they first occurred, sometimes far more than I remember the individual plot twists of the great works of literature that caused them. So weird what you remember. So strange what lingers and against all odds, returns and makes you smile.

Countdown to Christmas #2 (December 5th)

2007-12-05T12:26:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, it snowed. and in the evening it snowed. and in the early morning hours, presumably, it snowed.

But not like it snows back home. 3-5 inches equals a storm around here, apparently. Back in Buffalo they wouldn't bat a lash. That's like a wednesday afternoon before the lake-effect kicks in over there. *prepares for a long-winded, old-man speech, thinks better of it* I'll spare you the details.

Oddly enough, i still refer to Buffalo as 'home' despite the fact that i have not lived there in years. Maybe it is because i lived in western new york for 20 something years of my 20 something life. that's what we in the biz call 'a long ass time.'

Yet I'm glad i don't live there anymore. And not for the snow reasons. just, Chicago is pretty great and doing everything just fine. With zoo lights, edward albee and the Golden Compass on the horizon, will be a fine time in the city this weekend. winter storm or no.

Eee Gads! (He's got enough style to start 3 fads?)

2007-11-30T08:21:00.000-06:00

Look at the time. I just gots to get more consistent with yee olde blog. Maybe a mini-countdown will keep me focused, um, focused-er.

On that note, the Countdown to my X-mas Break in Buffalo which begins in approximately 3 weeks. It will be like some sort of on-line advent calendar without chocolate or the neat-o little doors that open up to give you an aphorism or migraine.

Since I am technologically inept, or perhaps cheap (maybe the following is a pay only feature?) I never figured out how to list links on the side of this page, like so many of my colleagues do. But if i ever did figure it out (don't hesitate to help me out in the comments section, yo) I would list the Oline as my top link. I covet her month ending quote-a-ramas, and if my memory were not completely for shit, I'd totally crib her style. As it stands, my memory is actually worth a great deal less than feces, the Croft wanted to discuss the Sound and the Fury yesterday and she was bringing up all these important plot points of which i had no recollection whatsoever. It was as if i never read the damn book at all, or read something completely different. And it wasn't that long ago that I read it either. Must be all the intravenous drug use I've been doing lately.

At any rate, give the Oline a looksy. And I'll see you tomorrow, or failing that, Monday (tomorrow is the weekend after all).

I will not pretend that it was all fine; Dinner last night sucked

2007-10-26T11:10:00.000-06:00

Seeing old friends is nice. Especially when said nice friends are low-key, go with the flow types. However this worked to the disadvantage of Croftie and Myself last evening. My friend, let's call him Bradbury for perfectly unnecessary anonymity's sake, is in town for three days. Bradbury lives and works in Jolly Old, and his stateside adventures have mostly been in the NYC. His girlfriend has friends (family?) here in town and as such I was happy to receive a tangential visit. To catch up. All that. It's been a while. etc.

Dinner plans were made, actually made (as opposed to imagined--see previous post) for Thursday evening. When i got out of work I was told Bradbury would call me when they were going to have dinner, that it was going to be at "some Spanish restaurant in River North." Almost immediately I knew which place this was. I shall keep it un-named since I am not in the business of (openly) defaming people or places (but if you read between the lines the disguise is flimsy at best). Needless to say I'd been there before and had very mixed experiences. A mutual friend of us Crofts with a penchant for planning big dinner get-togethers (and whose target restaurants have reliably stunk) once led us all here and it was fine. rather expensive, for a college kid, but fine.

Last night however...

First off, we had to wait. and wait and wait. for. ever. For seemingly no better reason than to make the place in question appear more in demand that it should be. Waiting around late at night can make one cranky, but that was not the case with all of us, well, most of us. Bradbury, and us Crofts are all laid-back types, and i was busy catching up, and even Croftie, thrown to the wolves (while i was catching up with my friend), didn't seem to be fairing too badly. Later I learned this wasn't quite true, but all in all the evening was still salvageable.

Yet the restaurant was really loud. Think elementary school cafeteria with stereo speakers mounted in the corners focusing all the rambunctious kids to holler even louder). The food was meh. and kinda greasy. The waitress was trying very hard to push drinks over and over. And sketchy things like not telling us that when we asked for water, we were going to get bottled water, until one of our party astutely looked around and saw you had to ASK for tap water if you didn't want to pay for it.

The worst part was that when we got the check and collected the money and gave the bill to the waitress we were told we had put in a $20 too little. This was an absolute impossibility. The check split equally between all of us amounted to a $20 each. We all watched everyone put down a $20. And Bradbury counted the total before closing the billfold. Impossible. And yet... Now I suppose it was possible that a bill fell out on the way to the register, and that somebody saw it and snatched it. But there is as much proof for this as there is simple disingenuousness from the waitress. It made me quite angry. But we all re-upped and hurriedly walked out.

Part of the problem of the evening was Bradbury (and by extension, us Crofts) are so willing to go with whatever dominant personality is organizing things. The friends he was staying with are new to Chicago. But very... strong willed and opinionated. This restaurant was simply the best tapas in the city, even though every online review site disagrees, and so do most of us Chicagoans (no problem giving shout outs tho, go to Cafe Ba Ba Reeba! Bates and dacon!). This place is newbie/tourist/hipster hell. But we simply had to go there.

It quickly became clear that the organizer behind all this (the Demander) was a particularly... difficult person. Over the evening's conversation I learned his thoughts on eating meat, buying diamonds, dubya, the us economy, american's erroneous assumptions of everything asian, why NYC sucks (there i happen to agree), contemporary architecture, on and on. So i did what any sensible Pirate would do. Ate a bunch of pork. Discussed my engagement ring hunting. and defended (defended!?) a few of the president's policies (such as not pulling out of Iraq right away). To sum things up (and this is horrible, just horrible, and I am a horrible person for doing this) you can get a good first impression of this guy from his dazzling well-crafted facial hair which looks like Robert Downey Jr's in the upcoming Iron Man film (minus some of the beard, but retaining 'stache and soul-patch).

where is my mind?

2007-10-24T13:17:00.000-06:00

I'm losing it. It's gone.

The little moments that used to be 'ha-ha, isn't that funny' are now becoming 'maybe I actually do have some form of memory loss/dementia. A few days ago I attempted to do something as benign as clip my fingernails. Job accomplished, or so i presumed, I moved on to other things. Two days later i realize that I only did 60% of the job, leaving the fingernails of my right hand unclipped. 60% is telling, seeing as I actually made the mental jump and started to complete the other side of the job. I could see 50%. Maybe i just got confused and thought I'd already done righty. fine. But to stop after just beginning him? the very fingers I am typing this with are mocking me right now.

Second example. I have a friend coming in from out of town. Way out of town. England out of town. Granted, he's been stateside for a week now, and he and his girlfriend are not staying with me or anything. But I was all set to go out to eat with them both tonight. As if I'd made definitive plans to do so. But in reality I'm not even sure when he gets in. Might be 11pm for all I know. Looking back over our email correspondence there is absolutely no reference to dinner. Just which days he'd be in town and an exchange of cell phone numbers. Where did the phantom dinner plans come from? I mean, it was to the point where I was about to call and ask him where we had planned on meeting and at which time. That would have been an embarrassing phone call. But it makes for an even embarassing-er memory. Because friends can giggle and laugh it off. When I laugh to myself it just kinda dies out he he, ha ugh with a sheepish eye-roll for closure.

Back on Topic (Finally)

2007-10-23T07:17:00.000-06:00

Lest you nay-sayers out there in the peanut-gallery start calling foul, here's a post ruminating (tangentially) on one this blog's three titular heads. Above is a video link for as long as youtube supports it, NBC is tenacious about protecting their dear intellectual property which is asinine in and of itself. These videos function as free advertising! The more times I laugh at some dude punching another dude just before the second dude eats something the more likely I am to tune in to SNL some night. Okay, so that last bit won't actually ever happen, but still. This is the first time I've even thought about that "Great Saturday Evening Institution" in like, long times.

The premise. As detailed above, the video is mostly a sequence of shots of everyday folks, who might be SNL regulars (*shrugs shoulders*), just about to bite into a slice of pizza, an apple, a french fry, etc. And then just before they hit pay-dirt Andy Sandberg lunges into frame and delivers a punch right in the face complete with a big yellow 'Punched!' description on the screen before Sandberg dances giddily. Equally effective is the music which deedle-deedles along until the big actions where it swells right along with the punches.

Very simple = kinda brilliant.

Why is this brilliant? Perhaps a better question would be, why is it not? You have random, senseless violence which is somehow augmented by the fact that the people being hit are just about to eat. Random punches would be funny--hitting unsuspecting diners is hilarious. Unrefined, maybe. But hilarious. And the dances that follow could easily be mortally stupid. But Sandberg enlivens them with more than enough dumb enthusiasm. And i don't mean dumb in the negative sense. This is dumb in the most positive sense.

One of the parts of me that finds this the most funny is the part that wants to simulate it. How fun would it be to run down the street and do everything normal behavior warrants one should not? Punches to the face occupy the high end of this spectrum because not only are you doing something unwritten behavioral codes forbid, like laying down in the middle of a busy sidewalk or peeing on a shop window, but you are interrupting the normal behavior of others, right at the precise moment where a person expects it least. Not to get all philosophical or anything but this is a Althusserian's dream come true. These actions are funny because they are fundamentally ideologically unexplainable.

And that is why, I would argue, that children, and those of us with very child-like sense of humor (er, guilty) will find this immensely funny. because everything adults do, everything in the real world that is so straight-laced and boring and horribly mundane is deflated. Children haven't been 'hailed' into the system yet, to go back to Althusser for a moment, and thus either don't know the codes or haven't bought into them yet. The only thing they know is that adults are boring and deeply unfunny. Adults punching each other in the face for no reason just before they eat, however...

And the punches make a fairly logical progression from least absurd to most. We go from one random man being struck to several in succession to a pair of foo-folks seated together in a cafeteria being 'double' punched to a punch-out and 'full recovery' by Mr Jon Bon Jovi to a man who temporarily escapes his punch-doom by answering a call on his cell phone. That last bit perfectly shows all that philosophical nonsense i was blathering on about above to be true. This isn't just random violence, but violence instrumented through a very child-like field of logic. It makes sense that Andy cannot punch the cell phone talking guy because that would violate the very basic child-logic rules. Cell-phone dude isn't just about to eat, therefore no punch. The same set of rules that make Andy murder the guy who 'figures things out' and tries to defend himself. If that guy had only just got punched and played along, everything would be fine. But instead his disruption escalates the violence.

Likewise, when Andy is forced to up the ante, the world reacts in turn. Just how boring are adults/regular life the world over? So much so that they are mindless zombies. And Andy must now flee from them across the globe through various stock footage shots of Paris, etc. Yet Andy has a trump card, he knows that he simply has to reverse things back to his own set of rules. How do you stop a marauding pack of killer zombies from eating you? You do the zombie dance, naturally.

Believe in your dreams, indeed.

I am Delicious (at Night)

2007-10-17T08:24:00.000-06:00

Let me explain.

Midnight snack. The impulse is sometimes maddening, overpowering. Which is all well and good if you have some sesame chicken in the fridge or a slice of cold pizza. It is not okay when you yourself are the one being snacked. For the past two weeks I have been a late night buffet table for beasties everywhere.

I loathe mosquitoes more than most things. I think my hatred was really ramped up in Italy where our second floor apartment had these gigantic floor to ceiling windows and no screens. It being hotter'n'hell most nights the windows remained wide open, my room-mate and i would be feasted upon and end up walking to class with red welts all over our faces, necks and arms. It got so bad that I would feign sleep, wait for the inevitable "szzz....szhsZZSSXZSSHHSsss" of a mosquito passing by my ear and flail about at it like I was deranged, which I very nearly became.

The past week I have been visited by 3 mosquitoes, all of whom now no longer can count themselves among the living. All of which tasted my blood and thought it delicious enough to not even bother with Croftie. But last night, last night I don't know what happened, nor do i want to know. But this morning i woke up with a middle finger swollen up enough to make it slightly hard to bend at the knuckle. it is red and itches.

I want this madness to stop.

I want to feel safe and secure that when i turn out my lamp and go to sleep that i won't be eaten alive and stung/bitten by ornery denizens of the older and more primitive species.

Leave me alone!

adding another jewel to yee olde bookcase

2007-10-15T12:51:00.000-06:00

It officially goes on sale tomorrow. I've had it in some form since March (via an advanced reader's paperback galley edition). Today, the 'real' books arrived at the store and one was damaged. So I'll be taking him home tonight, to sleep amongst friends on my bookcase. He's enormous and hardcover and wonderful and normally $37 and promises to be a phenomenal translation of an even phenomenaler work (which i read in a different translation a few years back in my great books in world lit kick). His flaws, his I'm not fit to be sold in a bookstore flaws, were easily fixed with a razor (for a few of his pages were over long, all he needed was some love and a haircut). God i love working in a bookstore.

things i find aesthetically pleasing (but probably shouldn't)

2007-10-12T09:34:00.000-06:00

1. the smell of rotting leaves (that crunchy Fall smell which gets really augmented after a good rain).
2. mustaches. Sam Elliot, Tom Selleck, Eugene Hutz... who would not want to be enlisted in ranks such as these? Or, I suppose, if you are a member of the fair sex, who wouldn't want to woo and wed these mans?
3. comic books. print-media's red-headed step-child. getting fashionable now, in Criticism and in Academia, but those don't really count and are a double-edged sword. Its sorta like being an American voter in a state doomed by the electoral college to perpetually be red or blue. It's like saying "See, we pay attention to you and value your interest in comic books/vote but in reality we don't really think you as individuals/comics) are to be taken seriously, not really, but you can't complain because technically, technically you are being represented. And long-winded analogy of the year goes to...
4. that i-tunes nano comercial with the lady-girl-crooner Feist. 1, 2, 3, 4...
5. and according to Croftie and most fans of sports other than Baseball, the national pastime.

Barry and the PoltergESPN

2007-10-10T07:06:00.000-06:00

Early in the wee hours of this morning I was awakened by Barry freaking the fuck out over an imaginary spot on the wall above my night-table. My night-table is populated by an unfortunate stratification of very heavy hardcover books (i.e. the Shelby Foote) and comics books. Most of the comic books are in plastic sleeves which are very slippery. Thus a book which is very heavy and should be secure in its own dense gravity becomes free to slide straight off my night-table when an insane cat is inspired to get up on them and frantically scrabble at the upper portion of the bedroom wall.

After the loud thud of various 800+ page books (and, occasionally, a very stocky cat, mind you) I rolled over to see Barry once more make his way up off the increasingly scattered pile of fallen books and comics and onto the table for further out-of-his-head scrabbling.

The thing is... there was nothing there. absolutely. nothing. With my lamp turned on I inspected the entire wall, and the adjacent wall for good measure. I flicked the curtain back and forth to dislodge any hidden winged or 8 legged beasties. nothing. Yet when I turned off the lamp and lay down, there goes Barry once more trying so hard to climb up the wall.

Part of the other reason why I came to the conclusion that there was nothing there was that Pickle would have nothing to do with all of this. She sat calmly at the foot of the bed and alternately slept or looked up with her alarmed expression (one of her two expressions) when something loud hit the ground. Earlier the previous evening a buggy had been frolicking in the window-sill just outside our apartment. She enjoyed this thoroughly, and she and Barry had spent a fruitless 10 minutes attempting to bend space and time and somehow scoop the bug up through the glass and screen.

Point is, she can see buggies. She LOVES them. Barry is the one who ultimately mushes and eats them (minus a few legs, usually), but Pickle the Hunter is no slouch. And her mighty powers of observation where not deceived. There was no bug on the wall, just a retarded cat hurling himself at imagined bugs on the wall.

Awake enough now so as to answer nature's call, I walked to the bathroom and back again. As i re-entered the bedroom I took inventory unconsciously. One Croftie (sleeping). One Pickle (sleeping). One Barry... (sleeping... in the exact, warm spot I'd recently vacated. His plan all along I'm sure. But here comes the scary part. From the living room came an incredibly loud noise. My computer had not only 'woken' itself up, but was playing a video feature from ESPN dot com with the volume on my speaker turned all the way up. And yet, the screen was dark.

Needless to say i jumped, ran into the living room and turned off the computer. My brain was still mostly asleep but i could not figure out how the particular video on a particular site had somehow began playing for no reason many hours after anyone had used the internet without having woken up the monitor in the process. For example, if something bumps the table the computer is sitting on and the monitor 'wakes up', then whatever is on the screen might 're-animate', a video might play, an ad might do its wiggly dance. But the screen was dark.

So my only conclusion was that something supernatural was behind all of this. And since animals can supposedly 'sense' ghosts, i imagine this specter was a ghost buggy. who began the evening by teasing the fat cat and ignoring the stupid one. who likes ESPN. he had better not like the Red Sox. otherwise I won't be so quick next time to stop Barry from flaying his ghost ass and eating him up.

Series of Thoughtlings

2007-10-08T12:40:00.000-06:00

lately, this blog has been more dinosaur (i.e. 'extinct') than zombie (unstoppably ravenous but brain-dead) or robot (super-helpful but destined to try, unsuccessfully, to take over the world). So time to harness my inner undead and walk/blog the land of the living once more, even if only to feast on the brains of the unwashed masses. Because I'm not up to taking over the world just yet.

Yesterday my beloved Cleveland Indians proved their mortality and teased me for 4 innings before imploding and losing game three of the American League Divisional Series. Previously charmed or at least impervious to Yankee mystique (a sort of musk that screams Bronx, bandwagon, 27 World Series Titles, unimaginable arrogance, and massive salary expenditure all at the same time), the Indians had delighted me twice over by winning the first two games.

Tonight the teams play game 4 in NY and the Yankees are once again favorites. I am nervous because momentum appears to swinging back NY's way, the game is being held on their home field, they are coming off a very strong performance, and the Indians pitcher this evening, a guy by the name of Paul Byrd, is one of those wily veterans who don't inspire fear in opposing batters. The worst part is that if NY wins this evening it is as if the first 4 games never happened. The series becomes a best of one. Granted, that One will be played in Cleveland with their ace on the mound, but the yankees will have at that point won two in a row. It seems like tonight is almost a must win for the Tribe.

How did this happen?

In other news, the new radiohead album 'comes out' on Wednesday. Released via download, the password issued in an email and good for one person only. And as well debated and documented in the media, you can pay whatever you like for the songs. I paid the 'full' price, which will net me a bunch of crazy art and vinyl I can't actual listen to, but also cds and pretty packaging etc. All for 40 pounds. thats British slang for 80-something bucks. Silly amount for music, but its not like i'm lining the pocket of some record label goon. This will actually go to the artists in question and hopefully contribute to more cool music down the road. Way to be a team player, Thom Yorke says to me in my imaginarium.

having been on a strict diet of coca-cola zero and diet pepsi, this morning's lack of either and subsequent purchasing/imbibement of a full fledged Mt Dew is like a shot of heroin. I feel incredibly good and kinda sick all at the same time. How on earth did i have one of these every day?

Later this month a huge X-men crossover event begins. For the lay-person (i.e someone who isn't 'rad' and doesn't read comic-books--the dorks) this means that all the different comic series involving X-men characters align and tell one big story, one that will (obligatory movie trailer over-statement) "change their world forever." I already read most of these series and I am pretty excited about this. Its like all of your favorite tv show characters being involved in the same story. But not really since Dwight Schrute (sp?) from the Office would never hang out with Sawyer and that Japanese guy on Heroes. At least not voluntarily.

The best part about getting to work early is getting a parking space. The second best thing is getting to LEAVE early, and beating all of the traffic home. Getting up certainly does have its sucking points (blech, gross phrase) but its all worth it in the end.

This post was written with Spoon's Series of Sneaks playing in the background.

City of Echoes

2007-07-31T15:19:00.000-06:00

When i moved to Chicago ages and ages ago (something approaching 5 years), i was immediately excited about "the scene." "The scene" is a bit of a deceptive name, it's never as vague as all that, it almost always refers to a particular city's artistic community, most commonly it's music environment. And that's what I was excited about. Finally, finally I lived in a city where musicians would stop practically every tour. Sometimes twice. And if you are Gogol Bordello, sometimes thrice.

The first band I saw play live here in the Second City, was a then little known prog-metal outfit named Pelican. They fill a fairly specific niche. Their music has no lyrics, their songs sometimes last for 10 minutes or more and can be, at times, labyrinthine. They have a penchant for unforgivable song titles like "Winds with Hands" and "Spaceship Broken: Parts needed." I had come to some ratty little club off the Brown line to see a band whose name now escapes me, something hardcore, you can see how much of an impression they made on me, and the opening act was Pelican. To say I was floored is a bit of an overstatement. But i was impressed.

Now it's 5 years and two Pelican albums later and I'm a bit giddy with my love for this band. Their most recent album, City of Echoes, is another decisive step forward. It has a raw quality to it that its predecessor lacked. As good as The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw it does have a polished, symphony-esque sweep to it. One could set an Opera to the Fire. Echoes sounds like an album forged by immediate emotion. pain or love or frustration or wonder or something, it's off the cuff, almost jazz-like, at times much quieter than what has come before, and it's growing on me.

That Idiot Neighbor

2007-07-16T23:03:00.000-06:00

Sort of like goldilocks, Croftie and I have 3 neighbors. Michael, the owner of the middle portion of our three-piece building, is a kind man who loves dogs, fixes random stuff for us, doesn't mince words, is gay as a kite and quite a good fellow. No problems there.

The tenant who lives in the lower part of Michael's middle portion is a divorced abomination of a man who has a son from his previous marriage that he lets do whatever the hell he wants in the back courtyard including spraying everything and everyone with a garden hose. But he's gone most of the time and can largely be ignored.

The tenant on the far end of the complex on the ground level is by far the worst. You'd think that with being that far away that we'd hear from him the least. Not so. He and his frat-boy friends who I assume are all junior investment brokers (if there is a such a thing) have a party every other weekend that gets broken up by the cops (called by the large number of stodgy old folks in these parts, lord knows why frat-boy moved here in the first place, you'd think Lincoln Park would be more his cup of MGD) and is generally obnoxious. Now that we have a loud jet engine of an air-condtioner his raucousness is not as much a problem. But there are evenings when I sit at my desk and type, exactly as I am now, and get to listen to the priceless gems that escape his mouth.

1. "Who, COOL!!! He sucked it back in!!!" Said regarding his dog who was in the process of relieving himself.

2. "That girl sure is lucky I have a penis, because that's what she really needs right about now."

3. "Wow, dude, look! If you step on them... they glow forever!" Said after mashing fireflies, one of nature's most brilliant and romantic creatures, into the stones of our back patio.

and with that, g'night.

A Kitchen Made of Cheddar

2007-07-14T10:06:00.000-06:00

Croftie and I are subtle people with subtle tastes. This has been proven time and again. But never more so than late yesterday evening. The two of us were about halfway done painting our kitchen a beautiful peach sorbet color. At least that is what the color is called, and that is what it looked like on the tiny sample slip. However, covering the not so huge but fairly substantial walls of our kitchen the color... changed. Perhaps it did not feel at home there. Croftie and I took a step back, both of us nervous but waiting for the other to say something. Finally, one of us did.

"Ferd, I don't want to live in a Kitchen made of Cheddar."

Three hours and some Thai take-out later, we finished priming over our miscalculation.

Books of Doug: #1

2007-06-21T08:35:00.000-06:00

First off, if you haven't already, read this:
Books of Doug Mission Statement

Books of Doug #1: Richard Bachman's The Long Walk

Before reality television, before Battle Royale, before the Patriot Act, before he gave up the pseudonym 'Richard Bachman,' Stephen King wrote a slim gem of a novel in the year I was born, 1979. The premise, though deceptively simple, is nearly impossible to relate in a satisfying way. The story is set in the near future, in an America which is just slightly dystopian. Every year 100 young men approximately 16-18 years of age are selected at random out of a pool of hundreds of thousands of applicants to compete in what has become America's premiere 'sporting/reality television' competition. These 100 boys gather on May 1st at the Maine/Canada border. At 9:00am they all begin walking south, and must keep a pace of at least 4mph. If they fall below this speed they are given a warning. If they remain under this speed for an addition minute they are given a second warning. Warnings can also be obtained for a variety of offenses such as attacking a fellow walker. If a walker is warned a third time and still does not pull things together he is given 'his ticket' and is out of the walk. Of course this being a King story, the 'ticket' is a bullet in the head.

The first objection to such a story might be, 'well, its just a bunch of kids walking and dying.' And i would respond, "Yes. That's exactly why it is so good." There is zero artifice here. We get to know a great many of the walkers through the eyes of Ray Garraty, the protagnist everyman type, and much of the novel revolves around the mundane. Talking, boasting, playing, arguing, bullshitting, eating, dozing, etc. It is because the contents of the Walk are so everyday that both its horrific premise and its philosophical themes resonate so clearly. This is not Battle Royale where kids are forced to put a weapon in their hand and kill their fellow classmates and the most vicious, violent and clever walk away in the end. But in a certain sense it is no different. Weapons are replaced by one's own will-power, one's desire to live. You still have to 'kill' everyone else, you just let them do the honors of bowing out on their own.

Yet it is the humanity between the competitors in the Long Walk which is the most striking features. King has always been an expert character author, and by the time we are 5 miles down the road he has created a host of likeable, wonderful, complex, and dark young men. By the time each of these boys reach the end of their tethers you are rooting for them to go further, you care about them, you relate to them, they remind you of someone you grew up with, or someoby you wish you grew up with. And this empathetic reaction can only be achieved through very plain, realistic writing.

King's prose is just that. It is also full of gore and violent imagery but I needn't have to point out, so is life. His writing can be painfully bad at times, at one point in my life I decided to 're-write' this story on my own, and I even began copying the novel, sentence for sentence, 'improving' sentence structure and word choice where i could, for the first few chapters until I realized what I was doing was ridiculous. King's prose for the most part is sound enough, and when it fails it doesn't sink the ship. The only way it would was if his philosophy was ornate and over-complicated and over-wrought like so many young authors strive for these days. King's themes are humble and almost transparently simple. Everyone, walker or no, has their own road to travel and when it is your time to buy out, you do, and the only thing that was important along the way was treating your fellow man with respect and diginity, helping them in their times of need as much as you can, making their lives as fun and happy and joyful as possible for what little time we share with them.

The fact that this dystopian future is so close to actually being here is another matter which greatly enhances the appeal of the book. Personal liberties have been restricted to protect the country against, in the case, certain unnamed communist and fascist regimes that would seek to ruin America. America in return has become a sort of totalitarian state where people disappear if they are enemies of peace or speak out against the government. King calls this disappearing act 'being squadded.' Garraty's Father who plays a much more important role in the novel than he might first appear to, is one such political dissident. Yet the populace must be placated too, thus the advent of events like ther Long Walk which has become kind of like the super bowl, march madness, the world series, and American Idol combined. Billions are wagered on who will win, what total number of miles each walker will walk. Millions crowd the sides of the roads for the chance to see someone get their ticket, or to grab a discarded shoe or other much more disturbing souvenirs. Ancient Rome's gladitorial arena is echoed here, but also the crowds around the Reign of Terror's public executions. If anyone is the villain or antagonist of the Long Walk it is King's rendering of the Crowd, a blank, faceless wall of bloodlust and human depravity.

Against this wall the walkers stand out as if spotlighted. They tell jokes, miss their girlfriends/wives, reminisce about their favorite moments growing up, miss their moms and dads, tell stories, live life. And then of course they die. They die from foot cramps, from sun-stroke, from malnutrition, from blisters, from bad luck, from lack of fitness, but mostly from fatigue. Some try and escape off the road and are shot as soon as their foot leaves the pavement, one of the few times you don't get a warning. Two even storm the rumbling half-track tank-like vehicle that drives beside the walkers and carries the soldiers and their equipment which keeps tabs on the walkers speeds and whereabouts. But they all die except for one.

Now the first question Lara asked me when I told her the plot of the Long Walk was, "why would anyone sign up for this horrible thing?" For lots of reasons, the least applicable but most obvious one being the 'Prize'. If you win, the goverment supplies you with anything you could ever want for the rest of your life. The catch, of course, is that by the time there is only one person left standing said person is usually in a pretty bad state, their desires are leveled to basic necessities, and the prize often just turns out to be one's life. Other reasons for signing up are less obvious and have to be inferred. Perhaps this version of America, while far from Stalin's Russia, is not a very pleasant place to live, or it is hard to work one's way up in life. Many of the walkers are poor, in fact all of them that we are introduced to are lower middle class or less. Walkers also attain a brief but awesome kind of celebrity. And there is certainly a sort of masculine stoic pride involved, of proving that one is not afraid of overwhelming odds, that one is man enough to walk down every one of one's peers, of bending others to one's will.

Yet one of the stars of the Long Walk, a kid named Pete McVries figures out the most likely reason. Suicide. Its basic and it's freudian as hell, it's the death drive laid out on a bare table for everyone to see. But like the death drive it isn't so simple. Because the death drive is also simultaneously the the desire to live one's life to the fullest, and the walkers certainly do that, albeit at an accelerated pace. To live one's life in just a few days.

There are some wonderful moments here, during the 'living'. Ray Garraty spends most of the first 3/4s of the novel walking through Maine because he knows that in his home town he will get to see his girlfriend and his mother. Doubts as to whether he will make it that far (more than half of his friends don't) or see them in the thick crowd haunt him the entire way. But when he finds them he doesn't have any warnings and he gets to stand with them, holding their hands, mouthing sentiments over the deafening crowd noise. Yet in the end McVries has to drag Garraty away from his loved ones against his will shouting 'what do you want Ray? Do you want the last thing they'll remember you by is the stink of your blood on their clothes?" Lest we forget this is a horror story after all.

The end of the Long Walk is as powerful as it is enigmatic. I won't go so far as to tell you who wins, though it becomes clear enough once you are only a few pages in. It is how they win that is so disturbing. No, they don't kill anyone, and they don't pull off some miraculous feat. They simply carry on further than anyone else. But that's not important. What is important comes next. As the Jeep rolls up carrying the grand marshal of this event, the Major as he is called, the last boy standing stops walking. He stares at the Jeep but then sees a figure, either dressed in black or in silhouette standing on the horizon. As the Major claps his hand on his shoulder the boy shrugs it off, begins walking to the mysterious figure. When the major claps down once more the boy "finds enough inside himself to run."

There is a huge debate as to who or what this figure represents. Some say it is the personification of Death, and that at this moment the last boy left dies. Or that this figure appears to lead the last boy into 'whatever comes next' after life. I prefer to think, whether or not the last boy lives or dies, that this black figure is his Father, or someone else in his life, someone he has lost, and he is delusional, perhaps lost his mind. Maybe it is a combination of some of these theories. Maybe the boy dies, sees his Father and runs with him into 'whatever comes next.' In either case the ambiguity, something which King is careful to avoid throughout the entire length of the stark, plain novel, has an awesome force. Like Garraty's girl and mother in Freeport, the last page alone is enough to keep me going further, reading this novel again and again.

Other notable works by King that came close to making 'the Books of doug" and might appear later in the series if I decide that the one book by one author rule is silly and arbitrary:

The Eyes of the Dragon
The Stand
The Dark Tower Series
The Talisman (with Peter Straub)

Books of Doug: Mission Statement

2007-06-21T08:03:00.000-06:00

Books are pretty damn important to me. One might go so far as to say they are my life. I work in a bookstore, I have a Masters degree in reading books, and as a writer and aspiring author I seek to create even more books. Yet above all else I enjoy reading books. I cannot even remember the last time I went a whole day without reading at least a few pages of something or other. What a horrible day that would be.

There are a select few books which I return to, year after year, sometimes every few years, which if they do not define me as a person, certainly define me as a writer, define me as the type of published author I wish to be. Recently I've decided to revisit, yet again, some of these titles that i know practically by heart. If you are wondering why on earth I would read a story I already know inside and out, then you are missing the point, and this series of articles I am about to post is not for you. But if you are the type of person who has slowly cultivated a private collection of dear, dear friends, 'desert island' books if you will, books you'd save from your burning apartment if you only had time to grab a handful or so, or you are curious as to what stories I've sewn myself together out of, then read on.

Some of these stories are masterful compositions, canonical works of literature with characters, dialogue, plot points embedded in the popular psyche of the modern mind. Some are obscure. Some are blatant rip-offs of other, perhaps 'better' works, and still others most would consider meaningless tripe, airport novels, or just plain bad writing. But the point is, they all mean a good deal to me. I love them for their faults as well as their beautiful moments. In short, I wouldn't have them any other way.

If you want to continue on to the first article in this series, you can do so by clicking here.

the Joys of the Literalist

2007-05-29T20:49:00.000-06:00

Oh ESPN dot com editors. you're interesting choice of words left me laughing once more this evening:

ESPNEWS Headlines

Beckett returns from DL on fire in Red Sox victory

hehehe. the poor man. was it a case of spontaneous combustion? At least he managed to get the victory. hehe. on fire. heh.

Neighborhood #5 (upcoming kickass concert)

2007-05-17T08:13:00.000-06:00

I am more than a little excited about this Saturday's concert. I haven't been this giddy about seeing a band since Wolf Parade (before that Les Savy Fav [twice] and before that, er, Radiohead, I guess, but that was years ago). Its like I am four years old again and X-mas is just a few days away, but those days pass by like enormous stubborn pieces of glacier-time. I listened and re-listened and re-re-listened to Neon Bible and Funeral so many times these past few days, come up with imaginary set lists, made 'cuts' of the songs that if they really really have to leave out then so be it I guess it would be okay but not really. With only two full albums of work they will likely play a bulk of both albums, the benefit of seeing these guys so early in their careers. You don't have to worry about them not playing your favorite obscure track from an EP released between their 4th and 5th albums or some such silliness. Since my 'perfect' set list keeps changing I suppose I will just list the songs in a 'most wanted' order. The closer to the top the song is the happier I'll be if it is performed. Red for Bible, Blue for Funeral.

1. Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) "The power's out in the heart of man!" This would be an excellent third or fourth song of their performance. Its too rawkus to just come right out of the gates with.

2. Rebellion (Lies). The 'hit single' from Funeral, I still remember when i heard it at the Gap on Michigan Ave and thought "in what perfect pop universe does this radio station exist?"

3. Black Mirror. Now this one they could open with...

4. Neighborhood #1 (tunnels) Still gives me the pop music equivalent of the DTs.

5. Well & the Lighthouse

6. No Cars Go. Croftie is probably sick of me blasting this on the Jeepie Jeepie's stereo.

7. Neighborhood #2 (laika). vampires. yeah.

8. Intervention
9. Blackwave/Bad Vibrations
10. keep the car running
11. antichrist television blues
12. crown of love
13. neon bible
14. my body is a cage
15. haiti
16. windowstill
17. Neighborhood #4 (kettles)
18. wake up
19. Une anee sans lumiere
20. ocean of noise
21. in the backseat.

A Horse is a Horse

2007-05-10T16:19:00.000-06:00

(of course, of course)

Why do the most abominable things in my life happen in threes? I've already documented the Bathroom Trilogy of Terror. Now I'm smack-dab in the middle of a creepy old man/sexual predator triple header. Bus-stop was only the first example.

Yesterday I got to work and was told to go clean up some books that were returned the previous day--not my job, but the actual person who does this has been sick, so I happily consented. At that early hour of the morning few employees are working and even fewer customers are shopping. Its generally quiet and one can get many things done very swiftly. The large stack of returners was located at the register, a cramped space to begin with. Take said tight space and add a moveable cart, the heap of books, myself and the cashier clerk, let's call her Jezebel, and there's not much room at all.

Jezebel, a part timer who exclusively works the register, is a busy body, an infamous sychophant, and today, rather scantily clad. In her hair is a crown of what appears to be dandelions. She is wearing a white canvas-like dress that has a preposterously low neck-line. Its just all hanging out there for anyone to see. Moveable cart between us, I begin to load the heap of books and bus them out of there when a customer comes in.

I immediately get a very very bad feeling about this. The man is a regular and slightly... off. There are rumors he did a lot of cocaine in the 80s and I'm not going to say I disagree with these assertions. He's a bit of a Robin Williams type, constantly mumbling things, mostly nonsensical, many of them jokes, claims to see leprechauns hiding behind bookshelves around St Patrick's day, does turkey-calls around thanksgiving, etc. The man comes over to the counter and his endless stream of consciousness stammers when his eyes fall on Jezebel. He recovers quickly however and spouts,

"Why, you must be Lady Godiva!"

Jezebel nervously laughs and maybe turns red, I've got my back to both of them and can't say for sure. The cart is loaded up and I turn around only to receive a second salvo,

"And you must be the Horse!"

Now, I am pretty well versed in myths, legends, histories and such things but these allusions failed me. I looked at Jezebel and raised the 'I have no idea whats going on' eye-brow. She smiles and turns away from the creepy customer. I leave her after the man is gone. Hours later it occurs to me to find out just what the hell was going on. When I get some downtime around lunch I wikipedia 'Lady Godiva' and immediately make the 'so shocked they climb up and almost off my forehead' eye-brows. Turns out Lady Godiva has nothing to do with chocolate (my only previous connotation of the name) and is a famous woman who paraded naked on a horse around the streets of some English city for some noble cause or other.

Now, lemme try and understand this. Was the creepy old man trying to give the young girl a compliment? If so, the horse comment that followed cannot be regarded in any way but sexually. She rides the damn horse for crissakes. Compliment? seems unlikely. So was he admonishing her in some weird literary way? I haven't the foggiest. All I know is that I am glad i didn't know the allusion at the time it was said. Manageable awkward would have been replaced with Apocalyptic awkward. And I can only imagine how this horrible trilogy will be completed...

Something Significantly Worse than Bus-Stop-Girls

2007-05-09T08:42:00.000-06:00

Riding the bus can be an unpleasant experience. Waiting at a bus-stop can be even less pleasant. Stuck out in the cold, anxious about getting somewhere at the appropriate time, and if you are picturing me via Croftie's imagination, you see a young man beseiged by a tide of lustful, impossibly attractive bus-stop girls putting on lip-stick and perfume, each plotting to steal away her man at a moments notice.

On Monday, despite the absence of Croftie's Sirens, the uncomfortableness of Bus-Stop was kicked up a few notches. I was exiting a bus in Hyde Park and saw a peculiar ad on the side of the bus-stop shelter. Normally these ads are for blockbuster movies or face creams or the occassional museum/culture cache. But this ad was different. This ad was made of a series of squares with sides about one foot long. Each square had the image of a place, all dark and gloomy and gray and washed out and scary looking with a word in the center. There was a creepy park bench, a street corner, the area right out front of a bar, the library and I'm pretty sure the image of an oil derrick. Reading the words your eyes visit each terrible place. The individual words spell out something like this:

To the many places you might encounter a sexual predator please add this.

Now I first inferred the sentence to be suggesting that Bus-Stop itself was the final hang-out of the sexual predator. The thought horrified me. Why would anyone make an ad like this? I feel awful enough for young women who have to wait out in the middle of nowhere for a bus full of degenerates and perverts and now they have to be constantly reminded of their unfortunate plight every time they sit down and look to the left at the big scary ad? Then I realized that the last square of the add wasn't gray and gloomy but highlighted and bright. It was a family room of some anonymous suburban residence. The ad was for domestic violence/child abuse.

Far from make me feel better, this realization actually made me feel even worse. What's more? I'll never visit an oil refinery ever again. Nowhere is safe.