Warehousing

Not even 10:00 in the morning when it actually opens there's a line outside of Barney's, a store I've only distantly heard of, never paid more than a half-thought, because I was raised with the nicest of my clothes coming from JCPenny sales. A dapper, gay Asian guy in front of us in line tells us his tactics re these kinds of sales. Apparently the first couple of days are the best for shoes, the last couple are the best for pants. Inside people dash madly for all sorts of things. It's Sunday, so the orthodox Jews are buying suits in full force. I nearly have a panic attack looking for shoes, wondering where all the lefts are, when really, one just has to turn it in to someone who goes to find the proper box containing said left. Lots of baggy pants. The woman's section is upstairs, so I don't see any hotties. Men in reserved corners trying on pants. A high school aged model tries on shoes next to me and his mom keeps prodding me about the boots I've, "Are you sure those fit? You're getting those?" but the guy is pretty nice, and we talk about the horrible pants selection and the general bedlam that is this warehouse sale, and he even shakes my hand and says Nice to Meet You before leaving with his parents, who seem to panicking over the breadth of shit he's accumulated in the past couple of hectic hours. The gay Asian tries on pants, smiles and waves. I wave back. I have a garbage bag filled with clothes worth more than my entire wardrobe, and the only reason I have them is because they're a million percent off, and even that price gives me heartburn.

Not slouching through another night

Re Leonard Cohen, May 16th @ Radio City Music Hall

What can I say about LC songs that would lend them any greater significance? Nothing. So here I am to offer my review of his concert as a communal experience of warmth and poetry, not of music, not to imply anything about the experience, but to look at it in a way other reviewers might not.

The crux of the show, I think, were the in-b/t's, like when he would remove his shadow-casting fedora b/t songs and smile, and that would be when people would see the bright face of this beautiful man, a man who looks about 10-15 years younger than he is, a man who eloquently says everything we wish we could understand about the best and worst of ourselves. When he danced off stage more than once, we could see that it wasn't an act. He truly was that happy and excited and electric that he--a 74 year-old man, sprightly as could be--skipped off- and onstage several times. For those who find LC a sort of everpresence through his music and writing and to whom the man has been an enigma, it was edifying to see the man in the shape he is rather than a wobbly old professor-type.

And that's just it: we've had the music, the poems, the novels (that I've yet to read, but you know, they're out there), but the man himself as a tangible presence has been so scarce. And so we got to see and know a little better someone whom we felt so oddly attached to, oddly because we thought the chance would never come. I can't define the essence of the show for everyone, but from the perspective of a fan from a younger generation, it was intimately avuncular even from 100 yards away.

While Leonard is a man of few words, the sort of warmth he exuded didn't need to be enforced w/ banter, though when he spoke, I went numb and chill and my entire self shut down nearly all sensory perception to let my ears focus on whatever it was he had to say, and his deep voice is exactly the soothing blanket of sound one wants from the perfect uncle and that always present sexual innuendo was pitch perfect.

NB: Bob Dylan, a friend of the ol' LC's, said LC's songs were prayers, and Leo started probably something like 4 out of 5 songs through the first stanzas on his knees, and even after he stood he kept his hands close together in front of his face as though the only thing in the way from actually looking like someone praying (both standing and kneeling) was the microphone.

And the way he was just so grateful to the band, the audience and the crew (I've never even heard of a musician thanking basically everyone associated w/ the show at the end of his/her performance. Most would prefer the dramatic effect of ending it abruptly or fading out rather than ending and showing you the credits. Leonard ended it like it was a Broadway play.) You could just feel how deeply and sincerely the man loves existence. His happiness became the audience's happiness, which may sound cheeseball, whatever, but it's the truth as I experienced it. Had he come on glumly, acting begrudged that he had his fortune stolen and feeling that he has to fucking whore himself out to get it back, the songs maybe would've been the same (probably not, though), but it wouldn't have been nearly as satisfying. Instead of alienating the audience with the cool, rock star indifference that was old by the late 70's and by now sort of insufferably parodic, a cool that makes the audience not a participant but a voyeur, Leonard bared himself. He loved the audience and wanted us to know it, and that's why the show was so goddamn good, because instead of watching a man, we sort of felt, in our own odd way, that we met him and that was his gift to us.

Whew. Thoughts? Am I being melodramtic?

What's Water?

It wasn’t until two days after the fact when I got the news of David Foster Wallace’s untimely death. For about a week afterward I was in literal mourning. DFW wasn’t just any writer. He was the one who parted the slimy veil of bullshit, the one who said, ‘Don’t you see why this is disingenuous or superficial or just plain stupid?’ He was the one who gave us words like “chunklet” or “interjaculated” (see “John Billy” from The Girl with Curious Hair for the latter). He was probably one of the only writers to say of his own work (one that was declared one of comic genius) that he had set out to write a book that was deeply sad. If the man who saw through the bullshit had taken his own life, then all there must be past the bullshit is more + more thickly layered curtains of bullshit and bushwa.
But what hasn’t been said to reify the man (blog post by someone I’ll refer to as “Host” notwithstanding)? I’ve pored over the internet on and off since 14 September 2008, reading almost everything I can find, + there’s a lot.
Exactly seven months after I first learned of Wallace’s death (seven months and two days since the actual expiration), Little, Brown released a commencement speech DFW gave to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College, which speech has been floating around the web for years, as a teeny posthumous book: This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.
Flipping through the book shortly after getting in the mail, I recognized the format as typical to little inspirational, self-helpy-type things that are usually replete with out-of-context quotes from great thinkers of the past paired perhaps with little anecdotes wherein the narrator realizes a new acquaintance is actually an angel or God incarnate or some such. Allow me to put forth that this is in no way ironic nor do I think that the format has caused any intracryptine rollings-over.
In an interview with Larry McCaffery in 1993, DFW said of the purpose of fiction: “We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.”
The format reckons back to the days when DFW was in rehab + the years following when he would hang out at a Boston halfway house while writing IJ. It was at this time that DFW noticed that a “banal platitude” like “one day at a time” or “easy does it” actually offers effective and very real help “in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence.” “[B]anal platitudes,” he says in TIW, “can have a life-or-death importance.”
But This is Water is not the collection of b.p.’s that its format suggests. What it is is a journey into the empathy of a man who wanted nothing more than to love, to understand others, to be understood + to not be lonely. TIW is about “[h]ow to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out” (p.60).
Vadim Rizov of BOMBlog writes that the TIW publication seems to be “a semi-cynical rapid-response release of a text freely available on the internet,” which is something I’ll certainly concede, but I will challenge Rizov’s skepticism toward “any volume which puts every sentence on its own page” or that the format is “counter intuitive (sic) for a lot of reasons.” (The first example he offers is that “the entirety of pg. 111” reads “And so on,” which in and of itself is a matter of taste and is really no real logical reason per se, unless one were making some ecological argument on the lack of frugality exercised by certain publishers, which Rizov is not.)
Rizov goes on to argue that the hallmark of DFW’s style, which for Rizov has been terribly betrayed in this publication, is “that sentence after sentence, you [can] see a thought process forming; the goal, on some level, was to depict nothing less than the frequently disconnected and rambling ways the mind articulates itself.” But this facet of DFW’s style was reserved for his fiction and the more character-study-esque nonfictions that cautiously explore what it is to be human. TIW is more forthrightly didactic than that (+ therefore a bit uncharacteristic of the late writer), though it is not, nor does it attempt to be, as Rizov puts forth, a reduction of the speech “to the status of 137 twinkling aphorisms of brilliance.”
“The biggest problem is how this style undermines the sheer casualness of Wallace’s prose,” Rizov states. Allow me to counter by pointing out the mistake Rizov is making here, one of who the intended audience might be + maybe one of who the audience perhaps should be. TIW is a primly packaged and much more palatable, palpable + accessible version of one of the major themes of DFW’s ouvre, + if one were so inclined (as both myself and Rizov apparently have been) to plow through the garrulous tomes he left behind, then one would find a much more nuanced version of the teeny book I now hold in my hands. By putting this speech into a form that forces a reader to absorb (or at least consider absorbing) it in a more careful and deliberate way, “the sheer casualness” is undermined for a very good fucking reason, + that is that it emphasizes that the message is not at all a casual one; it is one of “life-or-death importance.”

Update + A Conversion

No, for real. I will start blogging regularly, + the posts will not be all personal stories. I will actually start doing book reviews again, as well as movie + music reviews + general cultural opines. I want to start freelance writing, so I'm going to build this mof' into a lovely portfolio.

But, for friends who might occasionally peruse this brain-space o' mine, allow me to offer an update on my current sitch:
I just got back from Poplarville, Mississippi where I was 2nd A.C.'ing (=assistant cameraman) on a feature produced by Ouroboros Productions (Banks Griffin + Andrew Renzie + Borderline Film), which is still untitled due to some legal snafu over the original title, "The Good Forest." In exactly one week, I am moving to Brooklyn, where I will be crashing w/ my girlf, Julie, freelancing on film sets, doing an editing internship under Andy Hafitz in an editing suite owned by Ted Hope, as well as trying to get some paid nonfic writing done when I'm not being an unpaid, unpublished fic writer.
This is my last post that will offer such updates, though I doubt I'll be able to withhold an in-yr-face subjectivism in my nonfic forays.

NB: I've purged about two-dozen previous posts to make way for the coming changes.

Talk to me, people.

zizekulation

Zizek on the current political era in its anticipation of Obama:

The financial meltdown has made it impossible to ignore the blatant irrationality of global capitalism. In the fight against Aids, hunger, lack of water or global warming, we may recognise the urgency of the problem, but there is always time to reflect, to postpone decisions. The main conclusion of the meeting of world leaders in Bali to talk about climate change, hailed as a success, was that they would meet again in two years to continue the talks. But with the financial meltdown, the urgency was unconditional; a sum beyond imagination was immediately found. Saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, finding a cure for Aids, saving the starving children . . . All that can wait a bit, but ‘Save the banks!’ is an unconditional imperative which demands and gets immediate action. The panic was absolute. A transnational and non-partisan unity was immediately established, all grudges among world leaders momentarily forgotten in order to avert the catastrophe. (Incidentally, what the much-praised ‘bi-partisanship’ effectively means is that democratic procedures were de facto suspended.) The sublimely enormous sum of money was spent not for some clear ‘real’ task, but in order to ‘restore confidence’ in the markets – i.e. for reasons of belief. Do we need any more proof that Capital is the Real of our lives, the Real whose demands are more absolute than even the most pressing demands of our social and natural reality?

links & what-have-you

As advertised in The New Yorker the John Templeton Foundation has a series called "Big Questions" wherein they ask a big questions and ask major intellectual figures to answer them.  I've read, in full, the first 3 responses to "Does the free market corrode moral character?" and it's been really, really interesting and thought-provoking.  I think if all Americans were forced to read things like this daily, we'd have a much better country.

Here's a song about our dearly departed DFW, and here's a blog called Words I Learned From Reading David Foster Wallace.

Here's a fat kid that's made me fall sideways in laughter:

  

Obamerica

Judith Butler published a blog post on ContinentalPhilosophy.com entitled “Uncritical Exuberance?” about the world’s buzzing adrenal glands in the wake of Obama’s historical election (I wonder how long it will take for “Barack Obama” to slide by in Spellcheck), and I’ve been thinking along the same lines.  For the country, this is like meeting a new girl (let’s call the country “Greg” and call this girl “Dharma”) who will soon be your girlfriend, and you’re thinking ‘My god, she’s perfect,’ and you’re totally unable to foresee really any problems down the road, when you know for a fact that the unproblematic relationship is a sort of mirage-brass ring.  So let’s be realistic right now.  Let’s know ourselves, know our views, and then we can assess our new president one day at a time and not get too starry-eyed, thinking everything will be roses.   

What Obama supporters must do is avoid becoming mirror images of those rabid W. fans that refuse to believe any hint of corruption or misstepping in their precious Christian Right, New Crusader administration.  We cannot just glaze over facts and ignore criticism.  Though there are certainly things to ignore—OK, quick anecdote:

I’m visiting my neocon parents (this happened today), and my dad and his best friend Breck are talking their Limbaughite rehash of post-election fervor.  It was the most horribly far-reaching criticism I’ve heard in quite some time.  First, they try to burst the black-pride balloon by saying that “He’s not even of slave stock,” which I doubt makes a difference to anyone except to people trying really hard to downplay this moment’s historicity.  “His dad was straight from Africa and he’s from generations of slave traders” (the latter clause can be said of a quarter of the southeast).  Then, “he’s only half black, so you could just as easily call him white.” (Now class, let’s open our copies of Absalom, Absolom!  Little Jimmy, will you please define the word “octoroon” for the class.) And then, in a show of the most fumbling semantic analysis I’ve ever heard, Breck recalls seeing a black girl in a car with shoe-polished windows that read, “My prez is black.” Hardly an arguable statement other than the fact that W. is still, technically the president.  His qualm was that it said my and not our, as though, so he says, 13% of the country (the stat he offers for black population in the U.S.) put him in office and they refuse to give credit to white voters.  And need I point out to a right-wing Christian all the instances of the phrase “my God” over “our God” is the history of Judeo-Christian writing? 

Anyway, back to the topic at hand:  To support our president, but not to stoop to the level of the heinously evil and delusional triumvirate of O’Reilly, Hannity, and Limbaugh.  Ralph Nader, I think, is the most reasonable in this.  He is probably one of the most knowledgeable political minds we have here in the U.S., and no amount of allegiance to anyone will cause hesitation in his criticism (really, if you want to get into Sunday morning, sappy, ideological particulars, he has no party alliance, he sides with the American people).  Look at his letter to Obama the day before the election.  (While I do think that Nader is a genius, I will acknowledge that he’s a bit more than Quixotic in his quest for a three-party America.)   

This all to say really that we are ineluctably entering a new era in American politics and culture in general.  That we shouldn’t let the blood flush from our brains which were so busy with criticisms during the earlier part of the Bush admin, then got jaded, winded, bored.  We cannot think that anything was won.  Look at Proposition 8 for Priest’s sake.  Obama says he’ll air a weekly YouTube video to promote transparency and an open flow of dialogue in our government.  But Obama’s planned gun-law legislations and this very sort of Big-Brotherish broadcast business have sent far-right-wingers scattering, comparing an Obama America to the beginnings of the Third Reich. 

So, fellow Americans, throw your goddamn confetti and I’ll be right there with you, but let’s remember why we all lost a lot of respect for the blindly faithful GOP, and let’s not just read Drudge and Huffington and NYT.  Let’s pay attention, let’s broaden our news sources outside of the bellowing voice of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow (though, god, I love me some Maddow), and be ready to say, “President Obama was wrong” or “flawed” etc. when the time comes.  I think we finally have a president who will ignore any pedestal or curtain in order to hear what we have to say, so let’s make sure whatever we say is good.      

(For those interested, my foot healed and I can more or less walk again.  It will still be a couple of weeks before I can jog and jump around, though.)