Wax Banks

Hilaaaarious.

What it was like to try to buy Phish tickets this morning:

Trade you some Star Lake for some Great Woods tomorrow, baby.

Updike and the Kid.

I hadn't read this in a while, but it really is an extraordinary piece of writing - if you are or ever have been any kind of baseball fan, John Updike's farewell to Ted Williams will tear you in half.

It may be that, compared to managers’ dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

If you know your American mythology or ever loved a ballplayer as a child you already know how the story ends.

This way to the exit.

Arthur Silber is apparently dying.

By choice.

I don't know him, nor am I certain I'd want to know him more closely as he is now; he's angry and disappointed all the time, hates America with remarkable consistency, and his interests seem not to be my own. He apparently sang or did theatre in a past life. He has several cats. He quite likes Angels in America. He used to be a Randroid but has moved into a more interesting political/economic philosophy in the last several years.

And.

My sincere thanks to all who have made donations. I have just enough to pay February rent, with a little bit left over. Since it's just a little bit more than the rent, once I'm able to function even slightly better, I'll be selling my books, CDs and DVDs to a secondhand dealer I've dealt with in the past. I won't get much money for them, since I don't have much of anything now, but it's better than nothing. And I'll need it. I'm sorry that people have recently purchased some items from my [Amazon] Wishlist. I'll try to listen to and/or watch the items people have so kindly sent me before they're all sold. I've deleted the link to the Wishlist, and I don't expect to restore it.

Silber doesn't get proper medical attention or welfare money, by his own account, because he's a 'conscientious objector' to the American political/economic system. (The precise meaning there shouldn't be difficult to figure out.) So if his hints of autobiography are to be believed, he's dying, poor and alone save for his goddamn pets, without even a properly-working computer with which to beg.

I don't want to keep typing things like 'by his own account' and 'if you believe him.' I hate the too-sensitive defenses I've built up over the years, which lead me to second-guess the man's accounts of his problems. But I've emailed Silber a few times, trying however ham-fistedly to be helpful (e.g. talking about work-from-home possibilities), and he's never gotten back to me. He's not obligated to do so, of course, nor to care how I feel. But the motherfucker lives off charity and is at the end of his rope - why not write back? He certainly has time to write long goddamn blog posts consisting mainly of quotes of older long goddamn blog posts - why not take advantage of a correspondent? Why would anyone want to die? If he's on his way out, why not straightforwardly talk about his health problems? Is that 'undignified'? What's less dignified than dying when you don't have to, for Christ's sake?

I want to beat the man silly for hating so many things, for being such a condescending prick, for refusing to live in this world while complaining about it. But I also want him to get healthier and happier. I don't want to extend his life - I want to improve it.

If you have any suggestions (other than 'Get over yourself' - I know, I know), or know anything about the guy, or know someone who knows him personally, could you let me know? And if you have ten dollars to spare, consider sending them his way. I'm not saying you necessarily should - but you should think about it, should have thought about it, come through it.

I wish I knew what to do, I wish knowing and caring were a little more lined up.

My first! Your next!

First live concert recording I ever heard was a hissy Nth-gen soundboard tape of 8/20/93, Red Rocks, first set. A gift from my best friend Sue, who printed up an adorable J-card with a big Phish logo and handwrote the track listing. Dunno where she got it. The tape was one of my most treasured possessions in high school and college; I practically wore the thing out playing 'Harpua' over and over again. I brought the tape in to 8th or 9th grade art class and our teacher, a banjo player and old timey musician, perked up his ears at the guitarist's introduction of 'Ginseng Sullivan' ('Did he just say "Norman Blake?"'), and nodded approvingly at the performance. You can grab the show in mp3 format here, courtesy of the enthusiastically hapless Mr Miner, who [unnecessary, unproductive ad hominem deleted --wa.].

Unrelated personal-hobbyhorse sidebar: the newest D&D book, Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead, contains the following monster-manual stat blocks:

Brain in a Jar
Brain in an Armored Jar
Brain in a Broken Jar
Exalted Brain in a Jar

You see why kids love this game?!

Holy sweet baby American Jesus: Deadwood entire, $65, today only.

Go, just go god damn it.

As good as The Wire and The Sopranos are, Deadwood is the most interesting of the three great HBO shows, which together represent the highwater mark of American television (a title they're not likely to relinquish any time soon for reasons too complex to fit into this sales pitch). No other show approaches the verbal richness and complexity of Deadwood, which makes the cod-Italian malapropisms of The Sopranos seem trivial, and the reportorial virtuosity of The Wire seem hidebound. Line to line, David Milch writes better dialogue than anyone else on television, better even than the equally skillful but far less dense comic poetry of Joss Whedon. The tale of Al Swearengen, Seth Bullock, and the town they birth between them manages to bridge between the microscopic character focus of the Soprano family saga and the citywide scope of David Simon's Baltimore, but unlike its sister shows, Deadwood was left unfinished, and - for that reason among others - is in some ways the least essential of the three.

Its central questions are as explicit as The Wire's, but more philosophical in nature. Where David Simon concerned himself with the urban American drug war's dark transformation into a war on the (largely black) underclass, Milch asks: how do people organize themselves around a symbol, creating order in the absence of law, and what effect does it have on human relationships that the symbol - in this case gold - is intrinsically meaningless? (Remember that Deadwood was originally pitched as a cop show set during the early Christian period in Ancient Rome, substituting The Cross for gold.) Milch offers cynical answers for all these questions, yet Deadwood remains a hopeful show, and its spiritual message - human separateness is an illusion, we are all one organism, and are capable of recognizing our shared humanity in moments of extremity - is one that in a limited secular form Simon might share, though I wouldn't bet on the darker-than-dark David Chase reciting those mantras anytime soon.

Thematically and verbally the similarly-incomplete, far more abstract John From Cincinnati is Milch's followup and companion piece to Deadwood, less immediately involving and viscerally satisfying than its Western predecessor but attaining in its grandest moments a form of spiritual uplift that the resolutely materialist pioneers of Milch's Deadwood never get to experience. Deadwood shares the sense of impending doom that hangs over The Sopranos, but by the end of its truncated narrative you can recognize one key difference between the two shows: whereas just about everyone on The Sopranos (save Melfi?) is a bad guy of one or another form, from the sociopath Tony down through the ranks of enablers apologists criminals venal swine and 'sympathetic' villains, Milch's characters stumble and fall toward goodness, struggling - unlike the Sopranos - to be extraordinary instead of just victorious. They really do want to connect, and in Milch's eyes they deserve it; Chase seems to have a much lower opinion of his creations than does his former HBO stablemate.

But you don't even need to get to the thematic richness of the show to love its poetry, its comedy, the sheer joy the actors project in saying these fucking words. Look, damn it! The underling's lament, out of the mouth of the vile E.B. Farnum, hotelier:

You have been tested, Al Swearengen, and your deepest purposes proved. There’s gold on the woman’s claim. You might as well have shouted it from the rooftops. "That’s why I’m jumpin’ through hoops to get it back. Thorough as I fleeced the fool she married, I will fleece his widow, too, using loyal associates like Eustace Bailey Farnum as my go-betweens and dupes. To explain why I want her bought out I’ll make a pretext of my fear of the Pinkertons. I’ll throw Farnum a token fee. Why should I reward E.B. with some small fractional participation in the claim? Or let him even lay by a little security and source of continuing income for his declining years. What’s he ever done for me? Except let me terrify him every goddamned day of his life ‘til the idea of bowel regularity, is a forlorn fuckin’ hope. (Pours water on the stain) Not to mention orderin’ a man killed in one of E.B.’s rooms. So every fuckin’ free moment of his life E.B. has to spend scrubbin’ the bloodstains off the goddamned floor...

...to keep from havin’ to lower his rates." God damn that motherfucker!

Or better yet, just listen.

Nothing on TV has ever sounded quite like this. And if you give yourself to the story, it will gut you.

Go, just go. Today only. Go.

Animal Collective: 'Bluish.'

The first time I saw The Breakfast Club was at my friend Scott's house down in Texas. We were in elementary school. We sat in his parents' bedroom and watched the early part of the film and I felt like there was a world someone had forgotten to include me in. I didn't much care for the film but there was a mood to the day, like everything was a few ounces heavier than I'd realized, almost imperceptibly so, and some people had noticed the weight, struggled to carry it, couldn't bear it, were falling. Another border for me to guard. I look back on the experience - on my whole early childhood in Texas really - and wish I could have hooked in to whatever weariness and weight the other kids seemed to be feeling, instead of my own incommunicable sadness. The bubble seemed too thick to pierce but clear as cold glass.

The chorus of Animal Collective's 'Bluish' - the man sings 'They're just for me-ee' and then it begins, the song's chordal rhythm quickening now like the principal's coming back to check on us - sounds exactly like that period now feels, in my memory. Have a listen.

The album is as good as everyone says, by the way.

The Wire, complete, $82.

Must I say it again? Go get it. That's an obscene price. This, Deadwood, and The Sopranos are the thus-far high point of American TV drama, on par with the best of Dennis Potter. And of the three, The Wire is the most traditionally plotted and the least traditionally pitched and paced - easiest to enjoy from the start but demanding intellectual and emotional investment and patience of an unprecedented sort and scale. The Sopranos was as demanding but never as leisurely in its pacing as The Wire, in part because Tony Soprano's ruminations and the ongoing elaboration of his relationships with other human beings were the series, whereas David Simon's series is the tale of an entire city yet it takes a half-dozen episodes just to reveal its title character. Meanwhile Deadwood is both classically-structured/-toned (each episode a day, roughly soap-operatic pacing, the protagonists redeemed-bastard types) and unprecedented in its language, never mind the complex uplift of its particular 'We are one organism' moral message. It's the odd duck of the three, combining The Wire's institutional critique with the closeup Shakespearean self-overhearing and self-fashioning of The Sopranos.

In other words, if you watch TV and don't watch these series, you're dicking around. Go, damn it.

22,727,000.

That's how many iPods Apple sold during last three months of 2008.

Think on it a while. Oh, and: 4,363,000 iPhones. Ridiculous.

Write, son, write like the wind!

Finished the first draft of a long piece of fiction today - not a novel but I'm not sure what else to call it, having refused the terms 'comedy' and 'parody' and fearing that 'pageant' makes me sound like a pretentious jerk. Been a race to the finish, this one. I confess, I'm looking forward to doing something other than writing, tomorrow. Hey, the living room needs cleaning; so does the study. Those two disasters should keep me busy for a week.

But it was a good day and I'm glad to share good feelings with you, Reader(s). I look forward to having more to share. Soon maybe. Hopefully.

Lovely speech.

The complaints about Obama's inaugural address seem petty, small, and cynical - a matter of expectations, or partisan carping, or pageantry-fatigue. Or perhaps of an inability, or unwillingness, to see the sweep of the man's intentions. I haven't followed the runup to the inauguration, nor did I have much by way of expectations, so I gave in to the moment, and it was a doozy. A strong speech overall, and Obama delivered it as well as I've heard him deliver a written speech (you may recall that he's pretty good at it). It was well-organized and very cleanly assembled, and his few rhetorical flourishes were well-placed and well-turned.

More importantly, I was thrilled to hear the President of the United States talk passionately about respect for atheists, the restoration of public trust in science, and the need to pressure wealthy nations to embrace alternative energy sources. When he talked about dictators and autocrats being judged by history for what they build, not what they destroy, I teared up (again), and thought of the plutocrat George W. Bush sitting behind him, bidden farewell today by a whole nation - and not fondly. This wonderful passage was the most direct rebuke to Bush, but (and?) also the loudest applause line of the speech, as well it should have been:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

[...]

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

Say it again: 'We will not apologize for our way of life.' And did anyone else hear this and think of David Simon?

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions - who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short.

This is an exceptional man. I'm glad he's working for me.

Go buy this right now.

Complete Sopranos on DVD, $150, free shipping, today only. This is one of the great artworks made in our lifetime and, irritating packaging issues aside, this is the edition to have.

Capsule history of American media.

As for Canada, so for the news media:

[...] prior to the advent of the digital american online there wasn't all that much to do; you'd watch a tv show on your actual tv, for instance, and the absence of spoiler websites meant you didn't know what was going to happen until you saw the actual show, which is stupid - how do you know you want to see the show without knowing how it ends, what the online encyclopedia 2.0 says it *means*, what kind of numbers the tv-industry professional webblogger/marketers think this "skein" will garner? in the holy name of american christ what is a "skein"? also newspapers were hand-delivered to the doors of hardworking organization men and their nuclear families by pauper children, selfish malnourished little jerks who'd come around every couple of weeks begging for money. "please sir, i have nothing to eat!" "leave me alone, {charming ethnic slur}, my atlantic-salmon-and-liquid-gold smoothie is getting cold." you remember what it was like: it was like we were on top of the world where we belonged. there was little to do, nothing to say (except, sternly, to the paperboy), and you didn't have an audience of several dozen strangers from the web-based online community webblogs to share your well-formed important opinions with. so you kept them entirely to yourself; it's not like you can talk to your family about that shit.

The worst thing about history, from my perspective, is that like the Passion Play, its ending has already been spoiled for me, and that makes it really hard to pay attention. The best thing about history is - well, there's nothing good about history.

Ryan vs. Dorkman, sigh.

It's so easy to be impressed by the hard work, attention to detail, and obvious (though massively overcompensated-for) Star Wars nerdery on display in the Internet-famous 'Ryan vs. Dorkman' Star Wars fan films that you forget the following:

* They are almost entirely humourless 'look how badass we look' films made by teenage boys.

* Neither character has anything resembling a personality, and the two fight almost interchangeably.

* The second film, which tacks three minutes of credits onto seven minutes of action, is a fight scene without jeopardy, narrative drive, change over time (the characters fight at full strength until they get cut to pieces), or noticeable shifts in momentum or advantage. Indeed, every time one guy punches another, he's immediately punched back - in unchanging one-to-one ratio.

* For all the 'Wow it looks just like a George Lucas fight' babble on the Internet, of which I suspect I was once a part, the fact is, each fight in a Star Wars film means something, and something big is at stake for each combatant, which is reflected in his or her fighting style and the flow of the battle. RvD stripped of its nostalgic value and element of surprise is...well, you tell me. What other forms of entertainment consist of largely mechanical interactions between two grunting individuals, with an anticipated ending and yet no 'narrative' as such, with the audience's thrill largely boiling down to 'I'm surprised that I'm seeing this on screen'?

* That kid needs to shave.

* The sudden brutality of the second chapter's ending is in line with the mechanical joylessness of the preceding six minutes, but that doesn't excuse its unpleasantness, arbitrariness, or lack of poetry.

In other words: the RvD shorts play like the work of two kids who set out to emulate the lightsaber duels from the prequels. Watching Luke and Vader fight in Return of the Jedi, I see a kid sad and angry that he and his dad can't work out their problems without fighting; watching Ryan and Dorkman I'm impressed by the rotoscoping work. See the difference? One is a VFX demo, one is a 'narrative.'

Their work is worth applauding. Just...well, just know what you're clapping for, I guess.

Lately.

Just sent this to Adrian in response to his VERY PUBLIC EMBARRASSMENT of me just a comment thread back, and realized it served as a reasonable summary of the past couple months:

write write write called bufu re: girl 3 hours write write write wife got part of her tongue removed not cancer thank god write write i have a bone scan tomorrow cyst? arthritis? whatever write write i drink coffee now COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE writewritewritewritewrite writewritewritewritewrite writewritewritewritewrite writewritewritewritewrite crash out turns out i like dungeons & dragons a lot write write write coffee writewritewritewritewrite my dad's gotten really old write write write finished one novel the second will be a million times better though 'novel' might not be the right word (yet whatever it is it seems novel - ha ha? ha) write write write write holyfuckphisharegettingbacktogether write write preorder phish tickets write holyfuck write write write crash out i'll probably get tendonitis.

(I just hope this doesn't cheapen my email to Adrian.)

Todd Selby takes pictures of wealthy, extremely fashion-conscious white people for money.

Aren't you proud of Todd Selby? I imagine Todd Selby is.

'End, Adrian? Nothing ends.'

More than halfway, not quite FIN. Then the goddamn charts and infographics. The text here should give you an accurate sense of this project's topic - note the words 'vikings,' 'failure rates,' and 'louche.'

I'm miles below useless at charts and infographics. Enlisting my wife - who knows her way around Excel - proved more difficult than anticipated. It turns out that her willingness to marry me demonstrated only a temporary lack of self-respect - but she's still over the 'knows better than to get involved in a project this insipid' threshold. Love, hate, it's all part of being immensely creative and stylish.

Comparatively slow day, but then today was my first attempt at writing scholarly history, so of course it's not gonna be a joyride.

[Update: The wife asked me to issue a correction.

WIFE: What do you mean? I said I would do it!

BLOG: No, you didn't.

WIFE: ... Oh.

This word, 'correction.' I do not think it means what she thinks it means.]

Contention.

Galaxy Quest is one of the smartest Hollywood films made in the last N years. In addition to being slyly funny (Shalhoub and Rockwell in particular are just ridiculous) and satisfying on a visceral level, it hits its satirical targets time and again, culminating in the following moment, which is - yeah, I'm surprised I'm saying it - kind of heartbreaking. You have to see it to get why, I guess. Spoilers ahead!!

The Shatner-spoof character, Jason (and Tim Allen isn't Brando but what has he ever been bad in?), is calling the nerdy little fan, Brandon, from somewhere in space. Jason ripped on Brandon with a 'Get a life' speech at a con at the beginning of the film, and they accidentally switched tricorders - Jason picked up Brandon's fake plastic one, Brandon ended up with a working space-age communications device. It rings. He thinks it's a practical joke. Jason, having undergone something of a total transformation out in space, needs to enlist him. But here's the great thing about the scene: his first impulse is to...apologize to the kid.

Brandon stares at the vox for a very long moment.

BRANDON

... Yes?

JASON

We accidently traded Vox units when we bumped into each other on 

Saturday. 

BRANDON

Oh... Oh, I see. Oh.

JASON

What's  your name, son?

BRANDON

Brandon.

JASON

Brandon, I remember you from the convention, right?... You had a 

lot of little technical observations about the ship, and I spoke 

sharply to you...

BRANDON

Yes, I know, and I want you to know I thought about what you 

said... I know you meant it constructively but...

JASON

It's okay. Listen-

BRANDON

... But I want you to know that I am not a complete braincase, 

okay? I understand completely that It's just a TV show. There is 

no ship, there is no Beryllium Sphere, no digital conveyor...    

I mean, obviously it's all just a-

 

JASON

It's real, Brandon. All of it, It's real.

BRANDON

(no hesitation)

I knew it!... I KNEW it!...

JASON

Brandon.. . The crew and I are in trouble and we need your help.

The look on Brandon's face is indescribable.

That last line is, strictly speaking, not the sort of thing you write in a screenplay. It is in this case merely accurate. My best attempt would be: 'ecstatic resolve.' Or maybe 'epiphanic,' though also kill me. Personally I'd have elaborated Brandon's speech for one line, had him win the argument - you can choose to believe in something that's not real and that's OK, etc., though maybe that's gilding the lily - no matter.

If you haven't seen the film, do. Bonus nerdery: Keith Mars gets to bust out some insane nonsense as big cheese of the alien fleet.

Disturbance in the Force.

Hints, tips: If someone tells you 'Oh your writing reminds me of Author X,' and you dimly remember that yeah, he did do something of this sort maybe, do not for the love of god go and spend half an hour reading about him before setting out on the day's writing work! There are enough holes in the road without your self-loathing and paranoia gouging another.

Self-fluffing: 12K in two days, including a new submission? If even a quarter of it is good stuff that's a fine, fine start to the week.

Next reading: A General Theory of Love by Lewis et al. Looks fascinating, went cheap.

Going, going...groan!

Reader(s), you know I love you, right? And yet I continue to flick these little ploplets of first draft at you:

atop which there's the pressing issue of: how do you know what you really want? the 21st century condition is to remain a stranger to oneself; maybe that's fun on a friday night alone in your sparsely-furnished loft - what's more exhilarating than sex with a stranger? - but then you need to pick things like tibetan wall hangings, a career, old wounds, pre-columbian very authentic art sculptures, and how do you know you're picking right? of course you don't, one can't, that's not really the issue. rather, in the absence of certainty how do you *reassure* yourself? how do you get back to feeling ok about stuff and whatnot? if this seems too philosophical we'll put it in more concrete terms: which obviously handmade native-stylish fair-trade tibetan wall hangings do we buy for our loft apartment and how can we trust this guy when he says two hundred american dollars is a fair price? what the *shit*?

[...]

(every activity worth pursuing, as goethe tells us, is like taking *something* from a baby. wisdom, says heidegger in his gloss on goethe, consists in figuring what kind of thing, and what kind of baby. hitler's response to heidegger was "jewish babies!" but scholars agree that hitler was a second-rate philosopher at best. remember, reader: we learn from the long war of the 20th century that skillful time management is sometimes morally *neutral*.)

Those are from a piece called 'introspection is masturbation.' Nobody's perfect but you and me, lover(s).

I know it makes me a whiner with a very limited pop culture diet to say this, but...

...the Neil Young/Phish stuff from Farm Aid is basically a waste of time, and it's not Phish's fault. Yet another guest appearance in which a musician with weaker improvisational chops and an inflated reputation steps on stage and weighs down a weightless band.

'Was this a particularly masculine enjoyment? I do not know...I will say it was sweet.'

It was good work if I do say so myself, clean, and upon finishing I put down the knife and actually sighed, a bit of amateur theatrics I permit myself only at moments of seeming narrative closure. A chapter coming to an end, that sort of thing. Which this was, to my mind: whatever messages I had spoken into this particular text would never again be spoken back to me as I'd imagined them, and the suppurating creep of memory had already begun to replace the hot ebb and flow of creation, of conception. I supposed I felt what a painter or sculptor might feel at the sweep and taper of the final brushstroke, or upon wiping away the last breath of fine dust from the emergent notion of a marble face. Or jade - I pictured my analogical companion's sculptural triumph in thousand-year-old jade, lit from within. That detail seems important, likely isn't; there you have it either way. Well my pride crested and receded; I slapped my thighs and stood, chuckling as I noticed a stray fleck of blood on the cuff of my shirt, another invitation to the inevitable: regretfully declined. I went ahead with the after-dinner chores, having resolved - if, having shared my unusual culinary practices with you, reader, you will permit me in turn a vocabulary indiscretion - not to beat the moment to death.

How to ban books and influence people, but in a cool way.

This is the sort of thing that takes up some of one's time. The best of a thing tends not to be representative; so here's the latter vamping on behalf of the former:

you don't want to look like a philistine, certainly not in front of your cool urban liberal-arts-type friends, and yet history shows that certain books should be banned from libraries and ideally burned in the streets, like sex books and stuff about asians for instance, also magical english wizard teenager books about gay. so how to square the "it's not censorship it's conscientious consumerism" circle? the ancient greeks had circle-squaring troubles in spite of their well-documented preoccupation with the matter as we all know, but maybe they would have come to the answer in time if they'd taken a few days off from fighting cyclopses, inventing democracy, and buggering one another and just *concentrated on their work* a little bit. upshot: you can not educate a greek person, especially not a long-dead mythology-hero democratic sodomite/pervert (but even the modern ones are a little dicey to be frank, cf. jimmy the greek and the cast of the american triumph movie "300"); they just have too much shit on their minds. also their english is atrocious, why can't they just learn english like the rest of the world? we're so good to you, greece, why don't you ever do US any favors? why with the language and sadness? also: democracy? fuck you, you can have it back. "greece" is the word, alright - for BULLSHIT.

and yet some problems transcend and/or transgress the porous borders between america's european client states. for instance, obviously: *your* problems.

The things I think about myself tend to be wrong, almost all of them. Also the following words appear in the thing from which that other thing was taken: 'the irresistible urge to write "BANNED!" on a giant bomb the size of the literary world and carve a you-shaped hole in it and then basically drop it all around you like an intercontinental ballistic scale model of jesus made out of 1/8-scale models of nixon [...]'

Learning nothing means never accepting that you've failed. Chin up!

Testers out on Mass Ave.

The Great Revelation, part XXII, is: 'If you can write 6,000 words in a day and feel you've cranked out some of your best shit in a long time and all the juice you needed was a single cup of coffee, then maybe it's time to call that Adderall hookup to to cancel your order.' Of course I just corrected like thirty typos and grammatical errors in that sentence, however many I left in, so maybe this subliterary spasticity isn't without its downside. Still, what a thrilling day. Of course I've been up and writing on and off since 7:30 this morning and will probably melt into a thick goo in a little while, but there are worse ways to go than doing one of the three or four things you love most.

Dave Sim - about whom you and I might think any of a million less-than-complimentary things, but who is one of the fellas from whom I've learned the most about the plain-ol' work that is writing - wrote the following back in the day:

You will know when you're on the right track, but until you're on the right track, you're going to think that you're on the right track. This is a tough point to understand. It is possible to work for two years on something (I did a weekly strip for two years before I did Cerebus) and have it be the wrong thing. If it's the wrong thing, nothing will happen, no matter if you get a Xeric Grant and a circulation of twenty thousand copies. If there's something in the back of your head that keeps gnawing at you while you're developing one story, start putting the one that's gnawing at you down on paper. I was convinced that I was either a newspaper strip artist, a political cartoonist or a short story comic book writer/artist through most of the 1970's. Then I decided I was an inker. Then I decided I was a magazine cartoonist.

The key was that I kept trying all of the options that were out there. I pursued each of them with great determination. I never quit on anything. But nothing 'happened'. At any point, I could have been working on a super-hero series I created for a publisher (Revolt 3000) or drawing and lettering a story from someone else's script (Phantacea) or doing political cartoons for the local paper. In each of those cases, it went for a little while and then it died, usually in a period of a few months. Each thing told me, 'well, I guess that wasn't it.' The difference with writing and drawing and self-publishing Cerebus was overwhelming. Things got in the way, but I could go over, around or through them. That's what told me that Cerebus was 'it'.

I don't necessarily know what he means, but I can imagine how he felt - and will extend myself the courtesy of 'The one is the other.'

From something else.

The ne plus ultra of wisdomless data in hipster tech culture may be the ascendant 'lifehacking' fetish, whose enthusiasts labour under the charming misapprehension that downloading neat-o Macintosh utilities amounts to meaningfully improving not the trappings of one's work environment but the very substance of one's life itself. These 'lifehacker' types write blog posts back and forth in a genially subliterary language full of debased tech terminology, pimping single-function shareware apps and Sweet! Sweet! Deals! on startlingly expensive yuppie lifestyle items to - remember - improve the 'quality' of readers' lives. Self-described 'customization freaks,' these bloggers and their readers pass off (and ingest) linkwhoring and free publicity as enlightened self-improvement - as if someone watched the seminal, widely-misunderstood film Fight Club, heard Edward Norton's self-satisfied/disgusted monologue about 'single-serving food, single-serving friends,' decided WOW, THE WORLD DEFINITELY NEEDS MORE OF THOSE, and went off and invented the absolute antithesis of all that the film stands for, times several million pageviews a year.

The single most important criticism of 'Internet culture' ever delivered consists of the next five lines of that very scene:

'That's clever.'

'Thank you.'

'How's that working out for you?'

'What.'

'Being clever.'

Which (cleverness) brings us back to Merlin Mann...

Decline of the West.

Talking about movies: 'Did you see what I see?'

Talking about books: 'Can you imagine what I felt?'

The difference between the two is the end of consensus culture.

Petulance.

Limbs I'd cut off if I thought I could bear the pain:

You can't change people's feelings, only their circumstances, and I don't have that kind of fucking patience. I hate that there is no order available to me in which what I (we) know as 'intimacy' can be experienced without the burden of secrecy and guardedness and defense. I hate the need to lie. And I hate that my inner and outer lives move at very very different tempi, and I spend so much time waiting behind my own eyes for the opportunity to join the two, if only for a moment. This is not the same thing as hating one's potential in the absence of one's achievement.

You know what? In my worst moments I still think of myself as a 'gifted kid.' I remember my woeful rural public high school and would give anything to be able to go back and let people know how fucking alone I felt all the time. More than that though, much more: I wish I could locate the complex at which my capacity for love and the social structure of Love might meet, and my own desire to give myself away could find full expression. Maybe that's on the page; maybe it's in a ring; maybe it's both and a number of other things besides. Whatever happiness it brings me, the answer is sure to underwhelm me. Answers always do. Facts always do.

I worry that I'm the sort who snaps.

During November and December and now January I've averaged more written words per day than at any other point in my life. By an enormous margin actually. Lately you've seen almost none of it, sorry Reader(s). Well or not 'sorry,' exactly. But some of it you'll see in time. Some of it I like to keep to myself though. From a few weeks ago:

start answering questions with 'i do' rather than 'i am' - you've already seen to one of the big ones following that form, that's a good start. 'i do take.'

From something else:

OK, question: Can you write your way out of things? Never mind your dismissive attitude toward writing-as-therapy and your related sense of hypocrisy about e.g. the second-person hectoring that you pass off as 'essays,' and never mind Tom Stoppard's whole 'drama is a way of arguing with yourself' great-intellectual-Man thing, the real question is, What is writing to a writer, in and out of the interlocking historically contingent social systems that make it a meaningful activity and not just doodling with letterforms? Just what's going on here? If you're putting this down on paper in a voice called 'second person' but every word is aimed through a gunsight at a shadow image of you, if you hear the words Ideal Reader and imagine not a 30th-century scholar with access to direct-neural-uplink full-colour holographic records of everything that's been written filmed painted or thought in the last 10,000 years but You with bigger pectoral muscles, then what are you and your thousands of words in a line capable of? And what accidents have to happen in order for it all to work? Note that we're talking about cognition here, yes, but given the sore limits of our understanding of brains and 'minds,' and given too the likely undesirability of demystifying human emotions too much lest we end up in a society where everyone feels what 21st century just-barely-beyond-cavemen know as 'love' but now we know it's not real, not even that you can take it in a pill like sunshine or sex feelings but we've even figured out what it's for, why we tell stories about it - in short the end of neuroscience is We are critics now and not lovers and that sounds like hellish abjection of the soul if there ever was such a thing...given all that, yes we're talking brains, but really we're talking magic, because I say so. If it seems unmagical to you don't fret; magic isn't real. But the 'you' I'm talking to is really me, and if I'm counterparty to my own literary contract, what difference does it make whether magic exists, or anything else? I made it up, didn't I? Out of my own brain I declare I made it up all on my own.

The universe isn't much bothered by you wanting; so do better and be glad of it. Well this was in the way of that, maybe, and if you'll excuse me I'm going to attempt to write like a grownup for an hour or so. Instead of whatever this is like.

Obama and race.

Interesting stuff from Ambinder:

In the winter of 2007, the [Obama] campaign entered a bidding war with the Clinton campaign over the endorsement of State Senator Darrell Jackson, the pastor of one of the largest congregations in South Carolina. The Obama campaign offered him a $5,000-per-month retainer, and Jackson said he would soon endorse him.

That's only half the paragraph. I got to this point and felt a pain in my stomach. 'Hypocritical assholes,' I thought. This is exactly the shit I want none of from my president.

Then the rest of the paragraph:

But then he sent word that the Clinton campaign was offering a more lucrative contract, implying, at least to the Obama team, that he would endorse Obama only if they would tender a more generous offer. Through his deputy campaign manager, Obama refused. It would be the last time that Obama negotiated with black pastors this way. (Jackson endorsed Clinton.)

Heh. Indeed.

A few weeks before the general election, aides to Anthony Evans, the pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas and an influential radio talk-show host, contacted the Obama campaign and laid out a political battle plan. Evans would mobilize 300,000 volunteers and dispatch 72 church vans to battleground states on Election Day. He would touch more than 2 million voters. All he needed was $5million to pay for it. The Obama campaign thanked him and said no. Evans threatened to go public with the refusal. The Obama campaign pointed to examples of other black leaders who had confronted Obama in public, and invited Evans, in essence, to bring it on. (Evans apologized the day after the election.) [UPDATE!! Ambinder sent email to everyone who linked to this story - admirable and cool - which you can find on the article's webpage.]

Nearly everyone who aspires to lead thousands and millions is a conman. I forget this. I like Barack Obama, and I trust him. He surprises me. He also angers me but I don't mind being angered by intelligent people acting with what looks like integrity. He doesn't tend condescend or pander. I like that.

I'm glad that Mister Bush is gone away, lawd lawd, I'm glad that Mister Bush is gone.

Idiots!!

Please for god's sake let's not destroy the word 'parse' the way we've destroyed the phrase 'I couldn't care less' and the word 'oppress.' 'Parse my words' does not mean 'mince words' - 'parsing' is something you do to someone else's utterances to figure out what they're saying. 'Mince words' is a colorful expression and I can imagine why some fool would equate 'mince' and 'parse' there, but we're more or less grownups here. Can we treat this most astonishing, polychromatic, polyrhythmic, multifarious, and flexible of languages with a little bit of respect? Can we please not erect additional barriers between the educated and the un-, under the banner of 'common' and 'good-enough' usage?

The word for the day is 'parse,' and what you're doing to it is 'fucking it to death.'

Fuck you, tree kangaroo.

TOO GOOD LOOKING TO SURVIVE

65th anniversary of D-Day, with musical guests...

June 6, 1944 - the Allies land at Normandy.

June 6, 2009 - Phish lands at Great Woods.

See you there.

In the welcome forthcoming end, 'foodie' means only 'bourgeois.'

Why invent an infantile term to describe an old concept - money without dignity? 'Foodie' now means little more than 'I like to take pictures of my meals, I have enormous luxuries of time and money and choose to spend them on food'; it's nothing more than bourgeois banality with a culinary - which is to say very literally 'consumerist' - bent, and if there is an activity in this world less interesting than scrupulously documenting one's 28%-tax-bracket indulgences (with proper lighting, and you'd need a decent camera, and oh honey could you move the handcrafted earthenware centerpiece, it's putting a shadow on my vichyssoise), it remains unknown to me. The self-identifying 'foodie' combines the philatelist's taste for the trivial with the baseball fan's mock-scientific language of self-congratulation. 600,000 Scoville units, a .308 batting average, the $200,000 1918 inverted Jenny: numerologists' confessions of life's meaninglessness. Or worse: confessions not of sin but of the smallness of one's sins.

Then again maybe nothing is more bourgeois than ceding the ground to the honored playwright to. But I too have my weaknesses. So here:

A great meal fades in reflection. Everything else gains. You know why? 'Cause it's only food. This shit we eat, it keeps us going. But it's only food.

Well no, it's much more than that. It's much worse. It's a lifestyle. A style for god's sake. What a thing, to read 'conscientious' as 'fashion-conscious,' and to have posted your pictures helpfully online, so that others might learn from your daring.

Handsomest man in Boston/Cambridge records a hit pop/rock song.

OH MY GOD THEY'RE GORGEOUS

Hand slap.

TPM:

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a less senior member of the Senate intel committee, says he was consulted in advance on the Panetta pick for CIA, so I'm starting to think that not alerting incoming chair Dianne Feinstein or outgoing chair Jay Rockefeller was not necessarily an inadvertent oversight by the Obama team.

I like the idea of the Obama administration punishing Dems who signed off on Bush's crimes these last eight years. And here's the sign of a refreshing change in Washington: whereas the Bush administration would punish their enemies by appointing imbeciles like John Bolton to the UN, Obama's crew brings out the stick and, without telling the capitulationists Feinstein and Rockefeller, appoints...a competent, ex-military nonpartisan with extensive political and managerial experience, who happens to be vitriolically anti-torture, to head the CIA. I really like the idea of giving the backhand to some fools while also helping the rest of the world. That's style.

Halfway.

Halfway through a big writing project, give or take. What an unequivocally pleasurable feeling.

Of course I still have to do the graphics, which are not my strength. (I have the visual aesthetic sense of a combat-fatigued polyp.) All the more reason to relish doing them, I suppose.

Dustin Wax: kill yourself.

If you're going to write a post called 'The Value of Writing Well,' and then self-pimp it in a 'Best Lifehacks of 2008'(!!) post, please for god's sake make sure you don't blurb it as follows:

Iprove your writing skills to make yourself a better thinker, a more compelling speaker, and all-around better person.

Of course it's possible that I've missed some online revolution in Writing Well, and 'Iprove' is actually some Information Age term meaning 'ROCK AWESOME' but a verb.

The new Doctor Who is several years younger than me.

That is all.

Time to change the motto of this blog?

Obviously any long essay about modern television should be entitled, or at least subtitled, 'The Tedium is the Message.'