Wax Banks

American TV is not popular.

The population of Great Britain is somewhere around 60 million.

In the year 2000, 19.8 million people watched a 'two-hander' episode of EastEnders on BBC One - essentially a one-act play featuring just two actors from that long-running British soap opera.

Take out the very young, the blind, the TV-less, the tragically hip, and you've got well over a third of the TV viewing audience tuning in to the equivalent of As the World Turns. Indeed, a 1986 episode of EastEnders drew more than 30 million viewers (at the time the population of the UK was roughly 57 million).

The most-watched one-off broadcast in BBC history, according to Wikipedia, is the 1966 World Cup final (England 4-2 Germany). I believe my dad can name England's starting 11 in that game; 400 million people watched the game on TV, 32 million of them in the UK.

The 2008 Doctor Who finale drew more than 13 million viewers - nearly a quarter of the human beings in the UK (not a quarter of TV viewers, a quarter of living domestic apes) tuned in to the broadcast.

Now.

Elvis's first Ed Sullivan appearance was watched by 60 million people - more than 82% of the households in the entire nation. The Beatles drew more than 73 million in the US on their first trip to see Mr Sullivan, but by then there were many more domestic TVs, and the viewership share fell to 45%.

Since the year 2000, the most-watched non-sports event on American TV - not counting the various news reports on 9/11/01 - was the finale of Friends, which drew 52 million viewers - roughly 1/6 of the population of the US. The finale of M*A*S*H drew more than a hundred million viewers in 1983, and 76 million white people watched the finale of Seinfeld fifteen years later.

In a nation of 300 million, the finale of The Sopranos drew 12 million viewers, while 'The Truth,' which closed out The X-Files's soggy final season, got more than 13 million viewers.

In other words, while event-driven TV broadcasts can still command the world's attention - 2.5 billion people watched the funeral of Diana Spencer on TV, for instance - only a single American theatrical production has been watched on TV by even a sixth of the U.S. population in the last decade, and only a small number of TV shows have ever done better in terms of overall population percentage. And the most-watched episode of Seinfeld drew a smaller percentage of TV viewers than several regular episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies.

In still other words: American TV costs and makes great gold-plated bucketloads of money, but scripted TV drama and comedy just aren't that big a deal anymore. TV no longer unites Americans of all ages. And we are not hearing - and very definitely not telling - the same stories. No wonder we've got so many problems!

Making a note here: huge success.

Just caught up on Mad Men - the penultimate S3 episode, I believe. I think this show is on par with The Sopranos in many ways, and has surpassed it in some (e.g. the complexity of the women's roles, both theatrically and sociologically, and the amount of attention the writers lavish on their (outstanding) actresses). Pete's still Pete - but his consciousness has grown more quickly than Don's, and this season he's had more surprises up his sleeve than Peggy...

Sidebar: Mad Men's wardrobe work these last few weeks has been unbelievable. As Kennedy's death, the rise of the modern right wing via the '64 election (note the dismal Rockefeller fundraiser), the arrival of the Pill in 1960, and the eruption of the African-American civil rights struggle into public consciousness announced the end of American (read: middle-class white male) cultural consensus, the Great Variegation, so the outfits in 'The Grownups' reflected the splintering of the chilly/cozy grey-suited style that had been Mad Men's symbolic baseline. Check out Betty's groovy leggings during The Confrontation, Pete and Trudy's weirdly uplifting transformation from ironic wedding wear to turtleneck'n'frankness, Joan's evolving style, the evolving hipsteria of Paul Kinsey, Suzanne the teacher's earth-chick simplicity...though the show has sometimes gone with grandly theatrical outfits - recall Joan's magnificent red dress of course - the pinpoint details of recent weeks' costumes have drawn notice without demanding it.

Good thing the writing has been impeccable. Don and Betty's big sequence in 'The Gypsy and the Hobo' was so good I couldn't believe it existed in the same universe as everything else on TV.

Jay-Z is not yet the Dave Eggers of hip-hop.

"With the same sword they knight you / They go and goodnight you / See Martin, see Malcolm / See Biggie, see Pac, see success and its outcome / See Jesus, see Judas / See Caesar, see Brutus / See, success is like suicide...Now the question is / Is to have had and lost / Better than not having at all? Because dawg: 'I'm just waiting 'til the shine wears off...'"

This passage - from Jay-Z's guest spot on Coldplay's 'Lost+' remix track - is what's known among New Yorker types as an 'echt Jay-Z flourish,' which I do not mean as a compliment. The idea that Jay-Z is hip-hop's best MC has been common currency for the better part of a decade, but it's never been believable. Hell, let's go along with the stupid charade and restrict our c consideration to commercial acts: in a world containing Gift of Gab, Eminem, Mos Def, Outkast (both halves), Latyrx (as a unit), Nas, Lauryn Hill, Black Thought, and Boots Riley - never mind cats like Aceyalone or Q-Tip or Kool Keith(!!) or even the infuriating trickster Kanye West - Jay-Z has to come bowing and scraping just to get into the top half-dozen. He's got skill and arguably taste, sure, but his sole subject of interest is his own adolescent messianic complex. And that disqualifies Mr Sean Carter from top MC honours.

If Dave Eggers had followed his moving, messy, ferociously sentimental A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius with a half-dozen books in which complained at ever-increasing length that no one understood how difficult his life was even though he was the baddest and the richest - and indeed wrote a second and a third memoir insisting that he was finished writing and everyone was really, really gonna miss him when he stopped - but then was back on Entertainment Tonight a year later - Eggers would be a fucking laughingstock, and rightly so. Jay-Z is inexplicably still taken seriously by 'critics' despite having pulled this juvenile shit time and again. Now, Eggers has Jay-Z's technical skill, his energy, his hunger to collaborate, and his (admirable!) willingness to mentor. But unlike our Yet Another Self-Proclaimed 'Best Rapper Alive,' Eggers keeps challenging himself with increasingly esoteric (and increasingly powerful) projects in an ever-widening circle of colleagues and collaborators.

In other words, Dave Eggers managed to grow up. He got past himself, which was no small task. Mr Beyoncé has been churning out the same tired cliché psychobabble for half a decade, piling indigestible sentimental treacle atop misogynist bile atop vacuous self-justification and self-admiration. He's under the impression that he's intrinsically interesting; he's wrong.

'If you can't accept that / Your whole perspective is wack / Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black.' But he's never faded, never seriously entertained the possibility of doing so. He's a prolonged-adolescent narcissist with more money than ambition. That he's avoided Kanye's pathetic drunken self-parody is creditable, but Jay-Z's too childishly self-serious to pull off Kanye's frat-boy pranks (never mind the far more subversive boundary-crossing of Andre 3000).

The worst thing about this? Jay-Z's smart as hell. He could be doing something other than preening and boasting and whining and spouting the same dull money-sucks cautionary tales in song after song. If he wanted to, he could put aside his own self-love and self-loathing and status fixation and get on with making music about the world beyond the window of his SUV. But he's not even trying. His big mould-breaking album of this decade was American Gangster, for Christ's sake.

Jay-Z needs to get on the phone to Billy Martin or DJ Spooky or TV on the Radio or ?uestlove or John Zorn or Andrew Bird or the Pet Shop Boys or Elvis Costello or Fiona Apple or the Flaming Lips or even Trey Anastasio (remember that Jay-Z sat in with Phish in Brooklyn in 2004) and explode himself for once. Find a new idea, which these folks have in spades.[**] Jay needs to put his verbal talent and metrical dexterity to work on the story of another human being. He needs any new story to tell. Why? Because we need storytellers and musicians with ambition, persistence, skill, and honesty, and if Mr Sean Carter wasn't moonlighting as a fashionista businessman he'd be a fine source of all those things and more. Why not? Stranger, finer things have happened.

* * *

[**] I'm dead serious about all of the above, except possibly the inscrutable genius Andrew Bird. But they are, as you can see, mostly white rock'n'roll dudes. My hipster parochialism shouldn't surprise you, but it does bother me. Not enough to do anything about it, mind you, just enough that I have to footnote the thing. I do think a Jay-Z/John Zorn collaboration would be awesome - the JZ initials match is a good omen, no? - and when they want to, Medeski Martin & Wood have the 'best hip-hop producers on earth' trophy waiting for them. But these pairings hold cultural significance for me because I'm a stodgy little white nerd. They're not particularly transgressive, I know. To be clear, I don't want Jay-Z to stop cutting tracks about dimwitted consumerist hedonism and start documenting life in the suburbs of Houston. I just want to know whether he can even do it. Easier prescribed than pursued, as the narrowness of my suggestions makes clear.

Building.

Don't say 'My work is bad,' say 'I need to do this better.' Or better yet just do it. No one cares about 'you' - only about living with you. Which is work.

Easy, right?

All political parties face a simple choice:

Consistency, or constituency.

Take your pick.

Why Ezra Klein will disappear, like so many others, into the dustbin of op-ed history.

Why?

This doesn't get as much attention as it should, in part because it's not really in the interest of writers to loudly talk about how much easier their job has gotten, and how much more quickly they can produce lots of content. But that's the reality of it. People tend to assume that blogs are a product of technological advancements in publishing content. But the writing of constantly-updated political blogs is a product of the falling time cost for finding information. You can now get all your polls on pollster.com, and all the op-eds from every newspaper, and all the archives from all these newspapers, and all the info on other blogs, and so on and so forth.

That's why I can publish 15 posts a day. Writing doesn't take very long. Quoting doesn't take very long. But assembling information used to take an awful long time. It required a lot of phone calls and microfiche and faxes and walking over to Brookings and paging through newspaper archives and begging a source at Gallup. Now it doesn't take much time at all. That allows me to be the equivalent of a very fast columnist, and there's no reason it won't allow others to become very fast book authors.

Why? Because Ezra Klein thinks his (literally) by-the-numbers Dem-hack blog isn't that different from a popular nonfiction book. Because Ezra mainly reads the mainstream news, his colleagues' interchangeable poli-blogs, and recent popular nonfiction. Because as near as I can tell Ezra, like the 'boy wonder of high-speed blogging,' has nothing resembling an aesthetic sense or command of literary style, only a collection of debate-club trophies and the instincts of a careerist intern. Because popular nonfiction is mostly arrant tripe, but it's still more thoughtful than the average poli-blog. Because thuddingly centrist political blogging is about being accessible and unremarkable - and our boy is nothing if not those two things.

This AOL-era milquetoast of privilege is under the impression that 'assembling information' is the same thing as 'learning.' He thinks Google delivers wisdom, not webpages (and, as if it needs mentioning, he surely has no idea how it does even that). Poor Ezra isn't the Journalist of the Future; he's yet another cookie-cutter product of the Educational System of the Past (and the Stupid Adolescent Blog Triumphalist Era of the More Recent Past).

Bless this soporific bourgeois motherfucker. He's our symptom.

[Shorter version of same: 'Hey asshole, did you learn nothing from The Wire?']

Worse problems I or you might have.

Having finished M. John Harrison's beloved space-opera-with-an-asterisk Light I now face the question of what to read next. I fear this choice. Like any high-school tenor I blend and double first and only then (or thereby) proclaim, so whatever I read will end up swamping what I think of as 'my voice.' One 'easy' answer: Pynchon, whom I know better than to allow myself to imitate. (Left to its own devices, the spider in your hair will get the hell out of there and onto solid ground, as you'd refrain from fistfighting a battleship. Some fights you can call in advance.)

On the other hand I feel the usual unsupportable compulsion to finish more books This Very Month, but I've got no quick reads in the Queue. All I have are my secondhand Britishisms and ongoing mirror-stage preoccupations and this creeping story idea that's snuck in through some triple-locked carefully-monitored doors this week with mischief on its mind. Replacement, even. As I'm enamored of my self-image I'll do my best to sabotage it in the planning stages; if I am an expert at anything at all, then I...

Or, ooh, Stanislaw Lem? Should I try reading Dostoevsky for the first time? I've always had it easy, you know. I was a bottle baby, didn't even need to pick one nipple or the other. So this is all terribly, terribly tiring. Good thing too; I'm up early tomorrow. G'night.

[Oh, and/but how was Light? It was frustrating, then absorbing, then rapturous. Is that the right word? I can't help feeling he'd want me to find the right word - not least because once Harrison has found the word he wants, he flogs it until it's music. I'm scared of my own reflection so I do the opposite, which comes out the same - the way 7C6 and 7C1 are equal, but one is mean.]

Damnedest thing.

20 reasons for a stranger to stop your heroes short

"You folks are..."

...hurting his business.
...trespassing on consecrated ground.
...mirror-images of her parents.
...not the first strangers to visit today.
...too close to a hidden cache of _______.
...in the middle of the parade route.
...drawing attention away from the mayoral proclamation.
...the spitting image of her long-lost kid(s).
...looking a little pale.
...in a position to help with some crooks.
...needed immediately - there's a fire!
...going to think I'm nuts, but could you _______?
...ideal couriers for this expensive book-sized package.
...the first customers we've had in twenty years.
...just the right blood type, by the smell of you...
...strong enough to lift a meteor, right?
...hopefully not frightened by ghosts.
...a little too foreign-looking for his tastes.
...in league with my goddamn wife, admit it.
...named in this will we've just read. Damnedest thing.

Divination.

I brought two tarot decks with me to the coffee shop thinking I'd use them for 'inspiration.' The 'Deviant Moon' deck has gorgeous evocative steampunk art; the other is my beaten old standard Waite-Smith deck, which is something like the template language of tarot - and more importantly, the default visual identity of 'the' tarot in the popular imagination. Strange how that happens: visual analogue to 'Kleenex' synonymizing with 'facial tissue,' though perhaps a more potent prompt to symbolic connection. People think of fortune-telling charlatanry when they think of the tarot, which is reasonable. But I think I'm looking for something else.

Well...or I tell myself so in any case. 'Inspiration.' The idea is to jangle loose some idea or association. Basically to buy idea-connection on the cheap. I have these cards with me because I wish to feel connected. Like reading lists of 'tips' in a hunting magazine, thinking you're learning how to be a hunter.

You have to respect the action of the thing. To buy in. Perverse, isn't it, that 'buying in' has become synonymous with 'having faith.' Well, I bought the cards. You surround yourself with the apparatus of belief. It's so satisfying to approach sacred places without rigor. Can you think your way into sacred experience? Yes, I suppose so. But you have to treat contemplation itself as sacred, or your space, postures, your food intake, the books you carry...you have to believe in some kind of magic. Which is to say, again, that you have to respect the action of each machine.

Else end up in its teeth, right?

Now, tarot cards don't tell you the future. Nothing does. But then divination is just a form of perspectival shift: Help me reencounter this strange moment. Divination pursues not certainty but possibility. Like the Sacrament of Reconciliation, it can bring about a change of stance, but the only change or manipulation that occurs in the activity is emotional, perspectival. You might say: aspirational. You sit in the confessional ready to engage with a new possible self and are 'transformed' (solely) to the extent that you're prepared to realize that possibility through action. Works in a mechanistic universe or any other. The contour of the experience - hush, prostration, air close in, fear, the imaginary presence of the Overseer - has been refined over the thousands of years. Institutional art. It's meant to produce an effect; it works.

Some people like naked pictures of the elderly. Some kneel before the dead. Some eat mushrooms or drink chemicals and see colours; others make bright music in dark rooms thinking it will save them from something they won't name. Some fuck for sport. Nothing will stave off death but irresponsibility. (The Fool dances heedless at cliff's edge, and alone among the Arcana he bears no number.) The purpose of the thing isn't the thing itself.

'Just...pardon the expression, but I love...no, I love the attraction. Or I love my own reaction.' (Jamie Laurie)

Can you show me the future? Yes. You will react to some arbitrary prognosis, thereby revealing some hidden desire.

Well. That's the one 'correct' prediction available to the diviner. But it's also false - in the sense that it can't produce the sublime moment of dislocation that art (even the art of 'fortune-telling') affords. Self-consciousness violates the integrity of the experience. There is no ironic divination, no uncanny self. We are our own baseline; the more we insist upon the primacy of our own experiences, the easier it is to 'get a grip' on things - and drag the moments yet-to-come down to our level.

But you know as well as I do that I didn't plan to work with the cards.

Opening up to new experiences is hard work for some people. The more I withdraw into myself, the more elegant my systems of justification (i.e. 'philosophy') become, the more detailed my analyses of 'divine' or sublime experience...and the further I get from experiential understanding of the divine. Which is to say you can say correct things or true things about God but not both, and one of those forms dies with us, is dead already. Truth is vitality.

I did come here to the café, yes, rather than staying in the apartment alone. But my new headphones are 'sound-isolating.' You can imagine what that means, but maybe you can't imagine what it feels like. It's absolutely lovely. Everything becomes backdrop (to me). All these folks animated separately from this fast-moving images in my head. They lose detail. I'm just as alone here as anywhere else I might disconnect myself through music. I lose the swirling movement of the air here. I forget what the heat of a body is.

And the cards? One box is out on the table, upturned so I can't see the art on the box. One is stashed safely in the bag. I'm free from the suggestions they might make. I don't wish to be seen (as). The last thing I want is for the future to behave irresponsibly.

The Fool. From the other deck - the unnumbered Major Arcane, or rather the zeroth card. The thing to which we return. Entropy rises as intention is washed out. Not order but tension. A maximally entropic universe is wholly known, as is a perfect crystal (entropy zero) - paradoxically, we can as easily describe an utterly dissociated universe as we can a rigid unitary identity. The fool only seems to surrender; he is his own ruleset. How can you walk across the canal? By not sinking. Why does your skin glow? I've never tried to hide it. Shouldn't you be sleeping? I can never know. As entropy rises we lose less and less information to abstraction.

The universe has opinions. It loves symmetry and chaos. It loves order and dispersion, dissociation, eruption.

The Fool and the Magician want very different things: perfect experience (meaning total) and perfect action (meaning pure). Total control is a fool's dream, of course. We have opinions too. And remember that it's the magician who wears the jester's cap; the fool may as well have stepped out of bed. Or floated upward from its warmth, becoming dream. Perhaps.

This is what I wanted to avoid: unencumbrance. How strange.

Old man in a smart cravat, 3/4-length raincoat. Halting steps and careful hand motions. Keep your hands from disappearing. (The moment you become unself-conscious you disappear. The Magician knows that that's death; the Fool sees that it's life. Old age makes fools of us, thank God.) He disappears up the stairs, comes back. Books sticking from a well-worn leather satchel on his right hip. He leans left against its weight, rubs his hands together. I think of the room as cold or warm but I know it's a mistake. I bring energy or leave it behind, or share it, or feel it. You find the strength to surrender or don't. I can't imagine how cold he must find each room to be, what it's like to see skin fade to translucence and transparency because of fucking time...he knows 'hot' and 'cold' are measures of his tolerance, has earned the right to give in. I'm obligated to feign warmth. So many years to go.

The inside of Judgment's trumpet is very definitely not a living thing. Cold metal. Noisemaker. See? Look at you. You've run out of noises to make on the cards' behalf. A credulous person might give in now to...not 'to the cards,' fool. To the possibility of something new.

The cards are pocketed and away. What was I looking for? Doesn't matter. On my errand I found:

The Fool. From the other deck - the unnumbered Major Arcane, or rather the zeroth card. The thing to which we return. Entropy rises...

A credulous person might give in...

OK.

Incredulity is something you choose. 'I couldn't believe it!' Well, that was true before it happened. The moment of decision comes to pass no matter how you've prepared. 'Incredulous' is not 'how you feel' when something happens you can't believe. It's the posture you adopt, crab-walking toward a junction or possibility, shoulders hunched. How comforting it feels: limbs drawn in against imagined cold ('cold' is a feeling, not a measurement), every atom's position known and controlled. 'In control' is a feeling, not a place. An inch more space between the feet of the Fool and the face of the cliff won't buy safety. That's what the Fool knows. Safety is a feeling, not a possession. You can't buy into it anyhow.

True things can't be bought.

Dwelling on the surface of the cards while disrespecting the action of association - imaginative creation - is laziness. Alternate form of the same statement: typing isn't writing. Or: only lovers know the hidden name of love. Or: religious belief is the myth that makes faithful action possible; faith is authentic action.

Or if you're into the whole 'brevity' thing: Deal.

That doesn't seem like a good ending but if I don't give these things away they will bury me.

Activation energy.

I'm hesitant to have people over to our place for dinner because we're (mostly) messy people and the work involved in dinner-partying together seems daunting. But our enjoyable (small) dinner party last night reminded me of a couple of simple things:

1) Let the food do the work. I tend not to trust ingredients, want to hover around the stove adding spices and such. But my lady made a fantastic pineapple/ginger dressing for my elementary salad, each just a mix of fresh ingredients, and the whole thing just sang. The pleasure of eating wasn't a function of the time in preparation nor the complicatedness of the work. It usually isn't; I just always fear otherwise. Next to the hearty spices and caramel-crispness of the tofu/cabbage/plum/wonton cups, A2thaGI's smoothmellow squash/carrot dip, and the aggressive taste of the cuke/hummus/olive cups, the salad was a clear high soprano note.

I learned rudimentary voice-leading rules in college, and our meal last night (unconsciously?) followed them: each item its own melody, each in its own register.

2) To hell with regionalism. No one actually cares that you're doing a Chinese dish, an Italian dish, a South American drink, and a side of beef jerky. As long as each dish does its thing and one flavour doesn't steal from another, geography doesn't matter one bit.

3) Eating habits are only habits. Dinner parties are a two-way invitation; if you're doing it right, you'll be taking chances right along with your guests. Don't deny yourself novel pleasures out of misguided 'etiquette' concerns.

4) Cleaning is fun.

4a) Well, cleaning is sometimes fun.

5) A clean kitchen is a much, much more efficient kitchen.

6) Generalizing from (3), Habits are only habits. They don't correspond to any essential nature or identity. I cling to my habits because I dislike discontinuities in my precious Self, but whatever new habits I pick up, my life will reorder around them. That's how you become an 'alcoholic' or a 'video game addict.' You might have a propensity for a thing but your habits are mutable and self-perpetuating. Habitual behaviour is an evolutionary boon, duh. Trouble is, since human devolution kicked in and fitness got decoupled from survival we (the spectacularly wealthy, lazy, lucky) have been spinning against ourselves. Habits spawning habits, the apparatus of survival and continuance misapplied. I'm accustomed to not having folks over for dinner. But it's only a custom. No Self survives honest fellowship with friends; the Self is for the times we lack such contact. We are most selfish when we push others away and choose solitude. It's OK to let fellowship do the work of reconstituting us.

6a) No seriously, I got that shit from the tofu cups.

The greatest special effect is 'acting.' This is not really that.

A trailer for 2012 without special effects.

A friend of mine is part of the FX team (or rather, one of several teams) for this forthcoming film. I mean no disrespect to the craftsmen on her team, whose skills and seriousness are not in question. A job is a job. But whatever this modified clip reveals about the film (nothing nonobvious), it hopefully shows us something about us, which we might otherwise choose - as usual - to forget.

Compare to the original clip, and keep in mind the content of the scene: we are rooting for the plucky limo driver, his plucky wife and kids, and the plucky shitbird-new-boyfriend to survive the onscreen death of millions of innocent people. Note that the scene is played for suspenseful comedy (check out that donut). Note the pornographic nature of the violence, which completely strips every human but the protagonists of anything resembling humanity. The final image isn't supposed to be sad or terrifying - it's too big, too wide-angle, too melodramatically voyeuristic.

Nope. It's supposed to be awesome.

Whatever the experience of making the thing, that is the thing's purpose.

Here is why Bono matters.

Bono matters because, like a certain big-eared Hawaiian lawyer we know, he can communicate both passion and intelligence without dilution or condescension:

"Love is a big word to be throwing around in [the Balkans]," Bono continues, building up steam, talking over the engine noise. "Carrying the badge of nonviolence, at first glance, looks well on an Irishman, but we lives 100 miles from troubles. So in a way, it was no great act of courage for us to drain the flag of colour and preach nonviolence.

"It's a completely different thing if you live in Croatia or if you live in the western Balkans. These people have, within recent memory, seen just what a thin skin of civilization we had in the late 20th century. We had just made Achtung Baby and Zooropa - and people weren't only not loving their neighbours, they were torturing their neighbours. They were attaching electrical cables to their private parts and making them squeal. I would not be at all offended if somebody were to say, 'How the fuck dare you come and speak about love?'" [--from this week's Rolling Stone]

To be both passionate about knowledge and knowledgeable about passion is a fine goal.

Charity.

¹Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

²And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

³And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

⁴Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

⁵Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

⁶Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

⁷Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

⁸Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

⁹For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

¹⁰But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

¹¹When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

¹²For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

¹³And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (1 Corinthians 13:1-13, King James Version)

Rio? Really?

How are they gonna deal with most of the world's semipro athletes doing 'rhythmic gymnastics' with the various man- and lady-whores of the Carnivale all night?!

Pornolympics is more like it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!drunknow

Barriers.

[Riffing off Chatty's post here.]

I think 'creative person' is a misnomer. Creativity is inextricably linked to context, to expression. Some people are able to come up with one side-splitting one-liner after another over drinks but can't write a joke to save their lives; others swerve effortlessly around bugs in code but can't see why their relationships break up. You might spitball two dozen wild ideas in a group meeting and draw a blank when staring at a blank page; the same melody that erupts from your horn in a jam session could be totally inaccessible in the studio or at the composition desk.

The common thread in these examples (let's get very, very abstract here) is the relationship between the mind's wacky-new-idea apparatus and its interacting-with-the-world apparatus. It seems to me we can describe creative 'blocks' in terms of conception/expression mismatch - and note that what we call 'genius' might be described as optimal ability/modality matching, or somewhat snarkily, well-chosen problems plus luck.

I find improvisation exciting and rewarding, and I'm a terrible planner. So I seek out situations in which I'm rewarded for making stuff up as I go along, and avoid having to make long-term schedules and plans. Because of this avoidance I lack practice at planning - which translates to reduced ability, thence to suppressed enthusiasm and (ha) avoidance. Experience only directly translates into more experience. Successfully applying a creative skill doesn't make me that 'kind' of person - it's just action. Even if it becomes habitual it's just action.

Habitual failure isn't a special class of experience or outcome, nor does it indicate an essential quality; it's only repeated action.

On Saturday mornings I tutor kids in Dorchester. It lifts up my spirit. Sometimes I'm confronted by a kid seeming not to know how to approach a problem, and beginning to sink into despair. The kid will come to believe that no approach is possible. This is the worst feeling, I think: loneliness. ('I'll be left standing still and the work - and my friends - will go on without me.') It seems to me that two dynamics are at work in those situations: when 'at rest,' the kid loses sight of what it would feel like to be 'in motion' (applying skill, displaying mastery); and yet half the time the kid knows every portion of the solution but can't (won't) combine them - won't try it out, I mean. Mismatch of conception and expression: not realizing that keys are for opening locks; not realizing that poetry is not written in an unknown language; not seeing that operations on dollars are easily translated to operations on decimals because dollars are decimals, etc.

Creativity is the willingness to test oneself.

Some kids don't know how 'smart' they are - how creative - because they don't recognize that they're in an environment where their creativity and risk-taking and intelligence will be recognized and valued. They harbor the misconception that when they manipulate complex symbol-systems in the form of SimCity or Halo or the chessboard they're applying skills that port directly to math problems, questions of history, wilderness tracking.

I see shapes and spaces when I listen to music - and am I far, far better at playing 3-D games with loud music on? Does my musical sense seem to 'tune' my spatial reasoning? It seems so. Well, now I know a secret...arrived at through (lite) analysis. The line between 'critical' and 'creative' thinking is blurry at best and can be obliterated entirely, if you let yourself experience 'criticism' as a creative act and incorporate analytical thinking into your creative activities. (When programmers speak of their job as an art form, we should take their word for it; after all we pretend that 'writing a novel' is not only an 'artistic' task but indeed a single task of any kind, despite the silliness and indeed impossibility of such a description. Same for writing a symphony, designing a megadungeon, building a website, etc.)

I'm terrible at certain 'creative' tasks. Plotting, for instance. ('Oh, sigh.') I have a hard time working out story-structures; stories fill in for me (when they fill in) like water droplets soaking into a piece of paper, moving from isolated points in every direction to 'fill in' the entire sheet. I can't conceive of stories in straight lines; shit, I can't even write a paragraph most days without a parenthetical apology or self-contradiction. Can I get away with calling that 'style'? I wouldn't be the first. On the other hand I am able to come up with snazzy little bedtime stories for my wife - which do coalesce into linear narratives, more or less. (And always with a moral at the end. Sample moral: 'Be true to your school.' Sample #2: 'Always eat a balanced breakfast.' The stories themselves are rather more morally complex.) Spitting out words I discover in myself a capacity for linear assemblage, which I don't know how to port over to pen-and-paper-and-write.

It would seem to be a matter of controlled testing, for me: start small, get acclimated, recognize analogies, submerge the ego. Exercise, in other words. Everything comes down to goddamn exercise.

I think conception/expression mismatches - creative errors - often result from egotism. You want to be 'you' but there's no such thing, so you corrupt your actions to correspond to an imaginary state of being. Isn't that comforting. Or, with less generalizing and more metaphorizing: you're saying 'sink or swim' but I'm worrying about whether I'll dissolve in water, y'know?

(I'm biting my nails right now. Shameful. Did I mention I've been wearing a rubber band around my right wrist? I snap it when I catch myself, but I don't always catch myself.)

Well, but to respond to this from Chatty...

As I said before, it turns out that some people have a really hard time coming up with an idea. Several more have an even harder time making something tangible with an idea when it finally manifests itself. The creative process has several mental blocks that get in the way between idea and final product. I think this is effectively so in the geek mind...

...I think we seem to have a hard time coming up with ideas because we have opinions about our ideas, or rather about our 'selves.' We imagine the Other judging us and let ourselves get bound up by the need to correspond to an ideal. 'I can not write this story about a wizard because I have not exhaustively worked out how this school of conjuration would function.' We've imposed a precondition on experience - a category. A new subproblem. How do you know that a subproblem is part of the problem you're trying to tackle? You know it when you encounter the subproblem in the context of solving the problem. When you directly experience it. The rest is egocentric fiction. Chatty cites these 'mental blocks':

• The Right Answer
• That’s Not Logical
• Follow the Rules
• Being Practical
• To Err is Wrong
• I’m not Creative

Every one of these is a version of, as Milch(!) would say, 'imputing motivations to some postulated Other.' We don't know what's in the hearts of other humans, and mistake the desire to know for a need, so we sink into despair, which is: 'I'll never be loved.' As if making and giving and feeling love were somehow different categories of experience; as if love were a disease to be passed rather than song to be sung; as if 'being loved' could possibly consist of anything other than shutting the fuck up and loving someone else.

Did this answer even a single question? Stop defending yourself; that battle is over. I'm trying to find the vocabulary of I love you, Reader(s). You win some you lose some. The 'be true to your school' part was at least funny though, right? Of course right!

Scattered, spoilery thoughts on Felix Gilman's excellent novel Thunderer.

Thunderer had me on page 4:

Countless painters decide to capture the Bird's image. It'll test their art. [...] Later, no one will even be able to agree what kind of bird it is. Some see a storm of bright feathers; others only the graceful motion of its wings. Little more than a sense of easy, invincible speed remains. A dozen minds conceive abstract new schools of painting to capture the moment.

You can imagine the last sentence (or rather, some immense distended version of it dripping with vile ichors and dark intimations best turned from with all speed, etc.) jutting from a Lovecraft story, but in Gilman's story it's a rational worldbuilding component: the passage of the Bird and its fellow deities really does change minds in that way. The city of Ararat, the central character of Thunderer, is as irrational as can be, but Gilman's offhand bits of description and microhistory always make sense; he knows how to maintain the 'vivid continuous dream' of good fiction. In this regard the novel is a complete success. Ararat has been showing up in my own dreams this week. I've been there and wish to go back.

What happened there is another, more ambivalent matter. [Spoilers damn you!] Thunderer picks up steam as it goes and ends with several vivid scenes, but they're out of proportion with the buildup; the climactic confrontation begins on page 425 of 437, and feels like a formality. The plot is patchy and unevenly paced and apportioned. One of the main characters, the scholar Holbach, is held up for most of the novel by several characters as a font of knowledge and possibility, but his eventual uselessness seems less like a clever irony than like a mishandled narrative thread. Another, the black-clad Captain Arlandes, doesn't do a single interesting thing after the first hundred pages, but just floats around waiting for Gilman to symbolically redeploy him in the final chapters. The protagonist Arjun's great quest gives the book its structure and ostensible central mystery, but his 'advancement' in the story consists of (1) getting superpowers and (2) apparently learning nothing.

I understand that this description of Arjun misses one of the points of the story - he lives a very full, exciting life in this book, with or without the involvement of Ararat's gods, and while not advancing in his preexisting quest he finishes a couple of others through ingenuity and dedication - but the Thunderer's plotting lacks the neatness and imagination of his worldbuilding.

The book has plenty of things on its mind that Gilman never quite follows through on, for whatever reason(s). Interesting suggestions about religion and politics are made; brief vivid parallels to current events are drawn; astonishing feats of narrative telescopy are performed; a mature sexual relationship is ably rendered; a feral, almost inhuman Peter Pan (the book's most interesting and truly otherworldly character) swoops in to save the day several times; and in the end, as several critics have pointed out, it's the city's survival that matters. Which seems a bit...cheap, in a way. It's tiring to get wrapped up in the story of a half-dozen people and a city only to find that the fates of the half-dozen are just incidentally or symbolically important.

I know I made similar complaints about Last Call, which was less vivid, more plotty, and ultimately less successful than Thunderer. But Gilman's treatment of human psychology is more believable and complicated than Powers's, and even as his characters morph from people to icons they retain the reader's interest, or in any case they held mine - which can't be said for 3/4 of Last Call's quartet at book's end. (Among Powers's surviving characters, only Arky stays human - and that poor bastard didn't even have a plot to follow.) I don't mean to dwell on Thunderer's inconsistent characterization and plotting in this review; it's just more immediately rewarding to point to what isn't perfect in the book than to rhapsodize about what is, viz., Ararat itself.

Fantasy cities have a certain appeal, starting with: they allow us to generalize (or more diplomatically 'universalize') without offending actual existing socioeconomic groups or being bound by the dramatic inadequacies of mere history. Plus there's something appealing to a certain kind of reader/writer about schematic creations like Ararat (or New Crobuzon or Gaiman's London or Powers's Vegas): a good fantasy city turns the entire world into a multiplication table, cyclical, algorithmically generated, easy to interpret. As busy as life but with none of the complex terror of talking to other human beings. And the big win for readers: everything corresponds to a straightforward System of Meaning. The neighborhood lines are bright and their identities clear, the organic process of urban development and variegation follows some abstract Plan, and - inevitably - there's some magical character who can traverse the city in unnatural ways, taking in its unnaturally sharp angles and artificially concentrated smells and inhumanly bright colours and producing perfect understanding.

(The archetypal modern urban decoder is of course Sherlock Holmes; Ararat even loosely fits Holmes's turn-of-the-century time period. Ararat's Perfect Urbanite-Semiotician is Arjun the (naturally) outsider, who learns to travel through time and space by listening very carefully to music. He's the wide-eyed focus character who strides, then slouches, then phases through the city searching (at least nominally) for his people's lost god, the Voice.)

The appeal of such a character isn't hard to understand: industrial cities are complicated and unnatural, their straight lines and mechanical sounds forbidding, their mere scale alienating and soul-deadening. They look like circuit boards, and deliver the same electric shock to the unwary. It's nice to imagine people with the ability to leap from building to building in a single bound (Jack) or step directly from one neighborhood to another (Arjun and Shay) or drop out of one life/career and into the next (Defour) or concoct a Book of All Things (Holbach and Nicolas) or see the full expanse of the city all at once (Arlandes and the Thunderer itself). Gilman's achievement in Thunderer is to build a city that can contain all these characters/types yet still remain vibrant and complex, organic and believable, a truly living thing. Gilman manages to deliver both a complex urban ecosystem and a set of unifying (comforting) fantasy premises and tropes without losing the wonder in either. I admire his work in Thunderer; it's lively but clear, and never dull. If it were more shapely I'd call it a great fantasy novel.

[Summary damn you!] The language of Felix Gilman's Thunderer is sprightly and clever; his characters are more 'neato' than 'deep,' but the story flows, and complicates, and satisfies. Gilman is better here at establishing ideas and situations than at plumbing their depths, but this is (was) his first novel, and that capacity will come in time, I've no doubt. In the meantime the sheer inventiveness of Thunderer is enough to recommend it, which I do without reservation. This is a hell of a first novel.

Discount on eye of newt.

20 people you might meet in a magic shoppe

Old man foolishly seeks weapons to rescue kidnapped grandson
Merc/thief stocking up before raiding mail station (next door)
Teenager collects materials for first love spell (doomed)
Musician defending self against devil collecting on soul-purchase (doomed)
Gardener cheating at biggest-pumpkin contest
Farmer readying anti-gopher incantation (doomed)
Bartender preparing brew that turns patrons into cavemen
Seer needs supernatural advisor to explain nightmares
Spelunker wants to create ever-burning torch (doomed)
Chaos-worshipper crafting bomb for local school
Kids mean to make magic rocket (doomed)
Owner's ex-spouse seeks post-separation redress at knifepoint
Parents want spell to keep (possessed) child from nail-chewing
Time-traveler stuck without functioning wormhole
Pregnant nun seeks magical abortion for demon spawn
Writer's novel sprung to unholy life; seeks unbothered sleep
Chemist indulging curiosity, avoiding derisive colleagues
Game designer looking for ideas (doomed)
School librarian on errand for evil science teacher
Seamstress must repair growing tear in spacetime in living room

Fall feeling.

Autumn is generally my favourite season of the year. A brisk fall day under a bright grey sky in sweater and hat is one of the best things. The first time you see your breath on evening air, balled fists jammed in coat pockets, you're not yet hunched into the New Englander's wintering posture of tucked chin and tense rounded shoulders...or the cutting cold wind off the Charles River just to piss you off a bit, hone your edge, ready you for the bitter hell of Boston winter. I love even those things. The right music helps; love too. If you can tell the difference you're not listening closely enough. I awoke from a two-hour trance to chiming guitars and the sky deepening from carolina to columbia to cornflower blue on its way to (I hope) the extravagant red of martian cities. I used to find myself in this situation all the time. The important thing, whether the sun's rising or setting and whether or not the music has yet found its way back from animated suspension to resolution and diminuendo and hush, is - the only thing is - will you listen to that -

Modes of instruction (RPG edition).

The D&D 4e 'training' adventure, Kobold Keep, contains five rooms, each containing bad things to kill.

Frank Mentzer's sample adventure for The D&D Basic Set contains seventy rooms - many of them empty.

Between them is an essential difference in opinion about the nature of the fantasy hero - and purpose of tabletop gaming. I am intrigued. (And this week, when this next round of paying writing work is done, I promise to write about something else. Maybe Thunderer, maybe the next nighttime read, A Confederacy of Dunces, bitterly funny so far.)

Of late: chemical bonds.

[From the thing I've been working on all summer.]

The Nature of Chemical Bonds (they’re just like love)

Most atoms want to form compounds: atomic combinations. The forces that bind atoms into compounds are called chemical bonds, and can take many forms. Chemical bonds are like love: sometimes they're about sharing something important to both of you (covalent bonds – shared electrons), or changing each other for the better (ionic bonds – exchanged electrons). With some love-bonds, it's the amount of electricity flowing all around you that keeps you together (metallic bonds – crystals trapped by a sea of electrons).

Sometimes the course of love has more to do with circumstances than what's between you; the same goes for molecules. There are chemical forces that aren’t bonds, and aren’t as strong as chemical bonds, but which do alter atomic behavior.

A molecule is the smallest group of atoms that can take part in a chemical reaction; it’s a tightly-bonded group of two or more atoms in a fixed ratio.* H2O, for instance, is the chemical formula for a molecule called "water." A billion oxygen atoms and two billion hydrogen atoms might constitute a quantity of water,** the substance, but the units are two-to-one clusters. The chemical formula indicates the ratio, not the molecule count.

[*] I won’t speculate on whether the "love" metaphor holds up for giant polyatomic molecules and ions.

[**] This is actually a miniscule amount of water. A decent-sized spoonful of Jell-O contains a million billion billion molecules of H2O. And yet, paradoxically, there's always room for Jell-O. It's a miracle, I guess.

Complete Seinfeld, $99 today only.

Why do you need The Complete Seinfeld? Among other reasons:

* It's the canonical 90's TV show, even moreso than The X-Files and Twin Peaks and (yes) The Simpsons. In terms of both sitcom history and recent American cultural history it's an invaluable resource.

* There haven't been many comic ensembles in the history of television with the chemistry and chops of Seinfeld's cast. Even the group's weakest actor (Seinfeld himself by a large margin) was blessed with great timing and a natural feel for how to deliver a punchline; as the show developed according to each performer's strengths, his comfort and ability grew, and by the show's fertile middle period he held up his end of the show just fine. His castmates, meanwhile, are masters who deserved every Emmy.

* While it's been surpassed in this regard by Arrested Development, mid-period Seinfeld featured the most complex sitcom plotting yet seen, not to mention the darkest outlook of any network comedy I know of. It was poisonous satire played skillfully to the cheap seats, written with the dense referentiality of The Simpsons. The best writing on Seinfeld was the smartest and funniest on TV, Back Then.

* Why in the world would anyone forgive Michael Richards anything? Because Kramer is one of the great TV roles - a type and yet an individual, which is to say an icon. George is a richer role, Elaine a more difficult one, but of the four Kramer is the holy figure.

Bah. I just bought the thing while writing so I'm fresh out of ready-for-sublimating desire. Just buy the damn thing. $99 is a fantastic value for this much TV.

District 9.

The opening half-hour of District 9 is so good that it sets the film up for failure or godhood; it does fail, ultimately, through a combination of thin worldbuilding, rapidly-attenuating characterization, threadbare plot, and (I imagine) subtleties lost on this American viewer. Roger Ebert picked up on a few such encoded messages:

The title “District 9” evokes Cape Town’s historic District 6, where Cape Coloureds (as they were called then) owned homes and businesses for many years before being bulldozed out and relocated. The hero’s name, van der Merwe, is not only a common name for Afrikaners, the white South Africans of Dutch descent, but also the name of the protagonist of van der Merwe jokes, of which the point is that the hero is stupid. Nor would it escape a South African ear that the alien language incorporates clicking sounds, just as Bantu, the language of a large group of African apartheid targets.

The film's first aim is to engender sympathy with the aliens, who are inscrutable, inconsistently rendered, and - let's be frank - vile. The protagonist is no less vile, his startling and always-clear onscreen transformation notwithstanding; Sharlto Copley's performance in the lead role is unforgivably good, given that the bastard's never acted before. This doesn't make the aliens easier to empathize with, however. The film's other aim is to entertain you with a merry brutal chase and some action-movie histrionics; writer/director Neill Blomkamp achieves this second aim with skill and panache (particularly given his smaller-than-usual budget). He's a filmmaker to watch.

But you can see action movies any weekend. The decidedly un-Hollywood first half-hour of District 9 you only get to see for the first time once - lucky you. That it's bound to be followed shortly thereafter by the remaining 80 minutes is misfortune of the sort we've all seen before, and can indeed see every single goddamn weekend at our local cinemas and video stores. Lucky us.

Well it's a fine time anyhow, if underwhelming in the end. What are we left with? Potential, as ever.

Q: What sort of man was Ted Kennedy? A: It doesn't matter.

Senator Edward Kennedy lost his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. Afterward he gave one of the most important orations by a liberal speaker since WWII. He cosponsored the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and felt betrayed when it was underfunded by the Republican administration and Congress. Kennedy killed a woman named Mary Jo Kopechne on Martha's Vineyard forty years ago and 'got away with it.' He had lots of money and power and was spoiled. He took out a second mortgage on one of his homes to help pay for his 1994 senatorial campaign. He was expelled from Harvard for cheating on a Spanish test and was readmitted because Harvard is full of people like him. He drank a lot. He endured the assassinations of two brothers. Kennedy was a vociferous antiwar advocate in the early 70's. He pushed for universal health care for nearly 40 years. He supported busing in Boston despite vicious attacks from his constituents. He believed that ending poverty was a Christian responsibility, and worked toward that end.

In the mid-80's Ted Kennedy publicly defied the racist white South African government in support of Bishop Tutu. Ronald Reagan appointed him special go-between in negotiations with Gorbachev. His father Joseph was a criminal and a successful politician. Ted Kennedy was a firm supporter of women's rights. The women in his family have not been accorded the same status and privilege as the men. He felt a strong sense of noblesse oblige. He stayed conscious through the operation that removed his brain tumor. His speech about Robert Bork was effective demagoguery. The Kennedys and their many handlers and hangers-on are under the mistaken impression that they deserve power because of their status. Ted Kennedy worked very hard. He was an important and effective senator. He died this week.

Facts are facts; categories are bullshit. What sort of man was Ted Kennedy? Don't ask stupid questions. He was a man, he made mistakes, he profited, he paid, he suffered, he worked, he died. Narratives of 'redemption' and 'class privilege' and 'the prerogatives of power' and 'the lion of the senate' don't apply - or rather, they apply each in part, and help us get a grasp on the life of a dead man, which shared these qualities with every other human life: it was difficult and it ended. We demand that he be something more than the sum of his actions and experiences because we wish the same for ourselves. We remain ignorant, terrified, angry, hopeful, attached, and so death is difficult for us to understand. We wish our stories ended in something other than everlasting darkness.

Ted Kennedy was many things, and the television and newspapers and magazines are full of rich idiots bloviating on his 'meaning' and 'legacy' and 'nature' and so forth. On 'the Kennedys' and other gossip. These declarations might inspire but they do not educate. They bring us no closer to the man. He has gone beyond our reach now. Ted Kennedy worked hard and died having lived fully, for 'good' or 'ill'; the work remains. We should attend to it, and to the facts of the man's life, instead of groping about for his 'true nature.' His category, his identity. As if such things, in this world of acts and objects, meant anything at all. As if they could keep night from falling on us too.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale.

Stayed up late last night to read the second half of The Handmaid's Tale. What exquisite writing! I worried at first that the politics of the book would be narrowed and hardened by polemic, but the characterizations are unfailingly generous and rich; unexpected kindness and connection and 'predictable' vileness all flow seamlessly together, and none of the narrative-present-time human elements are jarring. Some of the language is dated, of course, as are the assumptions about the role of consumer technology, and Atwood's version of a nativist-religious-reactionary revolution is the thinnest element of the book. But the implausible aspects of the Tale's future history nonetheless serve their purpose; what comes after the rickety bridging-fiction of the coup is emotionally airtight (however provisional or limited as political prediction).

And such writing, my god...the last sentence of section IX is a little stylistic fillip that occurs nowhere else in the novel; it's so beautiful I had to stop reading, if you know what I mean. The second half of the book is sprinkled with gorgeous, unexpected turns like that: flashbacks emerging almost undetected from present-time narration; imagined snatches of dialogue (e.g. Offred's vision of the Wives denigrating Janine); the instantly convincing reconstruction of Moira's narration. The book gets funnier, livelier, more sensual as it goes; the dusty opening chapters give way to fond memories, sexual longing, frank acceptance, and - finally - moments of rapture. I'm jealous of Atwood's skill. It's not just that every character is a complex human being; the writing itself evolves slowly from Offred's grim reportage (oh how very honest her justified cynicism seems) to the dangerous, intoxicating vulnerability of the final movements. The passages about love (after Jezebel's) are too true and honest to bear; Atwood's decision to follow them with the Salvaging is perhaps cruel but surely correct.

Offred is a real person. What higher praise is there for her creator?

I'm a little out of sorts today, and not just because of the book itself. Between Last Call and Atwood's novel, I've now read more novels (two) in the last three weeks than in any three month period since college. The purpose of confession is explicitness, so: I'm embarrassed, angry, worried about being exposed as a liar and hypocrite and poseur. I'm also hopeful (which is even more embarrassing). Maybe I'm learning how to read again. Wouldn't that be nice.

One other thing. Agi kept saying that The Handmaid's Tale was a 'hopeful' book, and through the first 150 pages I thought she was speaking ironically, playing a nasty trick. She was right though, as usual. Gents: listen to your wives.

[Surprise, surprise: Mary McCarthy's NYTimes review from 1986. I'm confused by her dismissal of the characterization; perhaps she couldn't tell Nick and Luke apart, but I knew them on sight, and I found the Commander (Fred) vivid and terrifying. This seems somewhat more accurate: 'At the same time, the Republic of Gilead itself, whatever in it that is not a projection, is insufficiently imagined.' But then the specifics of Gilead aren't the point. Offred's emotions, her desires, the constant (un)welcome return of her memories, the contortions required by her circumstances and the hardening ideas around her: all these things are instantly recognizable. The satiric target of The Handmaid's Tale isn't one particular religious/political movement or moment, but rather the dark desires given rein by fundamentalism, political or religious. Things would never happen quite this way; if they did, though, this is how they would feel. These are the choices we (would) face. Correct and true are not the same thing of course.]

Despair.

I started reading The Handmaid's Tale last night. I only made it through 75 pages and already I wish I were dead. My lady tells me it's a 'story of hope,' but she keeps saying it with this smile that makes me think I'm being set up for a fall. Alas. Click the image to see what I've been up to lately.

Milestoned.

Handed in what should be the first draft of a completed manuscript today. I have some administrative matters to attend to today and need to get started rewriting quite quickly, but since this project has been my summer's main focus, I feel at the moment as if I deserve a strong drink. I'll settle for a brief shower, as I neglected my morning ablutions and consequently stink like a fucking wet dog. Reader(s), you have my best wishes.

(p.s. I feel a little foolish pissing on Last Call like I did last night. The man's a beloved modern fantasist, after all, and plenty of people call it his best book. I just can't shake the feeling that, for all its imagistic potency and narrative drive, there's something the book completely failed to do, and it's got something to do with just-plain-people...)

Tim Powers, Last Call.

Tim Powers's Last Call comes highly recommended, but after finishing it tonight I can't shake a feeling of tremendous disappointment and frustration. It's not a bad book; indeed it starts beautifully, improves and accelerates throughout its first few hundred pages, and ends 'satisfyingly,' as it's supposed to. The trouble is that for all its no doubt richly-imagined goings-on and Powers's obvious intelligence and gnarly imagination, nothing much happens in Last Call. Familiar symbols (the Tarot, the Fisher King, the mythology of Vegas gambling and the poker table, bits of The Waste Land) are deployed enthusiastically, knotty plotlines proceed according to the familiar contours of those symbols, and at the 'exciting' climax the symbols (excuse me, characters) meet in symbolic conflicts devoid of emotional power. The book moves so briskly that you don't notice that it's not actually a thriller - each of its scenes seems to refer to a scene from a parallel novel, in which actual human stakes are played for in an actual world by actual humans, rather than elements in a Tarot-themed Gantt chart.

It is, in short, a neat idea (a few of them, really) stretched out over half a thousand pages. It's a heck of a story, and when 'THE END' comes it turns out not to have been much at all.

(I kept thinking of American Gods. Do not take that as a compliment.)

The good parts - Crane's early suffering over the fate of his wife, Dondi's apology, the Mandelbrot man, the slam-bang opening section, the regular appearance of steaming cups of coffee and cold beers - are just right, and pieces of the book will stick with me, I suspect. But with one exception the characters in the book never quite rise to the level of people. The relationship between Diana and Scott is wish-fulfillment and (when you think about it) a bit gross, and both characters get less interesting as the story progresses; the depiction of Scott's alcoholism is utterly facile; Dondi is a sentimental caricature but only that, and the thinness of his cruel backstory feels contemptuous on Powers's part; Arky spends most of the novel dicking around offstage in a plotline that has no interest beyond its dorm-room-bullshit-session premise, and his arc is engaging but far too handy to get invested in; Nardie is like a stock character beamed in from some other story; and Leon fulfills none of his initial promise, vanishing behind a twirling villain-moustache for most of the book.

Of all the characters, only the old man Ozzie is as neat-o as the book's symbolic register, and the book is weirdly muted in its treatment of him and his fate. I don't think that's a matter of noir aesthetics; rather, I imagine that Powers (like so many of his readers and critics!) was so enamored of the meaning of his story, its mythological referents, that he forgot to make the story itself matter. And we didn't mind - after all, who can complain about Weird Fantasy that flatters the allusion seekers and conspiracy fans in the audience? Some of the allusions and mythic parallels are so blunt they're offensive - when one character eats a thin white poker chip at a moment of transformational crisis, is it really necessary to have another character moan, 'Christ'? And should we pretend not to notice when the exact same thing happens a dozen pages later, with a bloody wound in the side immediately followed by a blasphemous 'Jesus!' outburst? I half want to assume that Powers's tastelessness in those passages is an ironic wink rather than a failure of nerve and style.

But I couldn't put the book down. It's exhilarating, and a few moments are breathtaking. But it feels, in the end, a little bit pointless. One Amazon reviewer unwittingly hit the nail on the head: 'One character is destined to play the Fool card in the drama and manifests as a homeless man who lives in special "boxes" all throughout Vegas.' Yes, I thought, that describes Dondi's storyline perfectly. I realized only after a moment that the reviewer meant only to describe Dondi's premise. And...and most of the jokes are puns. And without their symbolic parallels most of the events are meaningless or just not there at all. And the last 100 pages are a weirdly-paced mess, the beautiful coda marred by needless exposition and a saggy anticlimax that made the previous few hundred pages seem like much ado about nothing much. And, yeah, I couldn't put the book down. I feel like a fool for caring about 500 pages of notes for the Greatest Dark Magical Fantasy Novel Ever Written About Vegas, which Tim Powers slyly published in the guise of a novel. What a smart man he is.

Worldbuilding is storytelling: complication, complexity, and micronarratives.

My recent obsessions taken to a 3,500-word extreme! Go read (and if you're an RPG nerd, you should be following Philippe's blog anyhow).

The Hurt Locker.

The Hurt Locker is an excellent film, painfully intense from beginning to end and generous in its treatment of its characters and world. I recommend seeing it in the theatre if possible.

That's it for my review. Go see The Hurt Locker.

The rest is a misplaced complaint. (Spoilers follow.)

The dominant theme in recent Iraq War dramatizations has been the surreal, arbitrary nature of the war. Nothing about the soldiers' on-the-ground experience is connected to the narratives put forth by mainstream media outlets (in their role as government PR services), and beyond the usual war-is-hell, soldiering-is-strange, fight-for-your-brothers, innocence-gets-lost, it's-tough-coming-home material that makes up nearly every war film ever, Hollywood has had little to say about the Iraq War other than 'This makes little sense.' The Hurt Locker fits this mould: the film doesn't make any statements about the Iraq war as such. Rather, the film's declarative content is right there in its epigram, the first frame of the show: 'War is a drug.'

The Hurt Locker is the story of a drug addict endangering the lives of the people around him by feeding his addiction; more specifically, it's a recidivism story rather than a redemption story, so the ending shouldn't come as a surprise, though you may come away disappointed in the characters.

(Let's say up front that the movie is a drug too: at a tense point in the extraordinary mid-film mercs'n'snipers sequence I hissed out 'Kill the motherfucker' at one of the onscreen American soldiers, disturbing my wife and filling me with a potent cocktail of self-loathing and self-justification for the rest of the running time.)

The plot of The Hurt Locker involves three soldiers on an ordnance-removal squad: two provide cover, supplies, and communications, while the third (James) puts on an enormous space-pillow suit and defuses roadside bombs and IEDs and the like. It's an action/suspense movie, and the material is all guns and near-death and warrior antics. (The most incredible plot point in the film is the main character's simple statement of how many bombs he's defused. It's also the lead actor's best moment - an unbelievably complex show of emotions in no more than fifteen virtuosically-uncomfortable seconds.)

The story, on the other hand, has little to do with explosives; the film is ultimately a study in how the intensity of war denatures and distends the human heart, and what effects war-addiction has on soldiers and civilians alike. The story is told effectively, though not definitively, if you know what I mean.

If you spend two hours watching a film with (what you take to be) its central question in mind, you can start to believe that you're entitled to an answer; that's a reasonable assumption but incorrect. This belief is even stronger when the film makes its major concerns clear from the outset. The central plot question of The Hurt Locker is, as always, 'What happens next?' More specifically: 'Will they make it?' More editorially: 'Will James get his coworkers killed?'

This is only mechanism, though. The story-motor is a different question altogether: 'Why is James like this?' It's voiced by a couple of characters in the film, most memorably by James himself. The answer, in keeping with cinematic-Iraq-war standards, is 'I don't know.' Or rather, the answer is in the epigram - 'War is a drug' - and perhaps you'd be justified in thinking this both an elegant bit of storytelling and a frustrating piece of halfway-analysis.

Toward the end of the film, the war-addict returns home to his ex-wife and baby. At the grocery story he faces a vast aisle of scrupulously art-directed cereal boxes; after a moment's existential crisis, he grabs one with a look of mild but manageable irritation on his face. Our 'hero' is a quick-witted, intelligent man, and a hardboiled fighter - and newly attuned to the complexities of human lives and so forth, as prompted by his latest experiences in Iraq. We get two minutes of domestic footage, and he chooses to be redeployed to Baghdad. Roll credits.

James's final choice feels inevitable - i.e. believable, a correct storytelling decision - but I wanted The Hurt Locker to stay with him and take a chance on rendering his less intense (but no less complex) life at home with his ex-wife and kid. The upshot of the film is that he can't function anymore in an environment other than the life-or-death insanity of war, where he's both an effective fighter and technician and, occasionally, a mortal danger to his allies. Fine. The psychology of our 'hero'/loose-cannon is convincing and complex, and The Hurt Locker is a rich and honest treatment of its subjects in their main environment. But we only see them against the backdrop of the war. Which is a fine choice but now I'm preoccupied with the alternatives for some reason. Is that my fault or the film's?

I came away from The Hurt Locker desperate to find out how a smart, capable, emotionally-complex man like James - a hero - handles his few days or weeks at home. How do his survival mechanisms fail, exactly? We know that they fail, hence his voluntary redeployment, but I'd have been just as happy or happier had the film condensed its bomb-squad material into an hour and followed the processes of James's mind on the home front for another hour. How does war-addiction manifest in the world beyond the battlefield? How would the tightly-wound pragmatist James, who feels no apparent bloodlust but whose vengeful-romantic streak nearly gets his squadmates killed, respond to the armchair viciousness of America's war-cheerleaders? How is a man so clear-eyed about his addiction (in his moving monologue in the baby's bedroom) so easily overtaken by it?

But then I'm asking for another movie entirely. To hell with that. The Hurt Locker does what it sets out to do; I'm tempted to say it does so flawlessly. Now, two days after going to the theatre and a thousand words into a 'review,' all I want is to see the rest of the story, the missing piece. Y'know, the bit with women and kids and conversations in English and our hero actually managing a life that isn't prescribed in every way. For whatever reason, I demand to know the details of his failure, the mismatch between the world of war and (merely) the world. I want a good answer to a new question. To hell with that too. I wonder what else is playing this week.

Trying to figure out the history of fantasy roleplaying games. One in particular, for the moment.

[Why do I care? Because tabletop roleplaying is extremely important in the evolution of modern American fantasy, not only generic fantasy but the mass-mediated fantasies that lull us to sleep (and rouse us to fight - each other, if no one else). D&D is far and away the most popular pen-and-paper roleplaying game - that doesn't matter as much in the post-EverQuest, post-World of Warcraft era, but it still matters. The new books are bestsellers, and D&D still gives popular fantasy - books, movies, and games - much of its basic structural and stylistic vocabulary (y'know, the bits that don't come from Tolkien and Star Wars and such).

Plus, what can I say? Lately I spend my weekends rolling dice. I wanna know what's going on, and why.

I'm not an authority on this stuff - this is my attempt to put down the 35-year history of one game that's had tremendous influence. I'd like to try to talk about the nature of that influence later, as I think about it more. And so we're clear: I wasn't there, and this isn't about What A Swell Time It All Was Before The Suits/Millennials Ruined It. Nor is it cultural history. This is one attempt to summarize the history of a design as I see it. Probably I'm all wrong - I'm sure I've overestimated the irritations of actually playing AD&D, which I'm limited to reading rather than playing. This is all Big Angry Declaratives because I get that way sometimes, but really the whole thing has a giant question mark on top of it.]

OD&D

In the beginning you had miniatures wargaming - Napoleonics, Ancients, and so forth. Gary Gygax wrote a fantasy-wargaming ruleset, Chainmail. In 1974 he took a bunch of Dave Arneson's ideas (in particular the central conceit of roleplaying games, 'You are your character'), mixed them in with his own fantasy-gaming preoccupations, and produced Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop game that was much closer to individual-scale wargaming than 'storytelling with dice.' Indeed, original D&D was more a Chainmail expansion than a full-blown game in its own right; while the three 'little brown books' presented an alternative combat/measurement system, D&D players were expected to own Chainmail, and to be familiar with the conventions of miniatures wargaming. The game's setting was straight-up midcentury pulp fantasy, with no small amount of Tolkien (and a few spoonfuls of Lovecraft) thrown in to sweeten its heavy Leiber/Howard men-of-mixed-morals flavour.

Food.

Of course I find food obsessives ridiculous. Never moreso than when they're borrowing affective postures from their literary betters:

So, clearly, decent food can be had at more than reasonable prices [at the Cheesecake Factory], but it takes some careful choosing on a menu with more than 200 offerings. The biggest drawback is the mall-like atmosphere, a sense of faux everything that is perhaps inevitable in any large chain. The fact that any of the 146 CFs around the country can put out this astonishing variety of food is an impressive work of corporate organization and efficiency. But I left feeling sad, and not sure why. I think, on reflection it was because of the sense that what we'd just experienced was simply a company responding to the demands of America, and the demands of America were helping us to take our food one step backward rather than one step forward, and I don't think we have time for backward steps.

Well, no, but if you're worrying about how no one makes 'slow food' anymore and don't give a shit that doctors are all about hair-trigger optional C-sections - or you were as interested in the importance of Twitter during the recent Iranian uprising as you were in a democratic goddamn uprising in a nearly-nuclear theocracy run by imbeciles and lunatics - then your worry about 'backward steps' comes off as a little goddamn precious. Does 'faux everything' make our world worse? Yes it does. Is the availability of cheap tasty food at the shopping mall really the worst possible case? Nope. Does your Overwhelming Sadness at the availability of an unbelievable variety of (mass-produced freeze-dried sensually-denuded) cheap food in the suburbs seem like a gross luxury, given that the suburbs themselves are so complexly mind-warping that the Cheesecake Factory doesn't even crack the list of the Top 50 Things Worthy of Scrutiny About This Fucked Living Arrangement? Yes it does.

And you know what? The Cheesecake Factory sucks, just like lamely recreating the first scene from the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to promote your basic-cable TV guest appearance sucks. Just like Hollywood sucks generally, and massive income inequality sucks, and mosquitoes and designer clothes suck, and the bourgeois food-tourism that passes for 'adventure' TV sucks. Plus it sucks extra that David Foster Wallace is dead, John Coltrane is dead, Robert Altman is dead, and we have to go on pretending that weeping into your tastefully-arrayed miniscule portion of honey-glazed whatever counts as having an existential crisis.

Keep writing, Mr Ruhlman. You take it seriously and ask new things of yourself and I admire that (a great deal) (but only that).

Keep preening, foodies everywhere.

The fallout is bad but it's bomb I'm afraid of.

Music → Markup.

[This turned out to be something, but it's still just about Phish, so if you're at all skeptical about this sort of thing, skip to the bottom paragraph and be done with it. Seriously! You have been warned.]

For many Phish fans, the segue is the true measure of a set's fluidity and complexity. In Phish-fan parlance there are two kinds of segues - the bracket and the arrow. Take this setlist, from 4/5/98 in Providence:

Oh Kee Pa > YEM, Theme > McGrupp, Gin → Cities > Sparkle, Melt

The crucial element in there is the Gin → Cities marking, which denotes an improvisatory bridge between the songs, a passage that's neither the clattering midtempo rock of 'Bathtub Gin' nor the thumb-on-the-turntable sludge-funk of Phish's Talking Heads cover. Not only does the music not stop, it changes form to get from one tune to the other. If the tunes aren't in the same key, the band might start the second song wherever they already are, tonally, and drop into the right key after a few seconds or minutes - or the may walk the circle-of-fourths for a while before alighting on a suggestive key, which might prompt a new musical direction. The point is, when you see an arrow on a setlist, it means something is going on, risks are being taken, truly new music is coalescing in the gutters between tunes. The word 'composition' is being stretched and joyously repurposed onstage. For Phish fans (as for Deadheads) there's nothing better than a clean-but-crazy segue, one that in retrospect makes perfect sense but could never have been predicted at the outset of a jam. For many fans, those are the holy moments.

The bracket segues, on the other hand, can denote anything from the stop/start of OKP > YEM to the band fading out 'Theme' while Anastasio tosses out the opening licks of 'McGrupp.' Old Phish setlists tended to be heavy on the brackets and light on arrows - though once in a while you'd stumble across some absurdity like this, from 2/20/93 in Hotlanta:

Wilson > Reba, Tweezer → Walk Away → Tweezer > Glide > Mike's → My Mind → Mike's > Hydrogen → Kung → Hydrogen > Weekapaug → Have Mercy → Weekapaug → Rock and Roll All Nite Jam → Weekapaug, Fast Enough for You > Big Ball Jam > HYHU > Terrapin > HYHU → Harry Hood, Tweezer Reprise

Yes, the show is as ridiculous as its setlist. (And a fine copy is available in the Live in Atlanta box set.) The Glide > Mike's Song suite feels like a single performance; the frenzied quote-heavy performance of 'Glide' carries over as Anastasio starts whipping up the 'Mike's Song' guitar line, and when the band slingshots into the tune it's like the resolution of the previous song's tension. The spirit is improvisatory though the setlist was at least partly written in advance, and if the set wasn't full of onstage composition, it did feature wild onstage rearrangement - songs popping up within other songs, lengthy quotes piling atop one another, an anarchic party-hearty spirit that might've seemed strange from a bunch of 20something nerds. 'My Mind's Got a Mind of Its Own' evolves organically out of a cooled-out 'Mike's' jam; 'Kung' starts up where 'I Am Hydrogen' should be; 'Have Mercy' slips into a 'Weekapaug' longueur before a brief KISS tribute, and the whole scene feels like a single suite. Segues got more meaningful later on in the band's career, as average song length stretched far beyond the old standards:

Halley's Comet → Tweezer → Black-Eyed Katy > Piper, Antelope

That's 11/22/97 II, one of the canonical Phish sets from the band's greatest tour by far, Fall 1997. In this case the setlist hides more information than it reveals: 'Halley's Comet' skips right past the usual outro chords and into a greasy funk groove that mutates, after fifteen minutes or so, into a terrifyingly intense 'space jam' - roaring noise and feedback, celestial synth textures, and a pounding lost-in-a-cave beat from Fishman on drums. The whole thing lasts 25 minutes, and if it's the most interesting and uplifting jam of the set, its appeal is matched (in other ways) by the devastatingly sexy Tweezer → BEK middle portion. The set wanders all over the goddamn map musically, and there's nothing in 'Halley's' or 'Tweezer' that would explain what transpired between the two songs.

In the future we'll make improv-rock setlists as we now make 'tag clouds' on blogs - the heaviest tracks will simply be noted in a bigger font, and big breakaway jams will get their own 'Jam' notation in 48pt blinking Comic Sans, and the world will be light. Or shit - by then I suppose the world will be shit. I wonder whether they'll look back and say this post sped up the process of beshittening, or stemmed the tide for a moment - or perhaps they'll say nothing at all, as I've just done.

Well. To sum up: Improv-rock fans use straightforward markup for their setlists, which in combination with fan expectations and collective knowledge enables complex evaluation and info-exchange - despite the data's lossy compression scheme. This notation is unique to improvisatory rock; most jazz fans rarely need to note segues in this way. What's important to me isn't important to you, probably, though the fact that it's important (to me) might be an entryway by which you access the hidden heart of Just Another Human Being. And so how will I find my way into yours?

the day.

that day i will tend to things.
you will not take the sheet rolling over in bed.
that day i will skip breakfast i think.
i will walk only away.
that day i will eat an unhealthy dinner.
i will try to read a book and fail.
i will lose my place.
that day i will hate sunshine.
i will not want to be touched.
i will watch children sit.
you will not be singing along as you walk in from work.
that day i will be tired.
i will fear to sleep.
you will not make up funny words over dinner.
i will have my way on the issue of the television.
that day i will not know what sentences should look like.
you will not turn from the unwashed laundry rolling your eyes.
that day i will forget obvious things.
i will catch myself not breathing.
you will not again gather into a human shape
what remains of me
that day.

L,
W.

Holy guacamole - Palin resigns.

From her statement to the press today:

If I have learned one thing: LIFE is about choices!

And one chooses how to react to circumstances. You can choose to engage in things that tear down, or build up. I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity. I choose NOT to tear down and waste precious time; but to build UP this state and our country, and her industrious, generous, patriotic, free people!

Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and "go with the flow".

Nah, only dead fish "go with the flow".

No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time... to BUILD UP.

And there is such a need to BUILD up and FIGHT for our state and our country. I choose to FIGHT for it! And I'll work hard for others who still believe in free enterprise and smaller government; strong national security for our country and support for our troops; energy independence; and for those who will protect freedom and equality and LIFE... I'll work for and campaign for those PROUD to be American, and those who are INSPIRED by our ideals and won't deride them.

I WILL support others who seek to serve, in or out of office, for the RIGHT reasons, and I don't care what party they're in or no party at all. Inside Alaska - or Outside Alaska.

But I won't do it from the Governor's desk.

I've never believed that I, nor anyone else, needs a title to do this - to make a difference... to HELP people. So I choose, for my State and my family, more "freedom" to progress, all the way around... so that Alaska may progress... I will not seek re-election as Governor.

And so as I thought about this announcement that I wouldn't run for re-election and what it means for Alaska, I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks... travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe), overseas on international trade - as so many politicians do. And then I thought - that's what's wrong - many just accept that lame duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck, and "milk it". I'm not putting Alaska through that - I promised efficiencies and effectiveness! ? That's not how I am wired. I am not wired to operate under the same old "politics as usual." I promised that four years ago - and I meant it.

"...so I better run!"

Y'know what? All in all I think it's kind of a great little speech. Political suicide, presumably, and given her history I'd bet you ten bucks (following Josh Marshall here) that this is about cutting her reputation losses and getting out of the public spotlight before additional ethics investigations snow her under. (Plus that MacArthur quote is craaaaaazy.) But today I finally began to understand how people could go for this woman. She just doesn't sound anything like a politician.

Which is to say on one hand her aggressive willful parochialism and grotesque bigotry ensure that she's not actually qualified to run anything bigger than Wasilla, by the looks of it, and I wish those poor bastards something better than Sarah Palin's stewardship.

But on the other hand: well, she's one of a kind, huh? Weird to get so far and be so wholly without shame. Admirable, kind of.

(I'm being sarcastic, but not just that. I really do think it's all kinda neat! Scary but neat! Like an episode of Buffy but with much less coherent dialogue.)

The financial crisis described slightly differently.

The financial crisis is the one thing that could have turned Obama's election - which was about young people's energy, new ideas, the blurring of standard GOP/Dem party lines - into nothing more than a middle chapter in a litany of grownup problems. It's the one situation in which Obama is no longer the bold (comparatively) young reformer but just another guy trying to fill the Big Political Moment.

I wrote this back in the day:

What are Dems getting out of Obama? How is the party establishment hoping to play his election, and what happens to his candidacy now that he's (sort of) the presumptive nominee? And what is it like to be a Young Voter in this extremely consequential election, voting for someone who seems to be as Outsider-y as you can get, yet who would never ever have gotten this far without the intrinsically creepy mechanisms of modern-media politics, to which he's rhetorically opposed? And, and: What kind of political generation is arising from the very, very questionable feelings of agency and 'ownership' that Internet/distributed political financing and the constant blather of blogs seem to promise? There's reason to believe that Young Voters are more apathetic than they've ever been, across the board; what does it mean that they're rousing themselves to vote for this guy?

What do these assholes think this is, a game?

Back then I really thought the election was about a sea change in American governance. I was excited about the election as such, the symbolism of it, the pragmatic power-sharing and -shifting of it. (Yes we did! and so forth.) The financial crisis - and the hyper-partisan mudslinging that's followed, much of it nonsensically 'socialism'-themed - hasn't suddenly turned Obama mortal and fallible. It's shown that as far as our nation's ruling class of venal middle-aged assholes was concerned, the election was never going to be allowed to change anything.

And that, ladies and germzzz, is my cup of fresh-brewed morning cynicism for today!

You enjoy (my/your)self.

The phrase 'I'm enjoying myself' certainly sounds different from 'I'm having a good time' - listen closely and the latter is about circumstance, while the former has something to do with addressing oneself to it. What's great about 'enjoying oneself' is that the key to doing more of it lies in the very phrase: lasting pleasure and deep fulfillment seem to spring from acting at the limits of your abilities, in a state of total commitment-to-circumstance that rests far below conscious 'awareness.' To truly enjoy yourself you must become unself-conscious, taking pleasure in what you do without dwelling on your self-image, which after all pertains to nothing but your own perceived inadequacies, fantasies, personal myth-history, etc.

Your self-image isn't a positive part of you, as I see it; it opposes action. Why? Because the last thing you want to do is lose your image of your self, find that you've been living out of step with your actual relationship to the world.

So you try to remake the world as what you think it's supposed to be in relation to your fantasy self-image.

Which sometimes fucks everyone up, starting with you but by no means ending there. Maybe you discover electricity along the way, or paint a chapel, or marry the right person (or just someone else), or send your kids to a school where they happen to be happy/sad/lucky/coddled/alone. Most likely you find that the world in your head isn't the world, and you begin to tear things up.

Sounds hopeless. OK, so modify it a little. (I'm carried away anyway.) What keeps us sane is: differentials. Change. As long as we think we're changing the right way we can settle down, live at peace, enjoy ourselves. Which is to say we can love what we are only if we see it as the result of doing right. You have to trust the process that is your self before you can quiet down and notice the world.

'Having a good time' is just about time. 'Enjoying yourself' is about action - getting out of your own way and letting yourself adapt naturally to your circumstances, which is what all the other animals do since they don't have to abstract everything around them to keep from getting [fired/abandoned/ridiculed/sued/shot/etc.].

I believe in the pleasures of incoherence and of fluid form, and I'm able to love things more honestly when I can move with them. I don't always more skillfully or beautifully but I find a line eventually, and can curve with it as the time demands. It's bedtime, doctor's appointment in the morning, work to be done, I'm behind schedule maybe already, the phone needs charging, there are so many ideas to get rid of. How swell is that gonna be.

From a biggish thing about (among other things) Hamlet, proof-by-induction, fanfiction, the meaning of love, and the Eiffel Tower upside-down.

Now imagine (3,3) and (4,4) on the plane. Ya dig? OK: What's the next point?

Most people, I'm guessing, speculate that the 'next point' is (5,5). Linear progression. You don't even have to think of it as function input and output; you could just have a weird way of making two lists of integers that happen to proceed at equal pace from the same starting point. 'Sliding friction' is the force that resists you when you're sliding; 'static friction' is what fights against you starting. The latter is the greater force; as wacky Wernher von Braun said, 'Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.' The world has tendencies: in motion, stay in motion; at rest, stay at rest. Reality is opinionated. So are we.

We're made to extrapolate, which is how we invented God; we need order to make sense of infinity, which is why we invented God; we tend to value and enshrine straight-line thinking, which is why God looks like a bearded white man (and there's no such thing as a 'liberal media').

Proof by induction works like this: if you can show that a proposition is true for one baseline element, and that if it's true for one element then it must be true for the next one in line, then the proposition must be true for all elements. Inductive reasoning frees you to run - once you've settled on your baseline, your (literal) starting point, then all you need is a logic of association to allow you to make a universal statement. Which feels, let me tell you, absolutely wonderful. That wind-in-your-hair feeling of encompassing all of what you see in a single expression or conception. A formula.

But.

That joy (of understanding) doesn't come from a point. Think of singular aesthetic (i.e. learning) experiences that have 'changed your life,' or just your mind: I remember for instance my first rock show, being dumped for the first time, 'losing' my virginity, realizing I was falling in love with my future wife. You go back later on and fill in relationships to what you know, or to later examples of the same general phenomenon, but in each instant what prevails is confusion, loss of center, prior understandings (a/k/a 'priorities,' right?) falling away. The word for this feeling is freedom. The feeling changes you, but you can't possibly understand or articulate each moment within itself. The limited relationship between your reptilian, emotional, and analytical minds precludes such understanding.

And from that point, where do you go?

What would Hamlet say if he were here with us right now?

D&D nerdery: Varied roles, empty rooms.

Over at Eleven Foot Pole, Greg writes about an unexpectedly empty room in Thunderspire Labyrinth, the 'Crypts,' described as follows in the written adventure (H2):

Crypts: The remains of about two dozen minotaur warriors lie here in burial niches along the walls. In the southern hallway stands a statue of a grim-looking skeletal minotaur with a greataxe—a minotaur version of the Grim Reaper. An iron door leading to the south is locked. It can be unlocked with a DC 20 Thievery check or broken open with a DC 25 Strength check.

Greg seems irritated not by the emptiness as such, but by inconsistency:

The skeletal reaper is a classic archetype, and here we have a new bull-headed twist on the idea. It's a great way to build on the undead from the last encounter and really tie the Horned Hold into the ongoing minotaur-themed history.

Unfortunately, yet again, it's not to be. The statue doesn't come to life; the dead don't rise from their graves. There is, in fact, no tactical encounter for this room whatsoever, making it the only part of the Hold not covered in this way. Players will be completely baffled as to why nothing in this room is animating and trying to kill them. It does, after all, run contrary to their entire previous experience.

I tend to insist that games should 'play fair,' not penalizing players for reasonable assumptions based on precedent. But that insistence doesn't extend to situations like the one. A roleplaying game's primary feature is the playing of roles; a strong role (in drama, at work, in school, in sports, etc.) offers its player interesting choices, compelling challenges, and - this is crucial - more than one note to play. Dogberry in Twelfth Night is a fool, sure, and he gets laughs aplenty - as does Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice - but for an actor neither holds a candle to Lear's Fool, who gets to do sly wit, big physical comedy, teary pathos, and that wild Merlin monologue, all in a relatively small written part. Lt. Daniels on The Wire got to be the angry careerist hardass in the first season, but the part came right to life as Lance Reddick revealed the long game Daniels was playing - and that smile of his 2/3 of the way through the season opened up the role, changing its relationship to the world around it. Great dramatic roles offer both subtle nuance and stark contrast - they vary in various ways.

(The wildest screen performance I've seen is Michael Gambon's in The Singing Detective, in a role as technically demanding and fine-grained as Hamlet but with an even broader range. See it if you haven't. Now.)

In combat-driven roleplaying it's important to emphasize for players that the combat has a purpose; violence in the real world is an extreme interaction, the end of communication, not (for most people) a basic mode of coexisting as depicted in shallow sword-and-sorcery gaming. D&D 4e is combat-heavy; indeed it's assumed that the primary mode of character development is through combat itself. But that gets a little monochromatic after a while. How do you know something's Big and Important if there's nothing mundane to compare it to, no baseline of experience, no mere life? How can the revelation of a secret be meaningful without it being withheld for a while? Who fights with nothing to fight over?

Why are your characters doing what they're doing? What is the world, to them?

Questions like these can be answered in well-designed combat, but your campaign's story - the emerging Tale of Years that includes but hopefully isn't limited to your party's great (and other) deeds - will be unreadable if it consists solely of one kind of action. A list of fights may as well be the bathroom-cleaning time card at the Burger King, a schedule of obligations.

Ever read The Da Vinci Code? It's not a good novel by any standard other than one: it's absolutely impossible to stop reading once you've started. (By that standard it's pure goddamn heroin, a near-perfect example of a bad idea embodied.) People remember it as a breathless ride in which the action never stops, a chase across Europe to confront conspiracy/history or blah blah blah. It's a chase book, an action book. Right?

Actually no.

Most of The Da Vinci Code is talk.

The constant chatter - blunt exposition, inept one-liners, endless portentous crypticisms about 'the universal feminine' or what have you - occurs in the midst of ongoing hustle and bustle, but it's still chatter. The puzzle-solving is just part of it - ultimately The Da Vinci Code is a fast-moving detective story about a guy solving pseudointellectual puzzles about the history of a religion. It's not a shooter (though perhaps you remember the shootings), but it's not even really a sneaker. It's a talkie. Dan Brown's vile genius is to situate the talk carefully, punctuating it with deaths and escapes and travel and the like.

And yet the story moves like the devil's chasing it. The story isn't 'good,' but it sure works.

An empty room - what looks like downtime, wasted space, a fidgety longueur for ADD-afflicted players - is an opportunity to move the story in another direction: backward into history, down into the secret tale of the world, in to the characters' motivations and fears, out beyond the story the players think they're living to even more complex threats, possibilities, ramifications. This is true in straight storytelling as well as in games, and for teachers guiding students as well: If you treat a scene as a challenge, the players who trust you will rise to that challenge. That's true in and out of combat, of course. It's a historical accident that American roleplaying games evolved from wargames (and everything stupid and retrograde about the industry and culture of RPGs in America stems from that basic fact); we owe it to ourselves to think of roleplaying as an activity that can include simulation (e.g. of combat), but that's really about - surprise - playing a role. Structured make-believe. Storytelling with dice. It could really be so.

The strength of a role is this: the variety of strong actions it allows for.

* * *

All of this is to leave aside the technical question, 'How do you make an empty room interesting?' Which is a storytelling challenge dating back millennia, of course. Here's a simple solution: let the players stock the room. Describe it, set the scene, lay on some creepy atmosphere, and when a player describes searching the room, hand over control: 'OK. You find something in the statue's shadow, embedded in the floor. What is it?' Or maybe just: 'You hear a keening sound, distant, worrisome. What does it sound like?' And let the player(s) tell you.

It's their story after all.

Phish2point0: an overview mixtape.

[This is a very long Phish post. It's aimed at people who aren't necessarily fans, but it's still...a very long Phish post. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.]

The period known to fans as 'Phish 2.0' stretched from the first day of 2003 (the worrisome comeback show at Madison Square Garden) to mid-August 2004 (the catastrophic farewell festival in Vermont). In that time Phish played 63 shows over four relatively short tours and a trio of multi-night stands (Hampton '03, the 20th anniversary run, Vegas '04).

It was a weird, fascinating time for the band, as I've talked about elsewhere. In the mid-90's it was a big event for a Phish tune (other than the long composed suites) to stretch beyond 20 minutes; by summer 2003 one could reasonably expect one or two such monster jams per show. Yet something was a little off; the energy couldn't be sustained, or the music ran its course, and personal problems certainly obtruded; within 18 months of their shaky-but-thrilling reunion and very successful winter 2003 tour, Phish were broken up, this time (it seemed) for good.

They're back together now, more focused and energetic than any time in the last decade, and it makes sense to consider what went on during that wild interregnum, to get a better handle on what they're doing now.

In that spirit, I'd like to present a mix of 2003-04 Phish, with notes on what to listen for, even how to listen, where this music fits in the band's history, what it says about their unique improvisatory methods.

programmers: capsule history of the internet.

[Additional Fixing You magique. Forgive me.]

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.

(do you remember the time little beauregard chased the paperboy all the way back to his "home" under I-45? we thought we'd die laughing! apparently the paperboy, too, was afraid he would perish.)

fixing what's wrong with you.

[Another Fixing You excerpt. Still haven't figured out what to do with this stuff.]

here is a snap judgment for you, an example, along with the rest of this "carefully-crafted" prose assemblage, of the power of spontaneous decision-making (we've thought carefully about it to make sure this is correct, so who knows really, but...): think of a teddy bear. looks a lot like an actual bear, doesn't it? the resemblance is not a coincidence. both are adorable talking creatures with bellies full of delicious honey and severed human hands; both stick to their own deal, keep the woodland vibe mellow, and don't mess with everybody's shit; both crave knowledge above all things. and: each thinks of itself as a bear - but only one of them is correct. which one? well we're not scientists so we won't hazard a guess, but it's unnecessary in this case anyhow. each has it in itself to be...actually no, these aren't interchangeable personality-free little goddamn human infants we're talking about, these are living creatures with names and aspirations and clearly defined sex roles. each bear has it in HERSELF to live a full satisfying life, whether she's stuffed full of cotton fibers or made by the same divine hand that shaped the pyramids, montana, this charmingly retro-obsolete (but in a progressive way) old-media artifact you're reading.

each might find something like happiness, but either Bettina the Bear has her facts wrong, or Wu-Pen the Teddy Bear does. one of these ladies has a human/bear soul, one is just a homunculus. but in the grand scheme it doesn't matter which is which. in either's arms you might fall asleep dreaming about the candy planet, from either you might run screaming through the campsite all yelling and shit about "i'm being chased by an enormous killer animal/children's toy!" with either - maybe both - you might feel the kinship that all living creatures are afforded in moments of soul-extremity. you might also be eaten, whatever, the point is CLASSES DON'T MATTER, categories are largely nonsense. file that under "wisdom." sidebar: college classes don't matter either. no one ever got anywhere with a comparative literature degree from dartmouth anyhow. ever, like in history or anything.

feel that refreshing breeze wafting up your handcrafted designer pant leg? that's relief, the onset of something like wisdom, also climate change makes the air warm and/so it rises up the pant leg. we're someplace new now: stay focused.

Arms against a sea of (aquatic versions of) myself, I guess: more on the latest Phish tour, with detailed musical example so I don't completely hate myself.

I liked last night's show, and Deer Creek.

That said.

To deepen my understanding of the fun, quietly disconcerting summer tour at its halfway point, I've been listening these last couple of days to some long '2.0' tracks - the unbelievably cool '46 Days' from IT, the 'Headphones Jam' from the Undermind sessions, the latter two thirds of 6/19/04, the 2/03 and 7/03 jams everyone knows. Trying to figure out what's changed, what's missing, what's been added. Obviously the technical side of the music is stronger than it has been since 1998 at least, maybe earlier. But it's equally clear that the jamming is less adventurous. Less patient. And what's missing, I think, is the deadly electricity that starts flowing after the energy inside a given song-form (and implied improvisatory form) is behind the band.

Here's an example. The IT '46 Days' jumps off the diving board at 3:20 (on the SBD). The implied opening chords thin out to a one-(minor-)chord vamp within a minute or so; around 6:30 the band takes the volume down a little, Fishman starts one of those roiling uptempo drumbeats that characterized so much of Phish '03 (cf. Waves, Walls, Seven Below, Pebbles). By 7:30 Trey is building a grungy soundscape and playing the occasional dark figure in his low range, Page is on the Rhodes, and Mike is in his eerie subterranean place, playing those intricate 2.0 bass figures that are to my ears the most Dead-like thing about Phish's sound. By ten minutes Fishman has cooled out a little along with Trey, going half-speed, but thirty seconds later the band is building intensity and suggesting doubletime rhythms within the kind of ambient-grunge texture they do particularly well.

All of which is to say: eleven minutes into this climactic tune of the festival the band is playing roughly in their scalar homebase, with the same underlying tempo as at the outset, but they're in something of a holding pattern, and anything could happen. What happens is a great big ambient 'space jam.'

If a summer '09 tune reached this point, someone would push the jam somewhere - or you'd have a straight-up ambient interlude and the next tune would kick in.

Nearly a half-hour remains in the IT track, though.

I love the IT documentary (though Trey looks and sounds frighteningly unhealthy in it). There's a great sequence with Page talking about how certain musical moments and exchanges are possible only after you've dwelled with a jam for ten or fifteen or twenty minutes. Underscoring that interview, and then featured for a few minutes, is a long snippet from just after the twenty-minute mark of the '46 Days.' A curtain of noisy guitar/keyboard texture is fading away, and Fish has landed (somehow!) on a sprightly 6/8 beat, counted/accented as two triplets (as in a slightly-fast 'Jesus Left Chicago'). Page starts playing eerie washes on the Rhodes, while Mike and Trey latch onto Fish's new time signature, but feeling it differently - in 3, in 4. After a while Fishman starts subdividing his own phrases in 4, keeping up the tempo (the hi-hat hits are at the same speed) but with a new count (accents and snare hits every 4, then every 8, rather than in 3 or 6).

It is, in other words, a nearly-ten-minute exercise in tension-building following a nearly-ten-minute dark-ambient space-out - and the filmmakers (and maybe Phish themselves?) selected this passage to illustrate one of the central messages of the film and the festival, about patience and empathy and open communication. I think that's important.

So by the 29:00 mark Trey is playing more melodic lines in the midrange, Mike is making groovy suggestions, Page is building some syncopated halfway-funk shit on the piano, and Fish throws some goddamn disco into the drumbeat. From there you get something like a quick quiet 'Piper' groove, shit goes barroom by 35:00 and everyone's getting laid on the back of the 4am bus to Funkytown, and when Page hops back on the Hammond you know Trey's ready to strap on and head home - at 37:00 you have the coolest segue of the weekend, reminiscent of the rocket-liftoff key change leading into 'Mike's Song' on 7/22/97 and complete with suggested modulation from Trey...he takes it back...Page is with him...back...then BOOM, we're back in the home key. Around 39:00 we're out, and the rest of 2003 feels like epilogue.

Why does this shit matter? Because this goofy rock band performs a ten-minute build in intensity, almost without lifting the volume of the music one iota, and it could only have happened after the palate-cleansing, mind-emptying, face-melting blast that fills the song's second ten minutes. Yet those ten minutes would never have happened in early summer 2009.

Maybe it's sobriety.

Maybe it's the twenty-five-year itch.

It's not some new abstract 'focus,' folks - these guys had plenty of focus on that wild summer 2003 tour.

What they also had was the confidence to wait, to listen in quiet for rhythms that aren't only sound, to dig in and revise their jams as they went. Writing is revising, of course; that's the craft. There's a myth that improvised music is totally spontaneous, but that's not quite right. Listening is a craft too, waiting is a taxing physical challenge, and what remains for Phish - what could maybe start coming back in August? - is just that: listening, waiting. Letting the music play itself. Sometimes that means 'noodling' a little. Sometimes noodling (or math, or 'space,' or just cock-rock gone south) gets you thirty minutes into '46 Days' and you've found another universe.

That's the point. That's the thing I've loved most about this band. And if there's a criticism to be leveled at summer '09 so far, that's it as far as I'm concerned: not enough waiting, seeing the other side. Everything up to that point is pure happiness for me, but beyond it is transformation. How fucking good will that feel.

traveling is for idiots: lifehacking the western american hemisphere

[This is an excerpt from a larger, admittedly kind of weird piece. If you must know, it's from the Fixing You manuscript, a couple hundred pages of stylish/aggressive nonsense-or-possibly-genius in this vein. Please enjoy. --wa.]

* * *

the main difficulty with traveling, other than being eaten by carnivorous fish or having an "everyone here is very tan and speaks in gibberish"-related panic attack in the middle of the world's largest shopping mall or something, is adjusting to the little things, the tiny cultural differences that make life living: don't touch the food, don't look directly at sweet bitches or someone will cut off your hand, the mosquitoes have AIDS, there is no internet access unless you go to the city, nearly three hundred miles downriver, past the golden temple. THERE IS NO GODDAMN INTERNET. not 2.0, 1.0, little-known intermediate web technologies like web 1.5. nothing! plus there are sensitivity issues to worry about: how do you approach tiny japanese without being crippled by guilt, knowing that they've already lived through the 21st and 22nd centuries once, are aggressively fixing up the 23rd century with nanobots and thermonuclear magic spells at the moment (contemporary japan is what the 23rd century will look like if we make cloning not only legal but *mandatory*), and now here you come with your stupid questions about "how do they make tempura" and "why did the police outfit me with this GPS-enabled dog collar when i got off the plane in tokyo," things like that. plus, cultural solidarity is one thing, open-mindedness is one thing, but why are all the muslims dressed like assholes? you see? you dropped out of georgetown's medieval studies program before getting the degree, which was the right move, everyone thinks so, but you never did take that acting class you'd been so excited about - so how are you going to convincingly act like you don't know how much better your country is than, uh, theirs? all of them really.

worthies, the world is just too difficult to understand. did you see the part about no internet web? it's not available in alaska, indeed most of the u.s. west of the mississippi river (minus san francisco, obviously), so what are the chances they've discovered the internet in bangalore, paris, the picturesque mountains of switzerland? answer: the chances are very very small, and you can't take that kind of risk. you're not a gambler, you're an exceptionally talented and stylishly-appointed urban elite. you can't bring mohammed to the mountain because he's been put in a secret government prison on the floating magical island of west frandisco. but someone has to be brought to the mountain; the gods demand it. it just doesn't have to be you. nor do you want the mountain brought here; it's trivia night at Foster's and you can't duck out of it, not when you have to defend your "80's sitcoms"-themed record-setting title last week. someone else can babysit the mountain.

well so the alternative is to make like a grownup and stay home. but how? no american is truly cultured unless he or she has traveled the world, and yet we've shown through careful logic that travel is impermissible if not simply impossible, never mind pricy - god even if you can lifehack your tickets into a first-class upgrade from coach you're still looking at ten, maybe thirty thousand american dollars to get a seat on a giant spacegoing quantum shark-jet, and who has that kind of money lying around? other than famous personal american productivity guru/authors who spend their nights covered in locally-grown honey and rolling around in four-foot-deep piles of authors'-advance cash, "lucre" really, who has that kind of money in today's enlightened western world?

so if you can't go abroad - and you can't - you have to find a way to make HERE more like THERE, without all the "charming" local "flavor" that the emaciated non-digitally-savvy citizens of THERE think is so special precious dear to their ancestors in the dreamtime or whatever but is, when you get down to it, basically las vegas with cheaper whores and lower production values. which, sure, *awesome* in a way, but remember: no internet.

ok, to recap:

* be brave

* stay home

* america

it's a little unusual for a lifehacking project to intentionally downgrade performance and style, but when it comes to worldliness and open-minded cultural exchange, the western hemisphere is willing to take one for the team.

as is traditional, we have a set of easy-to-follow lifehacking tips'n'tricks in clear, jargon-free language - ready to be implemented by the post-digital post-national hardcore american digital freshmaker/coolhacker/raconteur now reading this volume, i.e. probably you. possibly not you - have you come down from the lsd yet, hasn't it been twelve hours? how much goddamn lsd did you take? - but *probably* you.

* food: american food isn't terribly fashionable unless consumed ironically, post-nationally - e.g. designer mac and cheese with a bottle of very delicate absinthe you got on your celebratory trip to bhutan when your post-college startup shipped version 0.02beta4 of the social-network app you guys had worked up and you just had to, like *unwind* - so we have some major changes to make here. luckily, most foreign cuisines are easily duplicated using american ingredients. for instance: to make delicate taiwanese curried poultry, buy some general gao's chicken at the local chinese take-out place, head down to your local organic/macro food mart, get a little green curry paste, and mix it in using a limited-edition quantum-plastic japanese designer stirring spoon. for authentic taiwanese texture don't mix it in, just pour it right on top, then call one of your chinese friends to wave nuclear weapons at you menacingly while you eat your food huddled in the corner of your small but efficiently furnished and stylishly laid-out loft, furtively looking around all the while to make sure no local warlords have beheaded any of your neighbors tonight. taiwan has warlords, right? or to make indian rice, buy chinese rice and give it smallpox.

* dress: ever since the second world war foreigners have been required by law to dress like americans, only funny in some small way - e.g. french clothes are always a little too tight-fitting at the crotch; all swiss wear baggy fleece workout pants cinched below the knees, known as "lederhosen"; amazon men and women wear dish towels; all germans have lots of piercings but in a refreshingly non-aggressive way; there's nearly a million chinese, two million, and they only have about 300,000 outfits between them - all grey tracksuits with "china!" written in big letters on the back, we saw it at the olympics - so in china you only get to wear any clothes at all one day out of three, which is actually ok because four days out of five it's illegal and unwise to breathe chinese air. (confirmed! on the internet.) you have nothing to worry about clothing-wise; most of your designer shit is made in sweatshops anyhow, right? so just pretend YOU'RE the sweatshop worker - easy, go around acting all grateful you have a job at all, even if that's a weird feeling for a progressive urbanite - and make believe you STOLE your featureless grey china-blouse from the factory, you're so worried about getting caught, and friendly subversive Commandant Chang can't cover for you forever, they'll catch you, FOOLISH xiao ming, they're sure to catch you...

* money: no problem. american dollars are good everywhere. however, to maintain fictional coherence on a fake stay-at-home world-travel vacation, you can't find or use an ATM, and will eventually have to barter to eat. this is standard in most countries of the dark, exotic east ("exotique" in french). you'll do fine; your body still has that undergraduate firmness, you'll fetch upwards of ten dollars a day. (sidenote: really? if you're offering, contact our publisher. IF you're offering.)

* internet: WHAT DID WE TELL YOU. NO.

* local customs: you went to graduate school, right? "culture is a conversation." you can more or less make shit up as you go along; for instance, refuse to believe that streetlights are real, or always turn left. if anyone asks what you're doing, call it "subaltern chic" or "just like mama xiao pan used to make" and then steal their wallet, but in an adorable, culturally authentic ("authentique") way.

* attitude toward americans: as with most things, you already know what to do here, you just need to maintain a constant high level of very cromulent mindfulness about it. assume that everyone on the street is an actual cowboy (ladies too) who bathes in liquid gold, nanobubble baths made from forcibly-aborted fetuses, and middle/near eastern crude oil; do not hide your disdain at people's inability to follow your language; marry a tiny cow-eyed babychild to preserve its honor post-defilement; occasionally mourn the death of a beloved uncle or grand-niece, wailing and ululating as their little coffin is lifted out of the pickup truck and lowered slowly, so slowly, into the blood-soaked earth that is your ancestral home - where you someday will rest as well. then vow bloody vengeance against whomever the hell; according to our fashion/historical sources, jews will do nicely.

obviously this will yield nothing even remotely like travel, will expose you to none of what makes other countries worth seeing (if you believe that marketing hype). but ask yourself: do you *really* feel like leaving home right now, right in the middle of things, when your favorite web-cartoon is probably updating tonight, and all your friends are talking about really important things on electronic digital mail? you really want to give that up?

well we don't either. never, ever, ever.

You have a seat reserved, honey.

Whatever do you think you're doing? she asked. I said, I'm flying! She frowned and said, I don't think sitting and flying are the same thing. I said, With an ass like mine you never can tell, baby. She came to see it my way; kissed me like I was whiskey on ice in summer; asked if she could fly with me. There was room on the couch so that was no problem.

Trying to keep a feeling of total inadequacy at bay in the face of world events this fine, fine Saturday: Phish, lately.

There's nothing to be done. I guess it's time to talk about Phish's reunion tour.

I've seen three shows this summer, and heard all the 2009 shows so far.

They've been playing well lately, and their written performances (vs improv) are better right now than they've been since maybe 1996. The fluidity of '97 is (temporarily?) gone, replaced with a middle-aged familiarity and zest that they've never quite had before; the catastrophe of late summer '04 is gone too, and if the improvisations aren't as daring as they were in the late 90's, nor as patient and organic as in 2003, Phish are attacking their songlist with the verve of their 15-years-younger selves, particularly the mature new material. The new album should be interesting.

The real question: how's the jamming? God damn it, how are they improvising?

Please understand that this summer I see, or maybe just saw, my twentieth show, and I've heard hundreds of 'em. I'm not as easily impressed as I was when I first flipped for Phish in 1994, and I'm attentive to aspects of the music that less musically-inclined listeners might not care about. (I miss plenty of others - guitar technology, for instance. Who the hell cares what brand of guitar equipment a guy uses, you know? Learn to play the goddamn thing, then you get to jack off about logistics. And yet I wish I knew more.) The point being, you might go to these shows and have the time of your life. You might hear nothing amiss. You might be bored stiff, or changed forever. What follows is only my two cents.

Well. So how is it? What's up?

A couple of things.

Less stylistic variety than there used to be. Phish's first big step forward in the studio was the seemingly effortless virtuoso comedy of 1992's A Picture of Nectar. After the lumpy prog of Lawn Boy and the scattershot Junta, here was a tight set of fiery songs flawlessly executed, tightened over years of shows, kept to almost-reasonable lengths. The most amazing thing about the album was its vast reach: Nectar seemed to encompass every imaginable musical style and invent a couple more for spice, and if it didn't yet have the fully unified sound of Rift (still Phish's strongest batch of studio songs, though not their best album), the album showed Phish's omnivorous appetite. In 1998 the band could cover an entire Velvet Underground album on Halloween, Dark Side of the Moon two goddamn days later, and a mix of Marvin Gaye, Zeppelin, and the Beastie Boys along the way. And if they always sounded most like themselves, they always approached jams on their own terms - molding their approach to the sound, style, and language of each song and genre in turn.

But in 2003 the band's many different sounds congealed into one consistent, thrilling - and then a little boring - rock'n'roll tone and feel. They were itching to tear the songs apart, but often the results sounded like...well, like one big song. It wasn't a bad song, but it wasn't the insane polyglot musical language the band and fans had learned to speak and appreciate.

Right now Phish's improvisations have some of 2003-04's sonic consistency. From a purely sonic perspective things are clearer and more precise than they were during that weird interregnum; Anastasio's guitar sound is less dirty but also less likely to seep into a noisy mud. In terms of spontaneous creation, though, the band isn't creating a new language right now. There have been flashes of pathbreaking boldness at times, and guitarist Anastasio's playing has certainly deepened in the last five years, but if anything the band now sounds more like their partial progenitors, the Grateful Dead: less cohesive, more focused on individual voices, with everyone doing their thing behind the lead player. Mike and Page are playing better than ever on bass and keys respectively, but half the reason that's so obvious is that they're being featured as individuals at the cost of group creation.

What it all means is that a given song is far less likely to spark sudden innovation - either they're on or they're not, and Anastasio's less mercurial playing prompts the group to take fewer chances. So they stick to what they do best, which is Being Phish, and that sounds awfully familiar. As beautifully as each of the four guys is playing, the mystical 'fifth man' emerges all too rarely. So you hear a rock band, instead of The Greatest Fucking Rock Band Alive.

Looser climaxes. The band doesn't have the same psychic connection as it did up through the 2000-02 hiatus; their famous complete trust is (for now?) gone. Where a 1994 'Harry Hood' or 1997 'You Enjoy Myself' jam was all about setting out together and arriving together - 'loose/tight' in the sense that each player could improvise freely knowing that there was a shared expectation about structure and fluid exchange of improvisatory role within a basic envelope - today's jams are, paradoxically, both more rigid (less likely to wander far afield, less playful) and more flabby (far less likely to clap militarily together on the downbeat, far less coherent in the 'we are all one big chord' sense, etc.). The easiest way to see this phenomenon is in the climaxes of big jams. They get there, but not as cleanly and decisively as they used to. If you like the old stuff, the pre-hiatus stuff and particularly the self-contained declarative-statement jams of the mid-90's, today's big bangs might seem both more triumphant and, oddly, less earned.

Far less open-ended and exploratory improv. Last night's Deer Creek show featured, by consensus, some of the best jamming of Phish 2009. 'A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing' broke open a near-continuous second set, with no time to breathe in the first thirty minutes of intense rock. But listen (at phishows.com, or phishthoughts.com/nospoilers, or livephish.com) to that 'Type II' jam between 'Ocean' and 'Drowned': a sprightly jam in the song's relative major key, the tempo kicked up a little after a meterless ambient interlude, with the whole thing dying out into some tinkling piano and the onset of 'Drowned' on no more than ten seconds' notice. Lovely, generous music for a couple of minutes, but isn't the point of 'Type II' jamming that the music becomes something other than an extension of the song? Meanwhile 'Drowned' itself morphs into one of those uptempo clav-driven funk interludes you'd find in nearly every latter-day version of 'Weekapaug' or 'Down With Disease,' which entertains the crowd without going anywhere for a couple of minutes, and then devolves into 'Twist.' You can faintly make out a suggestion of the 'Twist' bassline from Mike five seconds before the segue, but other than that, this 'most exciting jamming of tour' is basically a mid-jam fade and Trey counting off the next tune.

I don't want to dismiss the whole enterprise, because the music is still pretty great. Indeed, that 'Twist' gets hot and stays that way, deliberately echoing the scorching 'Oye Como Va' jam from the Jones Beach 'Twist' earlier this month but with a doubletime funk feel; only fools and assholes can complain when the band floors a gassed-up 'Twist.' Yet people are talking about this set as if it's the best run of tunes this whole tour - and without exception the tunes stay within shouting distance of homebase. The only total departures are 'ambient jams' of the sort that bridged so many songs in summer and fall 2000, to devastating effect in Fukuoka but boring audiences to tears on other occasions. I like their new, busier approach to ambient jamming, but it doesn't feel terribly risky or innovative; the formless between-song breakdown is one of the first crutches a beginning improvisor learns, as leaving the rhythm and making noises without tonal center frees you to resolve to pretty much whatever you'd like, within mood constraints.

Then again, what kind of person demands that a rock quartet stay 'innovative' after a quarter-century of pathbreaking improvised music? What kind of jerk am I, anyhow?

Well, but what kind of band are they?

More one-guy-partying showoffery. These are great musicians, no question. And they make fantastic party music. But it's their collective creation, their communication, that holds fascination for their fans. A ten-minute 'Tube' that's basically a long clavinet/cowbell freakout does tend to run into the ol' diminishing-returns wall after a while, like a pounding noisy 'Free' consisting solely of Big Bass Sounds followed by Trey's screaming guitar outro. (He's demolishing every single version of 'Free,' by the way. But the band hasn't taken a risk with that song since 2004 at least. In the late 90's 'Free' could end up in some straaaange places; we could go there again, y'know. I'd go.)

The crowd eats this mildly onanistic business up, and you can't fault the guys for wanting to rock out and show off a little. But these spotlit showcases cease to be communication at all, after a while. I don't need 'em. (That's me. Whatever.)

Less dicking around. The boys are charging out of the gate at full speed on every single song - which is both exciting and costly. The best 'Taste' solo ever (12/30/97) begins with nearly 30 seconds of quiet; the best 'Ghost' and 'Tweezer' renditions percolate for a while before cohering, as do classic 'Wolfman's Brother' versions like 7/24/98 (with its sharpest-ever climactic turn). Wasn't that the lesson of 1997 - take your time, build the music slowly, and something good will float by?

But Trey Anastasio's been to jail, for god's sake, and he wants to squeeze every note out of each performance. So you get two fewer minutes of idle notions per song, no dead air as it were. Meaning no more delicate, fragile versions of 'Limb By Limb,' no autumn-breeze openings to 'Hood,' and 'Reba' won't open with just Mike and Fish setting the scene in near-silence. The floor is raised, which makes the ceiling seem lower. Which is of course an optical illusion, but do you really give a damn when, after all, it's your house we're talking about?

And yeah, last night's Deer Creek 'Tweezer' heads right out of the gate with no muted chording from Trey, boldly takes one step 'round the circle of fourths, and bubbles to a pleasant end - but you never quite get the sense that the band is building a single thing together, even though the individual playing is more complex than it's (maybe) ever been. Which is to say...

Good focus, less patience. Phish's great achievement in 1997 was to develop an approach to group improvisation that built on dance rhythms and electronic/hip-hop energy, slowly evolving complex musical structures and building to razor-sharp peaks while patiently combining each existing idea, each going rhythmic concern, with whatever new notions struck the band in the moment. They learned patience, a new kind of musical democracy, and it elevated their game far beyond even the anthemic heights of fall/winter 1995. Check out the colossal '2001' from the Great Went in August '97: twenty minutes of pure after-electric-Miles eccentric-white-nerd dance-porn. Right now the lads are playing joyously but less patiently, meaning tunes like '2001' take off more quickly, do what they need to do in less time, and never quite reach the dizzying heights of the band's best stuff.

I listen to Phish in part because I want danger. I miss that feeling: 'How are these musicians going to get back to that song? And if they don't, where in the world will they end up?'

Phish 2009 hasn't been at all dangerous. Entertaining, yes. Beautiful, rocking, profound, yeah. But there's a part of my mind that's going unused at these shows, and I look forward to turning a corner along with the band. Soon, soon.

How not to structure a sentence, part one million and four.

Easy, comprehension-crippling mistake:

Musically referencing the monsoon with the opening “A Song I Heard The Ocean Sing,” this time we knew it was for real.

No!

We did not reference anything, god damn it! The band references the monsoon; we know it's for real. The two clauses should correspond and agree. 'Musically referencing the monsoon...the band let us know it was for real. And we did know. Know, we did. They rocked our balls and minds. Who did rock balls/minds? The band. The professional American rock band.'

See?

I never learned this shit in English class - never knew what a 'clause' was until college or grad school and still don't know what a 'mood' or 'participle' is - but it's not too hard to pick up if you read middling-tough prose with any attentiveness. Keep your ears open and the clarity of your writing will improve.

A note about recent Phish, posted despite my feeling that writing about anything other than Iran seems like a frivolous fucking waste.

Why was Fox Theatre 'Slave to the Traffic Light' butchered this week?

To my ears it seems that Trey was playing as if to finish the jam, though the jam wasn't finished - he'd suggested the climactic upper-register lines that often signal the jam, but then (around 8:30?) pulled back from them a little, heading back down the 'doc, which might've confused the others. And Fishman did seem to be with him before Trey went into the closing chords, though Fishman was clearly surprised by Trey's exit too. It's possible there was some visual-communication issue instead, I wouldn't know.

One unfortunate(?) new thing about Phish is the relative muddiness of their biggest jam climaxes: Slave, Hood, YEM, Reba, and specifically in the Star Lake 'Disease' and 'Piper,' or the botched 'Mike's Song' at Jones Beach. Back in the day, the closing chords of Hood or Slave or Reba wouldn't come as a surprise - there was a clear pattern to each build, a road map that the band and audience knew in advance. It might only be general - in Hood, Trey would start playing those cascading high notes, or in Slave he'd top out at the fifth and you'd know it'd be over in 4 or 8 bars (same in Reba) - but band and crowd would arrive together.

Presumably for lack of rehearsal or loss of habit, those standard progressions have been set aside or dissipated, and now we've got jams ending suddenly, without warning, or without 'peaking' as cleanly as they used to. The Fox Slave is a perfect example: without some unspoken shared agreement about what the end of the jam looks/sounds like, the band is a lot closer to square one in terms of synching up. Riskier, sure, but less viscerally satisfying for the audience. Or anyhow for me.

(The big rock tunes - Chalkdust, Free, etc. - are great right now. Phish can do that kind of shit in their sleep.)

The Star Lake 'Hood' was the cleanest version of the tour, with the most powerful peak, which Trey signaled with his canonical closing lines. Trey starts the closing chords at 11:30 (on the soundboard), but listen carefully to the thirty seconds before that: at 11:00 he starts playing those fanned scale runs he's been doing, ten seconds later he hits the top-shelf octave that signals we've got some multiple of 8 bars left, and right on schedule he goes sliding into the final chords 20 seconds later. According to a plan that was never written, but emerged over time. Habit, you might say.

Meanwhile, in that night's 'Disease,' Trey lands on the 'Free' chords ten seconds before the end of the DWD (SBD) track, which presumably suggests the next track to him. (DWD > Free isn't a particularly rare segue - no news here.) But instead of moving straight into the colossal 'Free' rift, Trey gathers the band with those (help me on the guitar terminology someone) muted eighth-note downstrokes, to establish tempo and feel at the outset. Ten years ago that segue might've happened more organically, but the band's signaling apparatus is rusty, and the Star Lake transition hardly qualifies as a segue.

(Sidebar: did you know Coca-Cola removes rust from tools? It's terrifying actually. Don't drink Coke - drink your rum straight and your caffeine in coffee.)

The point of this exercise is only this: the boys are unused to the kind of communication that used to come naturally to them, and that communication was the whole reason we'd see the shows. 'The biggest idea,' Trey calls it. It'll come in time, though not as energetically as back in the day, and we'll get both riskier 'Type II' (open-form) improv and more cohesive, discrete climaxes in the 'Type I' (intra-progression) stuff. Easier for the audience to follow, more rewarding, more open-hearted - I think these old guys on their best days or weeks or months were pretty much untouchable improvisors and generous musical companions. They've got work to do; they're doing it. That much right with the world.

Still not done!

There is a file sitting on my ~/Desktop called 'to-fucking-do.txt.'

Its contents, in full:

write buffy/dollhouse sex porno mashup fiction

with PUSSY

I am a man with a purpose.

Doubt.

We watched Doubt tonight (the film). I didn't read the reviews when the film came out; I assumed all the big critics liked it. Wrong. I suspect that some of the negativity came from a kind of official, mandated discomfort with theatre-on-film. Maybe some bullshit American anti-elitism, I don't know. (American film started Way Out West, with traveling-fair precedents; Euro film sprang from big-city theatrical culture. Hence the different levels of...liveliness.) That, plus discomfort with the film's complexity - films often feel like monologues, but theatre is given license to stage real moral dialogue (however often it succeeds in this aim). The heart of the film is the long scene between Meryl Streep and Viola Davis - shot through with so many unexpected ironies that it feels churlish to point out the perfect shape and momentum of Shanley's writing.

Complaining about Streep's intense work seems churlish too; I was taught by friendlier nuns than Sister Aloysius, of course, but I found her postures and delivery believable - and she hasn't gotten enough credit for her complexly comedic performance.

We've been watching Prime Suspect lately, and Sister Aloysius reminds me of Helen Mirren's Jane Tennyson - the worry on each woman's face haunts me. At their most monstrous or dangerous, I wish to comfort both characters. Indeed, Prime Suspect explores some of the same ironies as Doubt, though only sister James is as virtuous as the grimy-but-upright lead characters in the British series (which, by the way, you should be watching too).

I loved Doubt. I don't think I want to watch it ever again, though I definitely want to read the play. As soon as we finished it, we put on the DVD commentary; I never want to do that, it was lateish, but it seemed necessary. Better to stay up thinking. What a thoughtful work of art. I wonder whether it was a 'good movie.' I wonder whether it matters, one way or the other.

'College prep' is a crime.

The idea of 'college prep' courses and schools is stupid and unhealthy.

Never mind the social stratification that stems from the cost and availability of such programs and schools, never mind that tutors take pressure off mainstream/public schools to actually teach the expected material; it's the idea of preparing for college itself that rankles. We impose several artificial discontinuities on children already: treating physical activity and restlessness as problems outside of gym class, reducing music and visual arts' stature in schools, treating 'teenagers' as distinct from slightly younger but equally sexually (im)mature creatures, literally locking children up in featureless beige boxes for seven hours a day, etc. The high school/college discontinuity is difficult for parents and often jarring for students in part because we treat it as a border, a finale, rather than a milepost. Moreover, we set expectations for college - which allegedly 'teaches you how to think' - in such a way that high school seems even more trivial and time-wasting than it already, almost inevitably is.

Any skill or practice that prepares students for college prepares them for the rest of their lives, and vice versa.

The real stuff, the deep stuff, clearly differs from what we teach students as 'college prep.' Good advice is always good: Caring about your SAT score is tacky and only gets moreso after you've been admitted to college; wanting to demonstrate your skills is admirable and will get you places in life. Knowing how to seem intelligent in a classroom makes you a skilled deceiver; knowing how to ask clear questions and keep a dialogue going will win you entry into heaven. A good book - or a good time reading - has nothing to do with a good book report. Don't focus on 'study skills' as if studying textbooks were some unique field unto itself; learn how to focus on tasks for long periods of time, how to recharge your batteries, when and how to take a break, how to treat other people with respect and bring out the best in collaborators, how to evaluate your own mental state, how to organize yourself for work. And don't mislead people about your abilities - continue to improve them and take pride in mastery of all kinds. 'Practice' doesn't mean 'warmups,' it means activity. It means doing, living. Good life is good practice; and vice (of course) versa.

We teach children to think of school as something separate from life, and the awesome irresponsibility of the 'typical' college experience would seem to back up this lesson. But most 'rites of passage' are collective fantasies of identity rather than development and continuity - high school graduation, bat mitzvah, job promotion, first confession, and the Hallowed Wonderful Wedding Day should each in theory mark the culmination and consolidation of a period of development and steady growth, but we pretend that they inaugurate brand new chapters in life, as if there were such a thing as a 'chapter' in life, as if we could put away whom we've been. The past isn't dead; it's not even past. If we teach our children disposable skills such as what passes for 'college prep' - collections of trivia and arbitrary numerical measures you're not supposed to cling to and use throughout life but to show off to admissions boards like the coat and mane of a prize horse - we devalue their experiences, their differences, the stuff of their lives. You either do or don't 'become a worthwhile adult' - and what the blazing hell could that possibly mean? 'College prep' is like 'age 12 prep': it impoverishes the present on behalf of a fantasy future. It's irresponsible.

So enough with 'prep school' and 'college prep' and 'study skills.' Enough pretending that doing well in school is (and, grotesquely, should be) different from, unrelated to, growing and living well. These are symptoms of our deeper cultural problem, which is this: high school and college prepare us only incidentally or accidentally for the world when they prepare us at all, partly because we treat them as worlds unto themselves. Which is part of our debilitating collective fantasy that children are something separate from us - which is itself only the flip side of our even more self-serving fantasy, namely that we are a different sort of being from our children, and from the children we once were.