DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO LIVE HERE WHEN YOU CAN LIVE IN THE GOOD OL’ AMERICAN RUST BELT!!!

Heineken: Dutch for Poetry (and recalling shutting down governments)

Last night I drank the 1 pint 8 oz. keg of Heineken pictured above. The coconut monkey, a gift my dad bought for me when he was in Hawaii during the late 1980’s, is a sentimental keepsake and friend, and he’s also one of my best drinking buddies in the whole wide world. He is my Wilson on the stormy seas of life, and I will take him with me wherever I shall go (although he doesn’t have a name, how ironic is that?).

So anyway, I drank this mini keg and I became rather discursive, and in order to let the mental diarrhea seep out I made some refrigerator magnet poetry in the style of Shakespeare. No, I didn’t construct my refrigerator poem in iambic pentameter, but I stayed true to the immortal bard’s bawdiness, and if this poem doesn’t seem too abstract and you think you have some clue about what I’m trying to convey in it, then it may just increase blood flow and cause a tingling sensation in that special area of your anatomy.

Check it out:

Refrigerator magnet poetry and prose is a lifesaver at parties when you feel weird and uninteresting standing around and people keep walking around you and the beer confidence is doing very little to help your reticence. What is one to do in a situation like this? What you do is you walk over to the refrigerator and start moving little magnets with words and suffixes on them around and you begin placing them in a certain syntactical order. You begin conceptualizing a story or a poem which proves to party attendees that you are not in fact stupid but, provided the right medium, you can be smart, interesting, talented, funny, lustful and a whole lot of other things. This word ordering will be the perfect ice breaker to catapult you out of your 5th wheel status to temporary life of the party status. People will gather around you and marvel at what you are doing, and they will no doubt share any relevant related stories – e.g., how much they loved or hated reading Shakespeare in college, or how their friend has refrigerator magnets in German and Spanish. But probably the sweetest part is that you will leave graffiti on somebody’s refrigerator that will last long after the party has ended, thus leaving a lasting reminder of what a hit you were that night. And who knows - somebody may bump into you later on and remember you as the “refrigerator poem guy.”

I bought these Shakespearean refrigerator magnets when I visited the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. five years ago with a group from my college. My Shakespeare professor organized the trip and he was very excited about being in the nation’s capital and seeing as much as he could see in the 1 1/2 days we spent there. He would point out things like the Smithsonian museum and announce what a shame it was that we didn’t have enough time to take a tour of it. He reverently led us through the Vietnam memorial, America’s wailing wall, past all the crying veterans who make the pilgrimage to DC just so they can touch the engraved names of lost friends or loved ones in order to commune with a part of their ghosts. It was my first trip to DC, and I admit that it was a lot to take in. What I will never forget is walking in front of the White House and marvelling at how it physically differed from my lifelong mental conception of it which was based on stock footage I had seen countless times on the news. Cameras give an added dimension to things making them look bigger, and I guess I was taken aback by how much “smaller” the White House actually was than I had previously thought.

But this is not what is most memorable about my DC trip, it is what happened next that will be a conversational font for years to come. As I was walking around, I took my shoulder bag off and placed it on a bench just yards from the entrance to the White House where George “Dubya” Bush was probably inside having a meeting with important leaders. It was very hot even though it was April, and I took off my long sleeve shirt and tied it around my waist. In order to do this I had to set my bag and headphones on the bench, and when I was done I picked up my headphones but carelessly forgot my shoulder bag. I started walking back to the hotel where my group was staying – we were supposed to be leaving in less than an hour – when it occurred to me that my bag was not secured to my shoulder. All of a sudden I had that frightening feeling that occurs only when you realize that, sometime and somewhere within the last couple of hours, you have lost either your wallet or your child. It is a terrifying feeling to say the least, and even though my bag was not as important as either of these things, I ascribed a lot of value to it because it contained all of the mementos I had purchased on my very first DC trip (like a “Anybody But Bush” button and tee-shirt from the Folger Library with a quote from II Henry IV which read, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”). I stopped in mid gait and stiffened as an icy chill shot through my body. I looked down at my side – no bag. I looked at my other side – no bag. I tried to retrace my steps. I remember just having it, where could I have left it? I ran back to a vendor who I bought a pretzel from just a minute ago. He didn’t see my bag. Oh crap! I kept running back in the direction I came from. Suddenly, up ahead, I could see sirens flashing, a lane of traffic was shut down, and sleek black official-looking cars were parked in the middle of the closed part of the street. Men with suits climbed out of the cars. One held a dog on a leash and another flourished a device that looked like an electronic wand. A helicopter circled overhead.

It took less than ten seconds to realize that my worst fears had come true - my unattended bag had posed a clear and present danger for the United States government and the citizens of Washington, D.C. Oh shit! I thought, I have just put the government on high alert! The previous day while visiting the Lincoln Memorial, we were all evacuated by police and security guards because a suspicious looking package was left in a corner behind the monolithic statue of our 16th president. The hundreds of people who had been enjoying the view from the steps of Lincoln’s perch all grunted and groaned as they lazily floated away like a congregation of vagrants forced to find somewhere else to camp. The suspicious package, we would soon learn, turned out to be a box abandoned by a homeless person. But if the War on Terror has taught me anything, it is that there are “soft” targets and there are more premium targets. The Lincoln Memorial is what would be considered a soft target because it is simply a famous landmark, it serves no governing or other vital function that might render its destruction a crippling blow to the nation’s important systems. But I had left my bag only a few yards from the rear entrance to the White House, the home of president George W. Bush and the ruling seat of one of world’s leading super powers! This is the most premium target a terrorist could ever hope to strike if he had the temerity to get close enough, and seeing what a stir the abandoned box had caused the day before at the Lincoln Memorial, I knew I was standing in a deep pile of shit when I saw the helicopters and dogs and important guys in suits.  

As I approached the intersection where all the commotion was unfolding, I found a bike cop and quickly confessed my culpability. Surprisingly, he didn’t tackle me or pull out his gun and tell me to put my hands up. He took my name, license and social security number and radioed that information to someone who was probably sitting before a bank of the highest tech computer and video monitors in the world. That guy read the information back to the cop saying, “echo, T-I-M -F-R-E…” Meanwhile the helicopter circled overhead, its roaring blades disturbing the mid-day touristic peace just like a Lawn Boy disturbing the quiet calm of a suburban Saturday morning. I was shaking and nervous, envisioning Guantanamo Bay bedlam in my near future, and I was afraid to touch any of the buttons on the Walkman secured to my belt lest the sniper with the long range rifle who I couldn’t see blew my head off. It was a tense couple of minutes made all the more nerve-racking by the rudely impatient throngs of tourists who were overly eager to go on their White House tour. Not only had I gone and possibly shut down one of the most powerful governments on the planet with my forgetful carelessness, but I had also ruined the vacations of countless suburban moms and dads and their kids who I would most likely never see again (since I would die in a Cuban jail cell). So now, added to my fearful nervousness of being imminently and secretly tortured as an enemy combatant, was an embarrassment like no other. “Look at that idiot who shut down the government and spoiled our vacation,” people’s eyes appeared to say as they shook their heads and angrily stared at me, the fool who couldn’t even remember to keep his bag attached to his shoulder.

But luckily the cop had a lot of experience with these sorts of things. He was fairly understanding and I think he appreciated my honesty and cooperation. You see, the protectors of Washington, D.C. go on heightened alert every day – no, every half hour – or at least they did 5 years ago in the post 9/11 terrorist paranoia frenzy. Whenever a homeless person would leave a bag full of stuff at a landmark, or a government worker forgot his expensive briefcase in a subway terminal, or a stupid tourist like myself would accidentally leave their shoulder or shopping bags next to big important buildings, the capital’s police and secret service went into red alert and herded people away, cordoned off the area and sent in the dogs and guys with bomb detecting magic wands. And just like all of these routine bomb scares, my ordeal was over in a matter of minutes. Just as quickly as life in the nation’s capital had gone from calmly normal to imminently dire, everything reverted back to normal again. Traffic resumed, the tours commenced and the noisy helicopter flew away. I was a free man, completely forgiven and even felt sorry for by some people. As I walked away, a person in the crowd told me not to sweat it as these things are a daily occurence in D.C. It was a relief for me to learn that I would not be put on trial in a secret military court and labeled as a terrorist. Furthermore, I was glad that I didn’t cause anybody to miss out on their once-in-a-lifetime tour of the White House. I was even happier, however, that my little mishap didn’t interrupt the pundits on cable channels like MSNBC and CNN in the form of one of those live and late breaking aerial footage stories. I couldn’t stand the thought of my newly retired mom, an avid political junky who always keeps her TV tuned to the 24-hour news channels, watching my embarrassing horror unfold at her house hundreds of miles away in real time.

That would be the equivalent of her catching a glimpse of me drunk and stoned at a party constructing refrigerator magnet poetry and laughing with my friends and my coconut monkey which my dad bought for me when I was 11. I could just see her shaking her head and ruefully asking, “What did you do now?”

Don’t Send

The latest commentary in the ongoing new media-old media debate is a book titled The Tyranny of E-mail by John Freeman. Since John Freeman (former National Book Critics Circle president and current Granta editor) also happens to be my older brother, this post will be more or less a puff piece. I posted back in February about a dream I had of my brother starring as a guest on the Today Show being interviewed by Meredith Vieira. This is more or less the second installment to that post.

A portion of Freeman’s book was published in The Wall Street Journal on August, 22nd, and it was called a ‘manifesto.’ Gosh, you would think my brother was the second incarnation of the unabomber or something! Actually, Freeman is quick to point out that he is not a Ludite, but rather a privacy and efficiency advocate. According to Freeman, email is culpable for our shorter attention spans because it interrupts our train of thought every 5 seconds. We are dependent on it the same way we are dependent on the sound bite and textspeak. Email, like all other rapid-fire and truncated forms of communication, gives rise to the Instant Replay and back-to-back commercials. It is part of the chatterbox of sounds and images vying for our senses, and it is both a contributing factor and a symptom of our cubicle existences. It is the zenith of technological progress in the realm of instant communication that cannot be surpassed, and this fact alone makes it worth examining. My brother examines these things in a sort of post-postmodern way (at least that is what I gleaned from the WSJ manifesto). In many ways The Tyranny of E-mail seems to be a segue to the next book John Freeman plans to write, a book about suburbia. Mmmmm, I can’t wait for that one.

But in the meantime, here is some of what we can expect from The Tryanny of E-mail:

“A large part of electronic commu­nication leads us away from the physical world. Our cafes, post offices, parks, cinemas, town centers, main streets and commu­nity meeting halls have suffered as a result of this development. They are beginning to resemble the tidy and lonely bedroom commuter towns created by the expansion of the American interstate system. Sitting in the modern coffee shop, you don’t hear the murmur or rise and fall of conversation but the con­tinuous, insect-like patter of typing. The disuse of real-world commons drives people back into the virtual world, causing a feedback cycle that leads to an ever-deepening isolation and neglect of the tangible commons.

This is a terrible loss. We may rely heavily on the Internet, but we cannot touch it, taste it or experience the indescribable feeling of togetherness that one gleans from face-to-face interac­tion, from the reassuring sensation of being among a crowd of one’s neighbors. Seeing one another in these situations reinforces the importance of sharing resources, of working together, of bal­ancing our own needs with those of others. Online, these values become notions that are much more easily suspended to further our own self-interest. Not surprisingly, political movements that begin online must have a real-world component; otherwise they evaporate and dissolve into the blur of other activities.

It is almost impossible to navigate the Web without having to stutter-step around ads and blinking messages from sponsors. In using this tool so heavily, consumers aren’t just frying their attention spans, they’re forfeiting one of the large sources of information that comes from face-to-face interaction and business. A butcher can tell you which cuts of meat are the freshest; an online grocer may not. That same butcher, if he is good, might not just remember your preferences—which an online retailer can do frighteningly well—but ask you how your mother has been doing, whether you caught the latest football game. These interactions remind us that we are more than con­sumers; they remind us that we are part of the world in a way no amount of online shopping ever will.

If we spend our eve­ning online trading short messages over Facebook with friends thousands of miles away rather than going to our local pub or park with a friend, we are effectively withdrawing from the peo­ple we could turn to for solace, humor and friendship, not to mention the places we could go to do this. We trade the com­plicated reality of friendship for its vacuum-packed idea.”

Wow, cool stuff! Keep in mind that I don’t speak for my brother, nor do I entirely care very much about his moral point of view concerning email - I am more interested in the implications of said moral point of view. I myself happen to enjoy the streamlined efficiency of email and its various applications, and I employ it as frequently (albeit as carefully) as possible. But I admit that I am more easily entertained than my brother is. I like things that are new and shiny, I eat at chain restaurants often because I crave predictability and familiarity. I am part of the Dan Brown herd, the  blind following the blind. I do not necessarily think this is a bad thing, I am merely a product of my era much like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were products of their eras. But I also think right now is the best time in human history to be alive, and email is no doubt one of the countless reasons for this.

My brother, however, is a private person. I stopped sending him emails a few years ago after most of them went unanswered. He has little patience for communicating casually in this medium when a phone call might suffice. This is unfortunate because now he is a very hard person to reach. But this goes back to the point Freeman is trying to make in The Tyranny of E-mail about how we don’t need to be available to everyone 24-7 just because the technology exists to make us available all the time. In the “old days” of the 1980’s, doctors, statesmen and hommicide detectives were probably the only ones who might expect to get a page or a phone call in the middle of the night. But having an email account with your workplace might result in employees working long after the work day has ended, which induces faster burnout rates. All of this and more is covered in the book.

My brother mentions words like “speed” and “burnout” in his manifesto in a negative way, and this made me think of something. If some people’s brains are capable of working at extremely high rates of speed, is the technology of email necessarily a bad thing for them to incorporate into their lives? I thought of this because John Freeman is a man who never sleeps, and he doesn’t read books so much as he scans them. He is capable of juggling many tasks at once, like being the unpaid president of the NBCC while also making a living in Manhattan as one of the nation’s most prominent book critics. Freeman is capable of doing and performing so much with only one brain that it begs the question: why does he think we all need to slow down?

I do happen to know that John sometimes spent 2 hours per day answering emails during his tenure as the NBCC president. When I would visit him in New York, he spent the wee morning hours wading through a backlog of emails from all types of people ranging from work associates to fans. Obviously, with this kind of responsibility resting on your shoulders, it is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. As I watched tv or tried to sleep, I was reminded of my brother’s burden by the constant pattering coming from his keyboard. Often I would hear a tap interrupted by a pause, then another tap and a pause. This sound would repeat itself for several minutes as if played in a loop, signaling the authoritative action of an unnecessary or superfluous email message being deleted. The keyboard pattering, by comparison, sounded more optimistic, as if it was a relief for my brother to finally answer a legitimate email after reading nine wasteful ones.

In defense of my brother’s email tormentors, however, and as further evidence of Freeman’s bionic abilities, one could never anticipate what time-zone he was in at any given moment. Hence sending him an email at 3 am California time didn’t seem like such a sin if you might think he is currently in Germany on a cross-cultural tour to promote literature. What an even bigger surprise it must have been for the senders when they got an almost instantaneous reply too! But I couldn’t help thinking as my brother recounted his email nightmare to his family and talked of the book he planned to write about it, that he was somehow encouraging the inundation of virtual mail that consumed so much of his life by replying to just-received messages at 3 in the morning. Obviously this would tell the sender that he was in fact available 24-7, whereas waiting until the next day to read and respond to a new message might be the more wise thing to do if one doesn’t want to be hounded by email. My brother’s workaholic tendencies made him incapable of turning off, and he essentially became a human octopus. I can only wonder what went through his mind as he answered all those emails, what thoughts his brain formulated. He obviously must have discovered the limits and futility of virtual mail, mapping its paramenters as he sat there glued to his chair while his life whizzed by. He probably became adept at pointing out which emails could have easily been spared with a phone call, which ones were too long, too personal, too short.

The result of all this is The Tyranny of E-mail which not only analyzes the whole email phenomenon and tracks the history of written correspondence, but also seeks to edify email users about responsible use of the technology. It should be a good read with far-reaching implications. My last post was about how we need to put limits on what we say and I think it’s a coincidence that my brother has a forthcoming book about imposing limits on our virtual communication habits as well. This definitely is a time for 30-somethings to think more carefully about what they blurt out either in public or online. After all, we are now adults, and becoming an adult requires a lot of slowing down. Maturity means thinking before you say or do something, and the same rules apply to the virtual world. Fast thinking does not have a premium over slower, careful thinking; and in fact, the opposite may be true.

What comes next?

Virgin will soon be closing two of its New York City locations including its flagship store in Union Square. This is because CD sales are nosediving off the charts like– Well, if you have been listening to most of your music on an iPod for the last two years you probably haven’t bought a CD since Radiohead released In/Rainbows. The funny thing about the Virgin closings is that the Union Square store is always buzzing with life (especially during the Christmas rush). A lot of this buzzing is foreign, yes, but it is buzzing nonetheless. If any retail store that sells mostly CDs should stay open as a vestigial reminder of the modern record store phenomenon, it should be the Virgin megastore in Union Square.

I’m sure there is more to be said about this, but I am either too tired or too brain dead to put this latest rash of planned CD retail closings into a larger (and/or personal) context. But I will try:

The world as we know it is constantly changing and will soon be unrecognizable to us young’uns and our children. The northeastern US (in fact a lot of the US) is very old and antiquated compared to California where modern structures dominate the city grids. Only the older architecture in places like Pennsylvania and Connecticut that has been well cared for can respectfully labeled as quaint. Despite the gleaming futuristic skyscrapers that dominate Manhattan’s skyline, many cities in my state of New York contain large sections which were built by previous generations. I used to live in a house that was constructed during the industrial boom of the 1920s. While living in this house I worked in a fabulous building that was erected in 1912. I often used to wonder about the lives of the original dwellers of my house and workplace. Realizing that they have all since passed on, I wonder what they would think if it were possible for them to come back to life. Would they wonder at the strange person who was living in their house? Was I trampling their memories in some way? Disrespecting their sacred places? Dishonoring their legacy.

I often wonder if society is guilty of these transgressions as a whole. When I look at all of the dilapidated buildings which haven’t been preserved I can’t help likening it to a dishonorable burial. Demolishing these eyesores would be as respectful as cremating them. Likewise, caring for them and inhabiting them would be the same as dressing them up like tombs or mausoleums. But to let nature slowly reclaim them somehow seems neglectful.

On a train ride yesterday I got a good view of once grand buildings that are now shuttered with plywood, etched in colorful graffiti and crumbling under the weight of time. Will California someday look like this? Will the hip and trendy tracts of suburbs built during the 1980s one day become ghettos filled with section 8 renters and boarded up drug houses? Will the stylishly modern office parks be converted into non-profit agencies and food banks? Will some of the shiny high rises stand vacant with trees and shrubbery pushing up through the foyers? Will California one day be a state of mostly graveyard cities?

And where will people go to escape all of this? What or where is the next frontier?

I always loved and dreaded going to the Tower Records in Fair Oaks, CA when I was a teenager. I loved it because I could always check out the latest cassette tapes and CDs by the popular bands of the decade. Slayer’s “Seasons in the Abyss.” Metallica’s titular “Black Album.” Jane’s Addiction’s “Nothing’s Shocking.” But I also hated going there because my mom always threw a fit. I had to prepare for whatever unpleasant scene she was going to create just as much as I anticipated the unexpected excitement of deciding which album I was going to buy with my paper route money. Usually her scenes always had something to do with the fact that Tower didn’t take checks. Cash or credit card only. No exceptions.

I think my mom knew this and only started writing a check each time out of spite for the teenager operating the till. “What do you mean I can’t write a check?” she would yell. Heads would start to swivel at the commotion and I would turn red. “I hate– This store– You guys always–,” my mom would stutter searching for the right words to define her indignation. She always left with the same threat of never returning to Tower, and by the time she uttered these words I was sweating from my shame and embarrassment.

My mom won’t have to worry about Tower (and neither will I) because they are no more. The once monolithic record, tape and CD retailer has become just another victim of the Internet and matchbook-sized compendious musical libraries.

The passing of record stores is just another example of how the American landscape has evolved and changed during my lifetime. Just as records changed into cassette tapes, and cassette tapes transformed into CDs, the communal record store is being replaced by the convenient and expeditious Internet. I guess the last domino in this long chain to fall will be the even more communal used record stores. These establishments have attracted a loyal customer base by staying true to the art of music through eschewing high profits and generic commercialism. But once CDs have been milked for all that they are worth, the technology will eventually be retired. Just like the Rubix Cube and Atari before it, the compact disk will soon be relegated to the nostalgia compartment of every body’s memory.

Technology is constantly shrinking and expanding the economy. I always envision the economy as a balloon: when it gets squeezed in one place it bulges out in other places. I’m not sure if this simile is uplifting enough to get you, or me or all of us through this Deep Recession, but it echoes a lot of other familiar sayings.

Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary about the plight of Flint, MI quoted a well-heeled citizen of the city saying, “Get up and get your own motor going, start your own wheels turning.” Basically he meant that people need to realize that the industrial revolution is for the most part over in America. People can either sit around and mope the “good” old days or they can point their compass in a new direction. Several generations who only know how to work with their hands and are familiar with grease and smoke might have a hard time adjusting to books, desks and computer screens. But that is the future. The old ways are in the past and aren’t going to come around again.

Some people are only capable of thinking one way or doing one thing. The American Rust Belt is perfect evidence of this. This has always been a conundrum to me, but in light of these lagging economic times, let’s hope it’s not an omen.

Dreamscape

Last night I dreamed that my brother was on NBC’s Today Show talking with Meredith Vieira to promote his upcoming book about the tyranny of email. Part of their conversation (the only part I remember) went something like this:

Meredith: Do you recommend keeping separate email accounts for business and family? For instance, I have an email account I use for communicating with personal friends and family members, and then I have an email account that I use for work. Will this help us make sense of the flood of email coming in so that it’s not so overwhelming…and also…and so that the emails we actually want to read don’t get buried in all the…in all of the…deluge.

My bro: Well this might help, but I don’t think compartmentalizing email is going to help us get over our dependence on it. You can certainly have an email account for friends and family members, but if you’re going to do that you may as well get a hotmail or yahoo account for junk mail.

You know, every time you sign up to become a member of a web site they require an email account and a password. If I want to read the New York Times online I have to have an email address to set up an account so they can email me my password. But they are also going to send me a bunch of other stuff that I don’t want. It’s the same way with Amtrak, Greyhound and airlines. When I make train reservations I get about 12 different emails: I get an email telling me that my ticket purchase is processing, I get an email saying that my purchase has been confirmed–and so on.

So, you can find a lot of reasons for justifying having 3 or 4 (and in some cases seven or eight) different email accounts. And so, by relying so heavily on this medium, you basically become  a slave to it. Most people I know spend at least an hour a day reading and replying to emails. Many more people spend 2 or 3 hours a day.

Going back to family–I would rather receive a handwritten letter or a postcard from my family members and close friends instead of an email message. Whatever happened to sending postcards? Now I get emails from my friends saying how beautiful London or Paris is. People are sending their Christmas cards via email now! When I was growing up my parents received more than a hundred Christmas letters from their friends and family members scattered across the globe. It was fun to sit and read through all of the letters and look at the pictures. A lot of times there were handwritten personal postscripts included at the bottom of these annual correspondences. And we still have boxes full of these old letters which we have saved. How are you going to save and store a bunch of Christmas card emails. You don’t. That’s the point. Email is a sterile and ephemeral medium.

Meredith: But it’s so tempting, isn’t it? Because it is so much easier to just send an email rather than writing a letter by hand, putting it in an envelope, attaching a stamp, going to the post office–

My bro: [interrupting] –You know Meredith, I recall reading letters from my friends while I was in college. Recalling those times makes me realize that written correspondence is about more than just communicating information. The handwriting of a person, the tear drops on a page and even the smell of somebody’s perfume–all these things can’t be conveyed in an email. A big problem people have with snail mail is that it’s not instant.  Sure, snail mail might not be instant, but does everything have to be?

See, the problem is we want everything right now. We don’t want to wait. If information isn’t up to the minute it is somehow flawed. The reason so many newspapers are starting to change from a paper format to an online one is because news has to be updated every second to keep people’s interest. Somehow 12 hour old news which can’t be edited to include new information somehow seems archaic to our modern impatience.

This is where the dream started to fade out and blend with the actual Today Show which was airing. I had fallen asleep on the couch last night and was waking up to the sun pouring in through the windows. When I looked at the TV screen my brother wasn’t being interviewed by Meredith Vieira. I was a little bit dismayed but also glad as I wouldn’t want to miss my brother’s first — and possibly only — appearance on the Today Show (since I don’t have Tivo I also wouldn’t be able to go back and save what I had just missed).

To Chris at McSweeney’s, this is for you

‘TIS THE SEASON FOR CHRIS

It is that time of year again. People will either be rejoicing or groaning as the familiar rush of shopping, Christmas caroling and eggnog sipping reaches its peak.

In recent years we heard about the War on Christmas, a supposed attempt by capitalist dictators and their willing executioners to transmute the holy celebration of Christ’s birth into a secular and economy boosting season. According to a few paranoid fundamentalists, the mere mention of Christ invokes such a feeling of repulsion in the hearer that big box stores and other institutions have caused expressions such as “Merry Christmas” and (even) “Merry Xmas” to be thrown into the dustbin of holiday phrases forever.

But there is another holiday utterance which flies below the radar of conservative pundit censure. The two words “Merry Chrismas.” Let’s be honest, the t in the word Christmas is elided so often in everyday speech as to almost have become obsolete. Only people who speak English as a second language and elocution teachers (and their star pupils) actually pronounce the word Christmas with phonetic precision.

If Christians have gone on the offensive in recent years attacking big corporations and the media for trying to kill Christmas, why haven’t they ever had a bad thing to say about Chris? Because, if I have been hearing things correctly, people have been saying “Merry CHRISmas” for as long as I can remember. Who is this person Chris who has subverted Christianity’s second holiest holiday? Shouldn’t he be the number 1 target the Christian right should be going after?

For perhaps centuries Chris has injected himself into the tradition of worshipping the Baby Jesus. Maybe this is because Chris was an unloved baby himself, somebody who was coddled by an overworked and non-affectionate au pair instead of by a nurturing mother. Or Chris may have been raised by a single teenage mom who employed shouting threats of violence against his cries for touch. On the other hand, Chris could just be a bitter and vengeful ghost who suffered from gift neglect during his life.

Whatever the reason for this Chris person’s need to be an integral part of every past and future Yuletide season, his relationship to this joyous time of year is inseparable. We may overlook Chris every single time we say “Merry Chrismas” to somebody, but he is still there in our subconscious being passed along to future generations.

I invite all of you to celebrate Chris’s day on December 25^th. Make a place in your heart for Chris when you attend your places of worship, when you go door to door singing songs about him and when the exit greeter at Wal-Mart implies the Chris season without actually saying Chris’s name (or a name similar to Chris’s) so as not to sound presumptuous or offend you.

This is supposed to be the time of year when we all stop and bask in Chris’s transcendent and everlasting glory. But if you find yourself unable to refrain from saying “Merry Chrismas,” please do not feel abashed or hindered. Chris would have wanted it that way.

Parenthood

Another balmy day here. 70 degrees. The wives of rich and powerful men were out jogging, pushing strollers through Central Park or just getting an early start on their Christmas shopping. My cousin gave birth to her second child on Sunday and I will soon have to make the obligatory visit to see her and her new baby. And I don’t even know where she lives. I’m guessing her apartment is in the upper eighties somewhere, but I’m not sure. My brother is sort of the liaison between me and my cousins. Since I’m the baby of the family I mostly get kept in the dark when it comes to relative issues. They all assume I can’t be trusted with even a skein of yarn.

But being the youngest has its perks in terms of being spoiled. I was the first one in my family to have a CD player, a TV with cable in my bedroom and – get this – my parents even let me smoke while I was still in high school (this was actually a trade-off: let him smoke so he won’t have to sneak around to get his cigarettes and get into worse trouble). Another sweet trade-off: my parents let me to have the Playboy channel while I was still in high school to prevent me from bringing the slutty girls home like I used to do when I was 13 and 14. I guess they didn’t want to have an unwanted pregnancy on their hands or – this was the 90s – maybe they were afraid I’d get AIDS. Could you imagine a couple of professional, upper middle class parents trying to persuade the single mother of some girl who lives in an apartment to force her daughter to have an abortion?

My dad: Tim and Katie are both too young for this so I think it would be in everybody’s best interest to terminate the pregnancy.

Katie’s Mom: (looks at Katie) What do you think, Katie?

Katie: I want ma baby. She ma baby.

Katie’s Mom: (looks back at my dad) She want her baby.

My dad: (shaking head) I really think the long-term fallout from this will be something that Tim and Katie won’t be prepared to deal with–

Katie’s Mom: Katie said she want her baby.

My dad: But–

Katie: (becoming excited) I want my baby!!! Nobody’s killing ma baby!!!

My dad: (turns to me) Tim, what do you want?

Me: I don’t know.

There you have it. Let your children look at porn. Some of the male actors now use condoms so they are setting a good example in addition to providing escapist, fantasy entertainment for millions of young single guys with raging hormones. If parents have a religious objection to porn they can always drop their teenager off at a local senior center for three hours every Sunday. True Lies starring Jamie Lee Curtis can also substitute as porn (soft core) as well. A parent can leave a copy of this DVD is plain sight and then tell their teenager that they are going to a PTA meeting and won’t be back for at least two hours.

OK, mom. Bye.

where fantasy meets reality (or vice versa)

I had to post these pictures because I’ve been dying to share them with somebody…anybody. In my vicarious TV life I live somewhere in Southern California (maybe on the yacht below) and I am employed in commercial real estate; or maybe I’m a bar tender who moonlights as a sleuth; or better yet I’m a secret agent with amnesia and a double life.

Anyway, my uncle and aunt – who live in northern CA – recently vacationed in LA and they sent me these exotic pictures of their trip.

This is a yacht that was anchored at a wharf in Marina del Ray. My aunt commented that, “This person is so wealthy that he has his own helicopter on the back of his yacht,” and that, “It has a British flag on the stern.” I thought, maybe this is what Pierce Brosnan uses to get back and forth between LA and his home in Hawaii? (I know he’s Irish so the Union Jack wouldn’t exactly work with my conjecture–oh well). No, it belongs to an American. This guy actually.

I love Venice Beach. I was there in 2007 with both of my brothers and a sister-in-law. If you’re wondering where all the Dead Heads went after the Grateful Dead and Phish broke up, they’re all camped out at Venice Beach. The boardwalk is bordered by shops and kiosks selling and offering a gamut of tattoos, massages, piercings, tee-shirts, pipes, art work and palm reading. Hardcore burnouts and unique colorful characters throng the place every day. Think Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley only with nicer weather, a sprawling beach and friendlier hippies.

This guy is a Venice Beach icon. He has been playing tunes at the beach for 30 years. He sells CDs of his music, he has been featured in movies and – weirdly – I saw him in the parking lot party at a Grateful Dead concert in Sacramento, CA in 1992 (Shhhhhh–I was 15 at the time and wasn’t supposed to be there).

But Venice Beach isn’t only the haunt of hippies. Tourists, jocks (Muscle Beach), surfers, gangsters/rappers, dog walkers, Frisbee throwers and even celebrities (my brother saw Vince Vaughn and his girlfriend riding bikes) all congregate to the place to make it one of the hugest cluster fucks on the West Coast. But unlike cluster fucks the place is mostly functional. Some of the nastiest bathrooms in the Western hemisphere might be situated at Venice Beach, but they place still scores highly as a popular hangout for everybody and anybody.

Rich people also can claim Venice Beach as their own. All the houses and apartments that line the boardwalk look like the domiciles on the show Miami Vice. If you have a couple million to lay down on a home, you might be able to get something modest at Venice Beach.

This is looking south at Pismo Beach. This is not Venice Beach but rather this is the hotel where my uncle and aunt stayed on their trip. From the photo it looks very nice, the swimming pool so close to the ocean looks superfluous and excessive. But my aunt was quick to point out that the place reeked of guano. Seagulls nesting on the cliffs nearby saturated the air with guano smell and attracted swarms of flies. The sunbather in the photo, however, doesn’t seem to mind.

Here is a better picture of the guano.

And here is the British diva Faith Brown (I just had to include this).

So that is the real LA. Not too different from the fantasy LA I imagine myself living in. Only my vicarious world is more exciting. In real life I might leisurely stroll down the Venice boardwalk and marvel at the thonged black dude who enlessly lifts weights at Muscle beach. But in my vicarious life I would be on my cell phone talking to Faith Brown about our secret affair when suddenly the thonged black dude would point at me, flex his muscles and say in an accusatory voice, “You!” I would look in the other direction before looking back at him. Then I would point at my chest and ask, “Me?” “That is right, YOU!” he would repeat.

Cut to nightime. I am sifting through the garbage near MuslceBeach for clues. That is when I find a needle with the words “monotricholride dietholnol” printed on the side. I would think to myself, Hm, this is the performance enhancing drug I read about in the paper that was being smuggled to the baseball players at UCLA by their coach. Just then my cell phone would ring and it would be Faith Brown. She would say the words, “Mr Pecksniff is hungry” and instantly I wouldn’t know where I was. Or rather, I would come to and wonder why I was wearing ridiculous clothes and sifting through the garbage at Venice Beach.

Then I would meet Faith Brown back at our yacht in Marina del Rey. We would sail out to sea, stand at the stern under the stars with the Union Jack flapping in the breeze above us. It wouldn’t smell like guano. We would toast our cocktail glasses, get in our helicopter and fly to an imaginary island where androgynous children our born and raised before being released into the world on their 18th birthday.

On communication breakdowns and being real

BERT: “Is anyone else tired of hipsters and their oh-so-precious attitudes? You know the type I’m talking about, right? Their life is all about irony, and kitsch, and pseudo-intellectual babbling, which in reality hides how insecure they are. I mean, do these types actually know how to have a conversation, or is it all about their rhetoric and talking down to you?”

ERNIE: “I know what you mean. The polarization of wealth and power in this country has created two conversational extremes. On the one hand there are the sophisticated people who like to listen to themselves talk, and on the other there are the ignorant people who grunt and mumble the occasional word or two.

I don’t think it’s actually a case of black and white, however. People have varying degrees of intelligence and a diverse range of interests and values. But when people buy into stereotypes and homogenization personality structures begin to break down and we start to act in accordance with expectations. I think this is bad for human relations and the rugged individualism which is a cornerstone of the American way of life.

We are supposed to be a nation of free-thinkers and free-spirits, but lately a lot of people have been playing follow the leader.”

BERT: “You are exactly the kind of person I’m talking about. Listen to how self-important and ridiculous you sound.”

ERNIE: Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!!!

The Next Step

I read an essay today in the September issue of Esquire which touched on the prolonged adolescence phenomenon or what the author called the boy-man or girl-woman phenomenon. Judging by the tone of the essay it seems the author doesn’t think prolonged adolescence is a healthy thing.  Prolonged adolescence, in the author’s opinion (God, I wish I could remember the guy’s name), goes beyond forty and fifty-somethings getting tattoos and listening to rock music. No. The criterion for adulthood is being redefined, he says. Prolonged adolescence is enabled and empowered by (and I am paraphrasing here) wealth, leisure and talent. Thirty-somethings are now making enough money and have the education, talent and free-time to live out all of their teenage fantasies (which I assume would be having sex with a porn star and beating their friends at all night, Red Bull induced sessions of Guitar Hero 3 or 4…or whatever). The End Times are surely upon us.

In my opinion the essay was offensive on so many levels. Author guy is a generational chauvanist. At one point he stated how writers like Dave Eggers are embodiments of the boy-man phenomenon. His condescending summation of Egger’s novels attempted to prove this point but only proved that author guy has never even read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or What is the What? (the two Eggers novels he mentions). Sorry author guy. Name dropping doesn’t make you sound smart.

Secondly, author guy’s essay (I wish I could remember the title) was so desultory that I had a hard time connecting the various historical and artistic leaps he makes to the overall theme of thirty-somethings being stuck in a protracted adolescence or (even) childhood. He jumps from Where the Wild Things Are to the band Arcade Fire and then travels back in time to mention some (perhaps Renaissance period ) pedophiliac masterpiece. He finally ends with an explanation of why we love to see celebrities like Briney Spears and Lindsey Lohan dissolve before our very eyes every night on TV and in the tabloid. These topical gymnastics only prove that author guy should be trying out for the literary Olympics rather than trying to encapsulate a popular and troubling trend in a chichi style magazine.

There you have it. An essay by some guy in September’s issue of Esquire available at newsstands now.

I will concede with author guy, however, that there does seem to be an overall reluctance among many twenty and thirty-somethings to grow up. This has been obvious for many years now. Take a look at some of the beer cans being sold these days. I have a hard time distinguishing the newer beer can designs from the logos on the caffeinated energy drinks. Or consider the fact that Conan O’Brien is replacing Jay Leno when Leno still has another ten or fifteen good years left in him. If this is not NBC’s ploy to cater to the sophomoric humor of a swelling younger audience, I don’t know what is. The more sophisticated antics of Leno will have to find an outlet on (hopefully) ABC or some other network.

The trend in people living longer will utlimately mean more brand and pop-culture choices for everybody. Author guy never mentioned this. I assume he will always be brooding because in ten years forty-somethings will not be lining up to purchase tickets for the ballet and most of them will prefer George Carlin over Garrison Keeler. Oh, c’mon author guy! What’s so bad about this New World Order? Haven’t you ever heard the expression, “the more things change, the more they stay the same?”

In my own life I am still trying to reconcile my attachment to my sheltered existence with the reality of my actual age. At a certain point one must take the reins of their life and assume the onus of mature responsibility. I am at least half the way to being fully in charge of everything but the progress has been truncated in the past so that I am what one could call a “late bloomer.” This is not such a bad thing to be in a decade when many thirty-somethings still live at home with mom and dad and are working toward that ever-ellusive college degree. Others earn their degrees, move in with mom and dad again and continue to work at hourly jobs.

The reluctance to grow up for many of us probably stems from having happy childhoods. When we were younger our parents provided for our every need. All we had to do was play video games and watch MTV while are mothers supplied us with endless plates of Tostitos Pizza Roles and Texas Toast. Our fathers were less visible, often coming home later in the evening from their hard day at the office. They are more present in our memories of family vacations to theme parks and beaches. After all, they paid the mortgages on the houses we lived in and they paid the electric bill so we could watch Beavis & Butthead and eat microwave nachos. Who wouldn’t want this kind of life to not go on forever? The fun-filled shared memories so many of us have is the reason why we don’t want to leave this magical place either physically or mentally. I bet author guy would be lying if he said he didn’t surround himself with things that remind him of his childhood and adolescence. I am angry at author guy for bashing the childhoods and adolescences of gen X-ers just because they are different from his 1960s childhood and adolescence. Shame on you, author guy for being a generational chauvinist. But, if it’s any consolation, I am guilty of the same thing. I automatically have less respect for teenagers who have never heard of Pearl Jam or who can’t name either of the 2 American presidents during the 1980s.

The whole point of this post was to provide a link to the movie I made which conveys my fear of taking that next big step in life. I know the transition from adolesence/young-adulthood to adulthood happens in stages and can take several years to be fully realized. But I have yet to make one of the biggest leaps which will places me further away from my sheltered years than ever before. I have a huge chasm to cross and in some ways I am afraid that once I cross it I can never go back. I am talking about making the transition from marginal employment (i.e. per diem, hourly, fragmented and low-wage employment, etc.) to a full-time salaried job with good fringe benefits. In a lot of ways this is the threshold to that vague “rest of our lives” we imagine in our more callow years. In a lot of ways it is a big unknown and this is one of the reasons why it is so scary. I have been planning this next step for a long time with no small amount of procrastination and wavering and with some mixed successes along the way to note.

This video is my latest artistic attempt to work through the doubts, worries and fears I’ve been having about taking this giant leap. It was so long that I had to upload it in two parts and it even includes an intermission with advertisements and everything. I also employed tongue and cheek references from my past and used photos of my cousin. People who know me may be able to spot these little tidbits.

I may not be any more artistically or intellectually gifted than author guy, but at least I am aware of this fact and can laugh at myself because of it. So…without further ado. Here is my video in two parts, dedicated in this post to author guy.