Asshole of the Century

Rage

2012-02-14T06:47:00.000-08:00

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thus spoke Dylan Thomas in probably his most famous poem, written to his dying father. This is, I think, the only truly human approach to death. Until the very end, of course, when it finally grabs you, and sucks the last bit of hope from your soul, when you are finally ready to give up your ghost, and in that surrender you find what we are led to believe is an overwhelming feeling of peace. But until that final moment, anyone worth their salt is going to fight that mutherf*cker for all they are worth.

I’m not a big fan of group projects. And I’m also not very comfortable with public discussions of things that the folks in my family, the descendents of Oakies who had stoically scraped out hardscrabble lives on this continent for centuries, have tended to keep to ourselves. Things like our own suffering. But I married into a bunch of Midwestern Catholics, and I’ve learned that they handle strong emotions in a different way than how I was raised. I don’t think either way is inherently better or worse than the other. Just different. But I’ve learned to respect my new family for their honest expression of strong feelings. In this vein I, along with 29 other bloggers, have been asked by Sheila Quirke, my cousin-in-law, to write a brief commemoration of Donna Quirke Hornik, her daughter, who passed away a little over a year ago, at the age of four, from a rare form of brain cancer.

Actually, I’m not going to tell you much about Donna. I really didn’t know her that well, at least not nearly as well as a lot of good folks who’ve already written very eloquent testimonials about her. Rather, I want to talk about the rest of us still living and breathing on this planet.

“I could have been someone,” laments Shane MacGowan in “The Fairy Tale of New York,” to which Kirsty MacColl responds, “Well so could anyone.” Which gets to the heart of our existential tragedy, MacCool a siren for all of our fates.

Life, probably all life, but certainly all individual human lives, including mine and yours, is both ecstasy and tragedy rolled into one another, the tragedy precisely that there is so much beauty to experience, there is so much truth that we feel compelled to tell, there are so many good things that we want to get done, that as we squander our allotted time in the light, the momentous heaviness of those wasted opportunities becomes almost too much to bear. We all have experienced those seemingly cruel twists, those moments when it becomes clear that great chunks of our potential will never be realized. But this is especially true of 4-year old girls who die of cancer.

We all have our own ways of raging against the dying of the light. For my cousin Sheila, this has become quite personal, as it is also a rage against the dying of the light of her daughter. As long as Sheila lives, she is determined not to let that happen.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Sheila is determined not to be that type of “good” person, the one who looks back in lament at the frailness of her deeds. Rather, she is making her own green bay, in which the light of her daughter may continually dance. She is hosting a benefit for St. Baldrick's Foundation, which raises money for pediatric cancer research, and you can support her, if you are so inclined, by going to Donna's Good Things.

Fascists for the New Millennium

2012-01-19T19:43:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Meritocracy. We as a culture have become increasingly comfortable with the notion that everyone should be free to rise as high as their merit can take them, to the point where, in many circles, this idea is now a given. Perversely, we have also become a much more bureaucratic and conformist society over the past 50 years, one that can process only a pinched and narrow vision of merit, leaving the test takers and the product makers as the grand winners in our evolving societal bargain.

In politics, the folks who now run this country, people like Michael Bloomberg, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emmanuel, et al., increasingly come from a rarified and specific class, that of the educated elite. While their birth places and backgrounds are varied, the one constant, no matter what their roots, is that most of our current leaders graduated from the same small coterie of Ivy League schools. By and large, these are men and women who knew what they wanted at a very early age. These were the kids who sat at the front of the class, who always turned their homework in on time. They were go-getters at a time in their lives when most of their classmates were still just getting comfortable with their bodies, their world, and how they were going to navigate their place within it. And I guess we should congratulate these folks for their precocious talent. But we also need to recognize it is a very narrow range of personality that wins this game, specifically a type of person who can fixate on the tangible means to wealth and power by mid-adolescence, if not earlier.

There was a time, not that long ago, when a great man could reveal his merit at some later stage in his life, but that world has largely disappeared. Yale graduate (Obama), Yale graduate (George W.), Rhodes scholar (Clinton), Yale graduate (the elder Bush): Our Presidents are symbols of the possible, and these are the men we have elected to run our country for the past 23 years. And now, it looks like we will soon be able to choose between which of two graduates from the Harvard Law School, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, will be our commander-in-chief for the coming four years.

And it isn’t just the Presidency, or even politics in general, where this is true. In a variety of fields, from the bowels of corporate America to the creative arts, it seems that a degree from a top-tier university has become an increasingly necessary calling card. I can speak as a journalist. A couple of generations back, journalism was still a working man’s profession. Sure, some reporters had a journalism degree from a major university, but many others were brought up through the ranks, from street hawker to cub reporter to newshound to columnist to bureau chief. But for at least the past couple of decades, the established news organizations have placed more and more emphasis on a strong academic pedigree. When I worked for a financial newswire, almost all of my peers had Master’s degrees from a prestigious journalism program, either tony schools on the eastern seaboard or highly regarded Midwestern institutions like Michigan, Missouri, or Northwestern. And, at least at the lower levels of the profession, what we earned didn’t even come close to justifying that kind of personal or societal expenditure. I personally was able to buck this trend and land a job despite the fact that I got my degree from a lowly teacher’s college, namely Northeastern Illinois University. But my boss hailed from Australia, a country where commoners are still respected, and I suspect that is part of the reason she gave me a chance, as I have little doubt that most American-raised bureau chiefs would have taken one look at my resume and dropped it into the circular file.

I have long put Michael Bloomberg, both the individual and the politician as well as the news corporation that bears his name, at the avant garde of this new age of meritocracy. As a journalist, I heard too many stories about his demanding standards and his enormous ego, how it was company policy to hire two people for the same position, place them at opposite ends of the office, and then summarily fire the one that showed the lesser promise within his or her first few days on the job. And I knew that resumes and pedigree always meant a lot in their corporate culture, and that this could be traced all the way back to the Man himself.

Their basic argument is simple, and on the surface at least somewhat compelling: In an interconnected world where there are thousands of potential employees for any particular position, a large corporation needs a simple heuristic with which to sort the wheat from the chaff. By inculcating managers to look for a prestigious degree as a prerequisite for that first interview, the corporation may lose a little wheat in the initial sorting, but it will also get rid of a lot of chaff, the assumption being that anyone who can get into an Ivy League school in this day and age is, at the very least, not a blooming idiot.

I admit that in some ways this may just be sour grapes. I staked my life on the rather indolent, hippy-fried notion that pursuing your true path was not just what mattered in life but was also the best way to have influence. Growing up as a kid in 1970’s California, we were all trained to be little transcendentalists. If we wanted to have meaning and purpose, first we had to go off and explore the world and get to know ourselves. Sure, that was all a crock, but so is the facile meritocracy we have become.

Now, if the only downside to the iron grip of our contemporary meritocracy is that just a narrow band of academic workhorses are being recognized by the established social institutions, you would probably be correct in regarding this as at worst an acceptable misfortune. But what this new meritocracy has been doing to our country is more sinister than that. From the NYPD’s late-night assault on the Occupy Wall Street camps to the city’s aggressive harassment of cigarette smokers and recreational pot users (for which a whopping 50,000 arrests were made across NYC in 2010), the supposedly tolerant Mayor Bloomberg has, if anything, looked to put an even tighter rein on the city’s lifestyle than did the more openly oppressive Giuliani administration. Similarly, Rahm Emmanuel is currently seeking city council approval to further restrict free speech rights ahead of Chicago’s hosting of the G8 summit this May.

Bloomberg and Emmanuel are fascists for the New Millennium. They are totalitarians who also happen to believe in gay rights, progressive urban planning, and the perfectibility of man. They may be assholes, but they’re our assholes. At least so they want you to believe.

The new meritocracy is creating a brave new world, and they are doing it for your own good. As the Dead Kennedys presciently quipped about an imagined President Jerry Brown over 30 years ago: “Zen fascists will control you/ 100% natural/ You will jog for the master race/ and always wear a happy face.”

Health, happiness, and tolerance have become cultural obligations. And if after your trip to Whole Foods and the yoga studio you are still lacking in either of the first two of these, don’t worry, whatever your malady, they probably have a pill for it. And don’t be surprised if a tolerance pill is on the way. Or more feasibly, some geneticist will uncover an intolerance gene, and we will shuffle all the kids with the gene off to Tolerance Camp, where they have their ways to make you into an acceptable citizen.

My biggest problem with many of my progressive friends is that they continually mistake symmetry of belief for nobility of soul. So they repeatedly fall for the appeal of, or at the very least tolerate, the likes of a Michael Bloomberg, a John Edwards, a Jon Corzine, power hungry egotists whose antics should have sent off their bullshit detectors years ago.

After years of playing their game, I’m starting to come around to the belief that the Meritocracy which increasingly runs the United States of America poses the gravest threat in my lifetime to our country’s long-held freedoms. As far as the meritocrats are concerned, a vigorous dissent from their policies is not conducive to any of their larger societal goals. Dissent is messy. And inefficient. Within the absolute surety of their fevered minds, they probably don’t understand why we inefficient little beings won’t just submit to their vision of the world. Little wonder they are trying to slowly but firmly squash us.

Sympathy for the Demon

2012-01-03T00:28:00.000-08:00

Southern California is a land that eats its young. If I were to stretch my net wide enough, the list of my peers who are now dead would be as long as my arm, and if I were to expand the list to include those who are now but a hollow shell of their former selves, it would be like a photographic negative of the stars in the heavens, an almost numberless recitation of lives lost, of potentials unfulfilled.

I’ve yet to read a book that better captures the manic desperation of my time than Jack Grisham’s “An American Demon,” of the existential dichotomy that everything was possible but that nothing was right. The Orange County punk scene, circa 1980, was a white hot blast of unrivalled aggression, a dagger to the throat of a complacent suburbia where broken families, drug addiction, and a hollow materialism were hidden behind the smiling façade of the endless California summer.

Most of us were a little crazy, and some were just plain fucked. I had a friend named Rob who one day dyed his hair canary yellow, superglued devil horns onto his scalp, spray-painted a black swastika on his surfboard, and told me he was about to head to the beach with a blackjack in his bag, looking for a fight. Just about anything was a good reason for bloodshed, but jocks and “hippies,” which essentially meant the old school surfers who didn’t like the punk kids on their beach, were particular targets of abuse. From the cops to the jocks to the bikers to the Mexican gangsters, we took them all on. And lived to tell the tale. Well, most of us. At least for awhile.

Jack Grisham was one of the leaders of this new wave of crazy beach kids. He was also the lead singer for Vicious Circle and TSOL, bands who developed a big following in the scene. While he may have been a first class asshole, Jack Grisham was also kind of a hero of mine. I was a scrawny kid from honors class who, predictably enough, hated to get hit and was not much good in a fight. At the time, there was a large crew of very large guys, many of them football players from Edison High School, known as the Crop Dusters (a “crop” being slang for short hair), who would drive around the coast of central Orange County, looking for punk kids to beat up. I would flip them off, of course, and get real mouthy. But once they got out of their cars and started their approach, I’d turn tail and run for all I was worth, at least if I was by myself. Now, if I was with a crew, that was a different story. I got pretty good at being a set-up man, looking some guy in the eye while my buddy cut his legs out from under him and then giving the fallen jock a swift kick to the skull. But one-on-one, I was just another lit school pussy.

Jack Grisham wasn’t one of these turn-tail punks. The night when the Vicious Circle crew routed a band of Crop Dusters at the river jetty, sending most of them to the hospital, was a legend we all knew (and one that is recalled by Grisham in his memoir). If an accompanying legend was that the VC’s, as part of an induction ceremony, stripped a young girl naked, tied her up, stuffed her private parts with raw hamburger, and then let a Doberman loose on her to do its worst, well it was abhorrent, of course, but these devils were our devils, and pretty damn good in a fight.

One of the great things about punk is that it is both decentralized and local, making it pretty easy to have direct contact with your heroes. I’d meet Jack at parties. We even had a couple of good conversations. He was smart and personable. So when Jack would get on stage, I could honestly look up there and say, “I know that guy, and he’s pretty cool.” Even if he was also a misogynist, a thief, and a thug.

When the L.A. press first stumbled onto the crazy, violent, destructive scene that was boiling up at south suburban beach clubs like the Fleetwood and the Cuckoo’s Nest, many were incredulous. Few of these writers were native Angelenos, and they struggled to make sense out of where this scene had come from. Weren’t Californians supposed to be mellow, laid back, go-with-the-flow kinds of folks? How could we get so angry living near the beach? They didn’t understand who we were, of course.

When I was growing up in the 1970’s, Orange County was largely populated by the children of Oakies. My generation was the children of these children, the 3rd generation of Scotch-Irish fucks to live in the warm California sun. Couple this with the 1970’s notion of personal license, where most parents were too busy “doing their own thing” to raise their children, and we were the result. We are what happens when you take a bunch of defiant Celts, place them in a sunny land, feed them well and give them decent dental care, but also deracinate them and take away most of their cultural bearings. What happened was HB 1979. And Jack Grisham was our poster child.

I’ve always had a problem with literary nastiness. You shouldn’t be able to talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk. When someone like Bret Easton Ellis evokes an unblinking portrait of violence, it makes me want to pull him into a back alley and hit him over the head with a tire iron. But I don’t have that problem with the memoirs of Jack Grisham, because the guy is the real deal. Now, I can’t vouch for how autobiographical this “memoir” actually is, as it begins with the idea that Grisham has been inhabited by a demon. So let’s just say that Grisham takes a bit of license in portraying his life. And he also misses why we were so angry, blaming it on irrelevancies like Ronald Reagan and the Contras. Sorry Jack, none of us really gave a crap about politics. It was just an excuse, a vehicle to express our pent-up rage. The actual reason we were angry was because our ancestors had toiled for generations to get us to where we were, and we were told that this was the Good Life, but we were offered nothing: No purpose, no meaning, nothing real at all, nothing but a hollow materialism and a prepackaged notion of youth. And the beach. We were offered the beach. Which was nice. But everything human around us pretty much sucked.

Jack Grisham was one of those guys who could stand up on stage and get his fans to do almost anything. But I tell you what I wanted him to do. Towards the end of one of TSOL’s sold-out shows at the Cuckoo’s Nest, after we had routed all the bouncers and the hippies and the wanna be cowboys at Zubies next door, I wanted Jack to tell us that we should all go down to South Coast Plaza and burn that fucker down. It would be our way of saying that the stupid consumer society they were offering us was unacceptable. And it would have scared the shit out of a whole lot of people. It would have been glorious.

Instead, what we witnessed was a long, slow decay, both individually and collectively, a decay which is lived out in Grisham’s memoir. Grisham would set up scene after scene of depravity, and I kept telling myself, “Oh no, he’s not really gonna do that, is he?” And then the tale would head somewhere even worse. Destructive relationships, mind-numbing bouts of violence, alcohol and drug addiction, a general fall from grace; it’s an oft-told tale, but this is not a typical celebrity tell-all book. In the first place, Grisham wasn’t living the high life; he was increasingly broke and still living with his mom in a nondescript tract home on the flats of Long Beach. And he was convinced that he was possessed by a demon.

When I wasn’t horrified by Grisham’s actions, I found myself laughing with him, like at one point during his steep decline, as he was driving to his job at the “University Club” section of the young men’s clothing department in The Broadway, dressed in a dorky pastel polo shirt and wearing a name tag, when a car full of tough guys forced this seeming dork off to the shoulder of the 405 Freeway. Grisham gets out of his car, pulls a sawed-off shotgun from under his seat, and unloads a round of buckshot into the other car as they were stopped right there on the side of the freeway.

Then there are the odd sidebars of cosmogony, all justified by the fact that, hey, the narrator is a demon, so he has an up-front purview and can thus state as a matter of fact that all men go to God when they die, while demons are reincarnated, at least until the point that the “Not-Quite,” as Grisham refers to his demonic overlord, doesn’t need them anymore (at which point the demon simply ceases to exist). Also, he posits that men crave alcohol because it is a “synthetic God,” thus replacing and supplanting our own innate desire for a connection with the real thing. Then, after these bits of amateur theology, it’s back to vandalizing churches and screwing underage girls. So it is an odd book, a bit of a crazy quilt. But I liked it in part because of that.

I left Los Angeles in 1988 and moved to Chicago. I left for a lot of reasons, but probably the biggest was that I had gotten too immersed in the Hollywood music scene, which was becoming a dead-end road littered with victims of addiction, delusion, and plain old bad luck. I needed to find somewhere else to call home. But I still visited Southern California every year. And while most of my close friends are still alive, and many have found their niche, on seemingly every visit I would find out about one or two more folks from the scene who had kicked the bucket. This has been going on for over 20 years now. And these aren’t just due to the normal, expected causes of death. Sure, there has been the usual share of drug overdoses and suicides, but there have also been a lot of weird deaths, from drowning to a violent mugging to getting run over by a freight train. It is like the entire town lives under a bad moon. There are a lot of things that I love about Chicago, but perhaps the most inviolable is the fact it gave me another home away from all that shit.

Like a lot of us back in the day, Jack Grisham also tried to escape. At one point, he briefly moved up to Alaska, a move noted in his memoirs, but he hated the isolation and the cold and was soon back at his parents’ house in Long Beach. And there he remained, spiraling steadily downward, until he wound up crawling into a concrete sewage pipe that ran underneath a local park, contemplating the idea of slitting his wrists and ending it all right then and there. Then he thought about his estranged daughter, crawled back out of the drainpipe, and decided to live.

One of the problems with playing music in L.A. was that it had become a very cliquish scene. There was always a notion that style mattered, to the point where it became hard to imagine the next relevant thing. A lot of bands foundered on these shores, TSOL included. They did a glam/goth album, followed by something a little more metal. And while some of their individual songs were good, the band seemed to be thrashing around in a failed search for a new identity. So when I listened to Jack sing about depression or suicide on songs like "Beneath the Shadows", "I'm Tired of Life", or "Flowers at the Door," I assumed that he was just trying on another one of his personas. I now know that he wasn’t just trying to speak for the confused kids in his audience; he was one of us, another victim.

It seems every other prominent new writer these days hails from the same five-square mile patch of Brooklyn, channeling the same zeitgeist, or at the very least sitting in the same coffee houses. But most of the books I’ve enjoyed most over the past couple of years have come from someplace else and been written by a comparative amateur. I find Grisham’s somewhat confused narrative style appealing. It sure beats another dish of polished tripe fed to you by some MFA grad. And unlike a lot of folks, Jack Grisham has stayed put, making a life amongst the non-descript tract homes of suburbia. He has written an inspired tale about my homeland. I wish him well.

Kissing Under the Mistletoe Mindtrap

2011-12-25T22:04:00.000-08:00

One of the annoying things about being a parent is how we willingly clump ourselves into a generational herd, mooing and lowing our approval of the same products and huffing our disapproval, mostly under our breaths and in whispered tones, at those who choose to ignore the collective wisdom and do things their own way. I sometimes find myself falling into this mind trap, at least metaphorically clucking my tongue at the fits and foibles of a fellow mom or dad, and listening with eagerness at every tip of advice, from parenting techniques to product reviews. I’m also pretty sure that my own parenting techniques have been at the butt end of some of these collective guffaws, as I have shown absolutely no interest in doing some of the things that are expected these days from any right-thinking parent, like blending my own organic baby food (a practice that seems to have become almost de rigueur in some circles). Also, our 3-year old son’s bedtime is somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00 PM, and I’m sure this is probably considered negligent, or at the least a little bit loopy, by many parents (although I prefer to think that we are simply operating on Brazilian time).

A lot of this parental group-think is probably a necessary survival technique, particularly for first-time parents, as we seek to glean a few tips on how to navigate the shoals of bringing another soul into this world. But then I’ll look up from my position in the herd and see that we’ve all moseyed onto the same patch of rocky ground, seemingly for no other reason than the folks around us were doing the same thing. And I rarely feel more like this than during the Christmas season, which is a collective mind-fuck to begin with.

When I started hearing some of my fellow parents talk about “elf on a shelf,” my initial bovine instinct was one of fear that I was about to be left behind by the herd. I felt a brief pang of guilt that here was some crucial component of contemporary childhood that I had been denying my son, followed by the equally urgent instinct to wonder: “Where can I get one of those things?” Then I actually found out what an “elf on a shelf” was, and how much one cost (beginning somewhere well north of $20, at least if my sources are correct), and I began to wonder why I actually needed to shell out that kind of cash for a glorified doll. And when I began listening to how parents were moving this overpriced doll around their house and having it “follow” their children, under the guise that the elf was going to be “reporting to Santa,” I began to get a little creeped out. Maybe Elf on a Shelf is one of those mass neuroses, like Rolfing, or key parties, whose dysfunction only becomes clear in retrospect.

So I have put “Elf on a Shelf” in the same place where “Go the Fuck to Sleep” resides, as a cultural phenomena of my generation of parents that I have chosen to ignore. Nothing personal, but I just don’t get why we as a culture have all of a sudden gotten incredulous, bordering on apoplectic, that our children don’t just want to run off and hop into bed when it would be most convenient for us. Nor do I get why I’d want to try and convince my child that a stuffed elf was watching him, and that he better be “good” if he wants any Christmas presents. Sorry, but I’m not playing this game. Especially with $30 as the price of entry.

That being said, I love Christmas. I love the family element. I love the Christian ritual. I love the echoes of a pagan bacchanalia. It’s all good to me, with the possible exception of the crooning post-war treacle and the Santa kitsch. And here’s why:

Nordic Midwinter Fest: At its base, Christmas is a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, looking forward to longer days and the warming of the sun. A lot of Christmas imagery combines the sacred and the pagan, and some, for instance the Christmas tree, are more pagan than not. The evergreen tree is brought in to the home as a promise of nature’s renewal. Sure, it also alludes to Christ’s own promise of eternal life, but at its essence, the Christmas tree is gussified nature worship, with the lit decorations an echo of the stars outside and of the returning sun. It is a symbol that echoes back to some midwinter orgy after everyone had drunk a yard of mead. The midwinter drinking fest is a grand legacy of the Northern European tribes, a 3,000-year tradition that invites family, friends and guests to an extended toast around the fire, creating the kind of bonds that served these people well when they’d hop in a boat the following spring and go pillage the country next door.

Christian Ritual: If the Christmas tree is actually pagan, the nativity scene and the Advent calendar remain predominantly Christian symbols (although even here a lot of the imagery is a bundled mess). And a lot of the grand old hymns come right out of the traditional Christian liturgy. I think I’d love many of these songs even if I were not a man of faith. Emotionally, many are a mix of triumph and foreboding, of grandeur combined with simple joy. “Fall on your knees and hear the angels rejoicing, O night, O holy night, When Christ was born,” the song soars, its joy leavened by a fear of the weight of the moment. Like the three wise men, we are all, regardless of ideology or creed, welcome to rejoice in Christ’s birth which, like the birth of each and every child, holds all the promise of human possibility, a divinity that, at least on this day, is reflected in the pagan bonfire as surely as those of the Sacraments.

Hearth and Family: Most of these traditions are really a more recent addition to the more ancient rituals of both the pagan and the Christian church. Many date back less than 200 years. Even such a seemingly venerable tradition as Santa coming down the chimney was just a gimmick created in the 19th Century, the co-option of older symbols in an attempt to make the home seem like where it’s at, an only partly successful effort to lure men back to their families, rather than having them go out on Christmas night and “wassailing” with their buds. This appeal of the hearth remains at the heart of the contemporary American Christmas. Christmas is an invitation into the joys of domesticity, where we can look around at the home and the family we have created and see that it is all good.

Fun and Kitsch: I guess I have the biggest problem with this fourth lure of the contemporary American Christmas. I’m just not into the ostentatious display of goods. I’m not into breathy middle aged men, generally sounding like they are at least two martinis to the wind, warbling about presents, and city lights, and snow. I’m not into music being sung with your jazz hands out. But I like Christmas parties in spite of all that. I like downing a few drinks and hanging out with the boss’ wife, or one of the secretaries, and listening to them complain about some authority figure or how excited they were to see “Million Dollar Quartet.”

These joys, from the transcendent to the transitory, from the passionate to the mundane, are why I eagerly dive each year into these holiday rituals, as full as they are of ideological contradiction, societal expectations, and collective group-think. I do it, in short, because these rituals are both beautiful and true, and they enrich my life.

None of Us is as Dumb as All of Us

2011-10-16T18:28:00.000-07:00

“Never trust any movement that requires large gatherings of its followers to be effective.”

Thus spake the Asshole of the Century in my initial manifesto, a two-sided, one-page Xeroxed declaration to the world, titled “Purity Rules for the New Millennium,” which I stuck in book stores and coffee shops around Chicago, circa 1995. And I still find these words to live by.

I had my spurts of youthful rebellion, where I was carried away by the passions of the crowd. As a punk rocker in the early-1980’s, my friends and I were engaged in a series of running battles with the L.A. police, who for whatever knee-jerk and ill-informed reason, didn’t want to allow hard core punk bands to play music in their town. In particular, I remember the Exploited riot in East L.A. back in 1983, where, in a mix of inchoate anger and primitive glee, I tried kicking in the window of a Bank of America building while a mob of us were being chased by the cops. Of course, the window was made of protective plexiglass, so all I left was a small boot-sized hole about knee-high in the window, an anemic spectacle that only underscored my impotence and cowardice in the grand scheme of things. My angry gesture at The Man, kicking a hole in his bank, only served to make life a little less civilized for the folks in the barrio where the concert was held, proving me to be just another selfish white boy shitting on their neighborhood before returning to my trendier digs on the West Side of town.

From apolitical sports rallies to major social movements, activist or pacifist, left, right, or center, I reject them all. History is one long litany of the tyranny of the mob. From the French and the Russian Revolutions, through the Weimer Republic, all the way back to the vague but ominous threat posed by the Roman plebians whenever they felt that they weren’t being given enough bread by the Empire or that the quality of the gladiator fests and circuses wasn’t to their liking. In fact, popular uprisings tend to follow a common narrative (actually, the most common narrative is that they peter out and fail to accomplish anything at all, but let’s ignore that probability for the moment): The people, through whatever means, overthrow the shackles of authority; they put their own leaders in charge; they become disappointed in their leaders, often deposing or even killing them; then an autocrat takes over, and the people are ruled by an even more oppressive authority than when they began (ex: Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler, Khomeini).

Even some of the great, heroic struggles that are mythologized in our school system have their ominous side. It is taken as a given that the civil disobedience of Mahatma Gandhi was a great success, and it eventually led to Indian independence. What is less discussed are the Hindu/Muslim massacres, one of the great ethnic bloodbaths of the 20th Century in which close to a million people died at the hands of those who hated them because they had a different creed, massacres that went hand-in-hand with independence and partition. In essence, Gandhi and the Indian congnoscenti encouraged the common people to express themselves, and then they were shocked that this expression didn’t stop with the people’s opposition to British rule but extended to the hatred of their neighbors (the ones with the funny habits and the different beliefs).

So, to all my friends participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, understand that I am instinctively not an ally. I don’t trust the mob, even a well-meaning one. Education, enlightenment, and the advancement of the human race are accomplished one-on-one, or in small groups, where people have the opportunity to discuss an idea in depth and to ponder its implications. It’s why the printing press may be the greatest invention in the history of our species (rivaling seemingly more urgent advances like fire, or the invention of modern antibiotics), because all books are essentially a conversation between the writer and his reader, and it is this intimacy that makes them so powerful a tool to change the way we think. The mob, by contrast, is only as intelligent as the most primitive dolt that it needs to bring along for the ride. Much like a newspaper is written at the 6th-grade level so as to cast its net over a wide range of potential readers, the mentality of a mob must drop to the lowest common denominator.

But within its incongruous amalgam of complaint, there are elements of the Occupy Wall Street/La Salle Street protests with which I sympathize. For one, I appreciate the high percentage of homemade signs. Last Friday, when I braved the gauntlet of wanna be rabble-rousers in my suit and tie to broadcast my weekly market analysis from the CME trading floor, amidst all the prefabricated placards to “End the Fed” or “Give Us Jobs” was a woman, maybe 40, sensibly dressed and attractive, pointing a large cardboard sign directly at the Board of Trade building (in contrast to most of the other signs pointed either towards passing cars or at the Chicago Federal Reserve building across the street). Her handwriting was relatively small, making it difficult to read, but eventually I made out the following quote, by Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

She stood there, simultaneously meek and defiant, and I loved the fact she took the time to make that sign, quoting some old German who’s been dead for 200 years, dragging the sign downtown, and then spending her Friday pointing it at all the futures traders, the supposed enemy, heading in to work, on the off-chance that one of us would take notice and that the scales would then fall off our eyes, that we’d realize there were other avenues open for us than spending all our energy chasing the almighty dollar. I made eye contact with this woman, briefly smiled, and then walked inside to conduct my weekly dog-and-pony show.

Of course, I am to the financial industry what Stukas Over Bedrock, my old punk band, was to the L.A. music scene, circa 1984. Just as no one would confuse the career of Stukas Over Bedrock with that of Motley Crue, I am barely a blip on the financial radar, a stay-at-home Dad masquerading as an important voice in a suit, who for the past three years has managed to squeak just enough supplemental income out of trading to forestall any immediate need to go out and actually work for a living.

But the comparison with my brief and flailing music career is instructive, because I used to hate Motley Crue. I wouldn’t have cared if they were just another hair band, wasting all their money on Jack Daniels and blow while toiling through another Wednesday night as the support act at Gazzarris. It was Motley Crue’s success that made them a target of my wrath. How dare everyone else not see through their vacancy and their pretty boy calculations. But let’s face it, the youth of Middle America wasn’t about to start playing “Life Like Yogi” (the closest thing we ever had to a “hit,” reaching #5 on the Flipside/Rodney on the Roq hit parade) on their car stereos, even if they all immediately soured on Nikki Sixx. So there was really no reason for me to begrudge Motley Crue their success.

Similarly, I recognize that wealth is no longer created primarily by labor, but by ideas. A hundred years ago, if someone wanted to make something that people needed, he would hire a bunch of laborers to make it for him and then sell this product for a profit. The tension between management and labor was real, because the laborers were actually making the things that management was selling. But these days, labor is a much less important part of the process. We don’t need 10,000 workers in an auto plant; we have machines to do most of the work. We don’t need fifty women on a conveyor belt, sorting cookies into boxes; we might need just one to inspect the work of the machines that took the place of her 49 former co-workers.

When the designers at Apple come up with a new product, the idea itself could be worth billions. The people who figure out the most efficient, dependable way to make this new product are also worth many millions. But the factory workers needed to assemble these phones or computers are really not that valuable, and they are getting less so by the year.

So the people who generate ideas, be it in food, medicine, technology, or even (gasp) banking, will continue to be in increasing demand. The people who have advanced degrees and can facilitate the implementation of these ideas will also be quite valuable. Just below them will be all the service workers that are needed to run our society, from the teachers to the health care workers, and they will also be paid fairly for their work. And skilled labor, like carpentry or masonry, will also have value. But the grunt labor that used to be needed to produce things will be worth increasingly little as the world continues to automate. For now, it may find refuge in Third World factories or on the lettuce fields of the Imperial Valley, but those days are numbered. Even China is in the process of automating, and it won’t be that long until John Deere invents a lettuce picker that will make most migrant farm labor as obsolete as the mule.

This is our great dilemma: That most of what the human race has done to support itself over the past few hundred years, namely physical labor, is no longer worth enough to provide a decent standard of living in the modern world, and we as a society have to find something productive for all these people to do. The solution, of course, is education: We need to raise our children to be able to dwell in the world of ideas, to be the creative leaders of tomorrow. Failing that, we need to give them the scientific and linguistic competence to support the people who have ideas, or they need to be able to teach, to cure, or to feed. At the very minimum, we need to give those folks choosing a life of labor a valuable skill or craft that can’t be taken away by an uneducated immigrant or a machine. This is our future. And all the complaints about bankers are merely a sideshow.

Not that I don’t hate what the banking industry has done to this country. It is appalling. They have centralized political and economic power in a few hands; they have moved capital from the countryside into the seats of power; they have so interjected themselves into the political establishment in Washington D.C. that they have become virtually inseparable from the government. But, sad to say, even if these injustices were all corrected, the unskilled laborer who dropped out of high school would remain just as unemployable as he is today.

In other words, I want to join the fray without supporting the activists and conspiracy theorists who seem to be leading the charge. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to “End the Fed.” For all its flaws, the U.S. Federal Reserve saved us from another Great Depression in 2008, and for this it deserves our thanks. Anyone who thinks getting rid of the Federal Reserve will make our economy more stable understands nothing about our history before the FED was created, a tarnished history littered with repeated recessions and economic collapses. And I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that we all “deserve” a job. In fact, I think it is just the opposite. Even among the employed, there are a lot of incompetent workers who actually don’t “deserve” a job at all. We as a society may not want them to starve, or not be able to see a doctor if they are sick, but the notion that all of the bipedal herd consuming oxygen without offering anything of real value to the world are somehow “deserving” of anything better than a swift kick in the ass is misconceived.

So I won’t be joining all the true believers and their young tagalongs on the street, but I would nonetheless like to do my part in loosening the stranglehold the rich have on our society. And there are many worthy and practical causes to join on this end. But I believe the most elemental problem is how corporations of all stripes have intertwined themselves into the power structure of Washington D.C. And while there are many ways to attack this beast, I would like to throw my weight behind those looking to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case.

To be direct: This ruling, in which the majority of our Supreme Court justices granted corporations the same political and free speech rights as living human beings and disallowed regulations limiting the amount of money these corporations can give to certain political causes, is probably the worst decision by the Court since Plessy vs Ferguson. Citizens United was the capstone on a series of decisions the Supreme Court has made in recent years expanding the rights of corporations. I believe the best way to attack these decisions is by changing the Constitution. In this vein, we need a Constitutional Amendment limiting the rights of corporations. And while there are other proposals out there, I think the amendment should be worded like this:

“Corporations are not people and are not entitled to all of the same Constitutional rights as people. Specifically, corporations are not entitled to the full protection of the First Amendment right to free speech, as corporate political speech may be limited by the people’s legislative representatives. Also, money is not equivalent to speech, and its use in election campaigns may be limited by the people.”

So pass it on, and spread the word. Whatever else they may or may not bring to the table, the Occupy Wall Street folks have stirred up the Zeitgeist, and the time to do something about the increasing concentration of corporate power is now.

Purity Rules for the New Millennium (Revisited)

2010-09-30T19:48:00.000-07:00

For more than a decade, dating back to the mid-1990’s, when I used to leave a one-page, two-sided Xeroxed missive at coffeehouses and underground record stores around the Chicago area,the Asshole of the Century has been my face to the world. However, this asshole is undergoing a crisis of confidence.

Don’t get me wrong. With a couple of notable exceptions, I remain stubbornly proud of all my old screeds. But I’m beginning to think that it is the wrong time to be the Asshole of the Century. It has gotten to the point where every Tom, Dick, and Harry, from the web to the roadway, tends to act like an asshole. We live in a world of devolving behavior, where propriety and a concern for the feelings of others are so far away from a lot of people’s minds as to be in danger of becoming a quaint anachronism. Subtlety, common decency, humility, circumspection, all of these virtues seem to be in increasingly short supply these days. And perhaps only in their absence has it become clear how much we will miss them.

The Asshole of the Century was created at a time when our counterculture had kind of fallen asleep. I wanted to accost folks as they walked into their favorite coffeehouse. To wake them up. Piss them off. Make them think. Or at least make them shake their heads and chuckle.

As part of my current soul searching, I have decided to revisit the original pamphlet, entitled “Purity Rules for the New Millennium,” in which I attempted to lay out the core beliefs that would guide this asshole in my future writings. It’s strange how this old rant can now seem like it was written by an alien hand while simultaneously laying bare certain intractable elements of my self. Reading them today, I don’t know how many of these principles I still agree with. For one, I’ve either become a lot dumber or a lot less pretentious over the intervening decade, because it took me multiple readings to even make sense out of this list of imperatives, correlations, dichotomies, and “chimera”.

But here it is, the foundational text of the Asshole of the Century:

Given that our malaise stems from an absence of purpose, our motives need to become pure. Purity takes many forms. There is purity of action, purity of intent, and the purity of an idea. Purity can be achieved through either redemption, grace, or discipline. Given that the objective is witnessed through action and that the rational mind is incapable of redemption or grace, we need to focus our thoughts on the following disciplines:

THE PRIMARY IMPERATIVE:
Truth is light;
Mendacity is decay.
All human vice has its root in deceit.

THE SECONDARY IMPERATIVE:
Power is only legitimate as mutually recognized benevolence or as a means to suppress mendacity and its consequences.

THE TERTIARY CORRELATIONS:

Structure
Structure is the secret to both the mystical and the pragmatic. Even the most inspired of men must hang his hat on structure.

Progress
Without progress, mankind ceases to define himself. He becomes merely a beast. And as beasts go, man is nothing better than a homicidal monkey.

Guilt and shame
Only by accepting the dictates of guilt and shame can we throw off the putrid poncho. Shame is a gift that is not granted to many. It allows us to see deeply into ourselves. It enables us to make amends. Guilt, while more hollow than shame, is still a tonic for the selfishness of the consumer age.

Civility
People are social creatures. Our most important actions are those in which we engage with other men. We can best be judged by the degree to which our behavior is civil. Every uncivil act is a crime against the polis and against our better selves. It can be explained only by an advertising culture that has manipulated our monkey selves for its own purposes. We must counteract the ugliness of consumerism and the self-made man with the rigid dignity of our Puritan lineage.

THE DICHOTOMIES

Purpose vs. Meaning
As humans are a social race and defined by our striving for progress, purpose is a necessary corollary to human meaning. Similarly, without an understood concept of meaning, our purpose cannot be reasonably divined. One concept seems to simultaneously demand yet preclude the other.

Action vs. Contemplation
The mind is like light. It can either have weight or be in motion. In the West, our parable is the choice between Rome and Judea. The Romans cut their hair short, symbolizing that they were people of action. The Hebrews let their hair grow long in a demonstration that they were a contemplative nation. As regular folk, we are caught between the paths of Christ and Caesar and thus succeed as neither.

The Philosoph and the Spirit
Though thought can be employed in the service of Truth, there is an irrational element that the logician may never divine. In the beginning was the word, and it has power that cannot be subdivided or defined.

Freedom and Discipline
Without discipline there is no freedom. The world of the brute animal is filled with constraint. Only by the willful imposition of the structures of the human mind can we become free. If this imposition has negative consequences, it is because our minds are still weak and have not submitted to the secondary imperative.

CHIMERA

JUSTICE is neither benevolent nor true. It is typically retroactive, a response to its perceived absence. It is absurd to create something by first looking for its antithesis. What we mean by justice is really just an attempt at social consensus. It is a practical concept and not a moral imperative.

DUTY is the great bugaboo. It is enforced obedience, an attempt to disengage our moral compass. Every duty should be looked at as an individual action and subjected to scrutiny. An appeal to duty is truly doodee.

DEMOCRACY: The common man is often wrong. The public is subject to whim. Since the majority once wanted slavery and Mussolini, they could soon be coming for your own skin. Masses by definition are scary things. A political rally is little more than an organized mob. Never trust any movement that requires large gatherings of its followers to be effective. Those people should lead who have the moral imperative. In a benevolent society, the philosophers would be kings and the kings would be philosophers.

PRIVILEGE: Like children gathered around the dinner table, we all covet the privileges of others.

IDENTITY: The need for identity is our greatest weakness, the Achilles Heel which marketers and ideologues will use to suck us into their schemes. As long as we continue to crave identities that give us purpose and meaning, in the end we will all be played for suckers. The less you care about who you are and where you came from, the more likely you are to focus on something that matters.

The Consolations of the Damned

2010-08-31T15:21:00.000-07:00

There is something about the notion of predestination that speaks to me. It is deep-seated. Part of it might be some Calvinist echo that has been deposited into the back of my psyche, like they tried to do through dreams in the summer blockbuster “Inception,” a trigger of some ancient memory, either part of the collective unconscious that we are all share as Americans, or the more specific memories of my Scotch-Irish forebears. But while I was raised Presbyterian, historically among the most dour Calvinists of the bunch, we were California Presbyterians, which doesn’t really count. Growing up, my most salient memory of our church was of a pastor riffing on the prospect of alien life forms while officiating over my grandfather’s funeral. It wasn’t the kind of church where they talked about Calvin’s belief, formed through detailed calculations and a meticulous reading of the Bible, that there are exactly 244,000 elect in the history of the world, predestined for heaven by the ineluctable wisdom of our creator, and that the rest of us are essentially damned from birth.

The notion of there being a limited number of “chosen” to receive a full measure of God’s blessings intuitively makes sense to me, and I don’t think this is just because I was born an American or raised Presbyterian. Sure it is a brutal and rather pessimistic view of the cosmos. But, for better or worse, the idea of a limited elect also seems like a rather clear-eyed assessment of how the world works. It is blessedly devoid of the wish-fulfillment and fantasies of most religions, and doesn’t make any apologies for the seemingly cruel imbalances of fate. Hey, look around without the rose-colored blinders on, and why would anyone think that the universe doesn’t play favorites? No one likes to live in a world where almost all of us stand tried and convicted before we are even born. But who’s to say it’s not true?

“It’s not fair.” That, of course, is the eternal lament of the child, which was followed in our home, as I’m sure it still is in millions around the country, with my mom’s predictable refrain: “Yeah, well life’s not fair.” In other words, get used to it. Which is what I imagine will be the response by whatever deity set this entire mess in motion if we happen to have the opportunity to meet him/her/it on judgment day. It is indicative of the hubris of the modern age that for some reason we believe that we are the ones who should be judging God, rather than the other way around.

Using whatever cosmology you want to set the scales, by this point in my life, it is pretty clear that I am not one of the “chosen ones.” Nor are virtually any of my friends. By just about any standard, we fall short. In aggregate and as individuals, most of us are not particularly moral, or caring, or sympathetic. We certainly don’t have the instinctive empathy for the suffering of our fellow man that seems to be the standard currency in most religious faiths.

But we still have our moments of redemption, and for many of us, these moments tend to happen at the music club and the concert hall. For me, music remains the greatest of the arts (followed closely by literature and then architecture). This past spring, on my most recent trip to L.A., while at a party full of music industry nerds that at the time seemed like just another wasted evening, some 2nd tier record producer told me that one of the great things about music is that it somehow manages to express the essence of an era through sound. Through the resonance of vibrating frequencies in the air, musicians manage to construct an abstract mathematics that conveys what it means to live in that particular place and time on our planet. In my own mangling of this thought: Music comes closest to expressing the essence of our souls. And for the lonely and the fallen to be granted moments of such communion through music speaks more strongly to the existence of a benevolent God than anything I know.

I’ve been granted a few of these moments this summer, the most recent on Sunday, when Iggy Pop and the Stooges played the Riviera Theatre. I’ll not bore the uninitiated with a lengthy rundown of the concert, other than to note that Iggy was in fine fiddle, stalking the stage: part animal, part showman, part dervish. And that the Stooges provided a fitting band of communicants. Mike Watt hobbled out with his broken leg and his grizzled mien. Scott Asheton looked like an ex-biker out to smoke a cig on a break during his 12-step meeting. Only James Williamson, looking well-fed and well-coifed with that flowing blond hair of his, looked a bit out of place; but of course he was just a reminder that original Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton had passed away not long after the band's last tour, in 2009. In other words, the Stooges are scarred stars for scarred people.

The current concert tour is based on a fairly flawed conceit, but a common one in the touring world these days, which is for an aging band to replicate a seminal album from decades past, in this case 1973’s “Raw Power,” the third and final album by the Stooges and the only one on which Williamson played guitar. It may have sounded like a good idea, but the Stooges were essentially a singles (rather than an album) band, with a smattering of great songs on each record. While even the weaker songs on “Raw Power” are solid tunes, you couldn’t help thinking, “Boy I hope they play “Loose” or “I Wanna Be Your Dog” tonight.” Which is why I went a little ape-crazy when they broke into the opening chords of “1970” (off of "Funhouse"): “Out of my mind on a Saturday night/1970 rollin’ in sight/Radio burnin’ up above/Beautiful baby, feel my love/All night, till I, blow away/I feel alright/I fell alright/Feel alright.”

That is the beauty of the Stooges in a nutshell (so to speak). They have the rare ability to combine both the sexuality and the defiance of youth. As a young punk rocker, I unfortunately only mimicked the angry side. It’s too bad that I didn’t have the good sense to channel Iggy Pop, rather than Johnny Rotten. Because an underappreciated facet of the Stooges is how hard they swing. Maybe a lot of guys don’t get that subtlety, but I think most of the ladies do. It was an aggressive, sweaty pit at the Riv, but one leavened by some heavy hip action from the healthy smattering of women in the crowd. Women were dancing, swaying, fondling their breasts (OK, I actually only saw one woman who was slowly rubbing her nipples, but that’s one more than you usually see at a rock show). For a 62-year old dude to inspire that kind of reaction is a mighty cool thing. Iggy, you still rock.

My August was book-ended by concerts. At the end of the month was the Stooges, while at the beginning, Melissa and I drove up to Milwaukee to see the National, who also rock, but in a totally different way. The Stooges get to your heart through the gut, while the National do it through your mind. Their songs are beautiful, lyrical, and reward repeated listening. But they still have a groove, and they get at some of the same things as the Stooges, just in a different manner.

“I’m a confident liar/Had my head in the oven so you’d know where I’ll be/I’ll try to be more romantic/I’ll try to believe everything you believe…. I was afraid/I’d eat your brains/‘CUZ I’M EVIL.”

The National had 2,000 otherwise seemingly upstanding Milwaukeeians shouting this chorus. To be clear, this song isn’t about a glorification of evil, nor is it the comic book evil of a heavy metal band. It is about something much more poignant and true: Evil as it is experienced by most of us, as a falling short, an inability to get outside our own little boxes. The National dropped a bunch of these moments upon us that night, these perfectly performed little gems that hinted at the dark tides that lurk within.

I have a wandering mind, even during moments of reverie. As the band played that night in Milwaukee, I waxed ecstatic over the idea that in this life, where seemingly the few are chosen, even us soiled and poorly-repaired souls are granted moments of intense joy, albeit in this case a surreptitious joy, found at night, in dark places. It makes me think that even an all-knowing, omnipotent God might have moments of pity, where he allows the damned their pleasures, and so he shielded us in that hall from His blinding gaze, at least for a couple of hours.

The Mediocre, The Beautiful, and Those Who Love Them

2010-07-14T20:45:00.000-07:00

Of the many functions that sport has provided in my life, perhaps the most edifying is as a conduit for my seemingly fathomless hate. Now that I’ve reached a point where I’ve managed to surround myself with generally decent people, this has become more than an academic exercise. There used to be a time when all I’d have to do was walk outside my front door, and some trivial dickweed would inevitably succeed in earning my enmity, at least for a moment or two. But that doesn’t seem to happen much anymore. I’ve successfully been able to tighten my circle of acquaintances to the point where I really don’t actively hate anyone anymore (at least anyone other than my sister’s ex-husband, but that’s another story). The brain, like any muscle, has got to be used or it atrophies, and my mind has a carefully refined sense of who and what to hate that I don’t want to lose. Sporting teams offer an easy target on which to practice these skills.

Let’s face it; there have been a lot of teams to hate over the two score years of my sporting life. But a few stand out: The 1969 Mets, who took out my beloved Cubs and Orioles (probably my two favorite teams as a child); the Miami Hurricanes during the Jimmy Johnson era; the Dallas Cowboys during the Jimmy Johnson era; the New York Yankees just about anytime George Steinbrenner pulled out his wallet and stocked the team with enough players to buy himself another championship.

I am generally not too parochial in my hatred. Midwesterners tend to spend a lot of energy hating the team next door. For instance, Bears fans typically profess to hate the Packers, and Blackhawks fans hate the Red Wings. But I like the Red Wings and the Packers just fine. We are all under the same Middle American sky. Why can’t we all just get along? Or at least have a brat and a beer together. It takes some objective evil, something greater than just being in the same division, to trigger my righteous anger.

For instance, the Dallas Cowboys have to always be near the top of my list of potential clubs to hate, if for no other reason than that their fans have the arrogance to believe that they are “America’s team,” and that their stadium had a hole in the top “so God can watch them play.” The phrase “America’s team” implies that a big chunk of folks outside your home state actually like you and root for you, and that has not been the case for the Cowboys since at least the mid-70’s. The Saints, the Colts, the Steelers, the Packers, all at different times over the past decade seemed to capture the hearts of much of the country. So did the Cubs and the Red Sox at various points when they were making a run to break their respective title droughts. And so did the Bulls during the Michael Jordan era. Not that everyone liked these teams, just that they had a significant reservoir of support outside their own region of the country. But the Cowboys were not then, are not now, and never will be “America’s team.” While they haven’t really been good enough to hate for at least a decade, at the height of the Jimmy Johnson era, when he brought all the thuggery and shenanigans, along with his penchant for winning titles, from Miami to Dallas, he united two despicable traditions into a monolith that seemed to stain not just a team, but the entire sport. Oh, I would seethe over them. I pretty much quit watching playoff football, their victories put me in such a bad mood. And while Tony Romo, a swaggering, celebrity-loving cock-of-the-walk worthy of the Cowboy tradition, is pretty easy to hate, I actually like watching Cowboy playoff games these days, because it is a lot of fun to watch them lose.

I grew up in Southern California, and the first team I remember hating was the USC Trojans football squad. Admittedly, there was something parochial in this hatred. But there was also something tawdry in the University of Spoiled Children and the hold it had on the sporting life of my city. My dad and I used to sit there with my mom’s family, many of whom were USC boosters, including an older cousin who would go on to play offensive tackle for the Trojans, watching the epic gridiron battles between USC and UCLA. We would sometimes be the only UCLA Bruin fans in the room, as they squared off against O.J. Simpson or some other superstar tailback, led by an offensive line that inevitably outweighed the Bruin line by an average of 30 pounds. We would root that the Bruins, standard bearers for our city’s great public university, the one where the education was first class but the business connections only ordinary, would find a way to win the game through some combination of pluck, skill, and guile. And every once in a while this would happen. But mostly it was a case of watching guys like John Sciarra or Mark Harmon struggle in vein, overmatched against our crimson nemesis.

So my hatred goes way back, and I think that it is generally well-founded. Which is why my recent lack of hatred had me worried that I was getting old and soft, and why I was energized by last week’s announcement that LeBron James would be signing a multiyear deal with the Miami Heat. O.K., I know that the contempt foisted upon James over the past few days has been a bit over the top, and I’m not plowing any new ground here, but the combination of arrogance and vanity that surrounded the entire proceedings were stunning. And as a result, three of the biggest stars in the sport that I probably play best will ply their skills in that capital of arrogance and vanity, Miami, Florida.

Compounding this, you have Rush Limbaugh and his ilk applauding the move, bloviating about how it will save LeBron hundreds of thousands of dollars to live in this low-tax state. Well, all we have to do is look south into Latin America to see what happens when the rich get to keep all their money, when there is no sense of community, no sense of shared sacrifice. You get a huge underclass, poor public schools, and little opportunity for upward mobility; the rich live in armed compounds and drive around in bulletproof Mercedes; and what middle class there is just tries to keep their heads down and survive. This is what the douche bags on the right are essentially advocating. They are the cheerleaders of the American apocalypse, rooting that we finally give up any notion of a shared community and become just another banana republic. Florida is only a dry run for the real thing, which these free markets zealots will no doubt try to foist on the rest of the country at some point in the next couple of decades. So the Miami Heat have now become the poster children of the pending American apocalypse. Even if it weren’t personal, you still have to hate them, just for everything they symbolize about our devolving republic.

A few days after the LeBron announcement, Spain won the World Cup soccer final, 1-0 in extra time over the Netherlands. And, in case you missed it, Spain was also voted one of the most “beautiful teams” by beautiful people.com, a dating website where your photo has to be approved by the other members of the site before you can be let into their little club. Actually, Spain finished second in the voting to Italy. Meanwhile, England, Serbia, Algeria, and North Korea were among those chosen as the “most ugly” teams in the poll.

I doubt these results came as a shock to anyone, but let’s break them down a bit. The two most “beautiful” teams are from the Mediterranean, literally meaning “the middle ground” of what at the time was the known world. And it is not just the location of these teams that are middling. The guys on the Italian and the Spanish teams are generally neither short nor tall, neither thin nor bulky, neither pale nor dark. They are pleasing to the eye precisely to the degree that they do not offend. Studies show that we are attracted to someone who is a little different from us, but not too different, from their looks down to the pheromones they release.

The Italian soccer team, I admit, is almost always stocked full of guys with that classic Mediterranean look, with tan bodies and symmetrical faces. In fact, they are one of the few European teams who typically don’t have any ethnic minorities on their squad. Everyone is prototypically Italian. I find the Spanish squad, in contrast, a little weird looking. First, there is Carles Puyol, who looks like a cross between Kenny G. and a guitarist for an 80’s metal band having a bad hair day. And Andres Iniesta, who scored the winning goal in the championship game, looks to me like a hairless hobbit, this balding imp of a man with the eyes of Bambi. But with Italy out, all the lovers of Mediterranean men had to find a new team to ogle at, and I think the Spanish were the beneficiaries of this attention.

Meanwhile, all of the “ugly” teams on the list were from countries on the periphery, from England, from the Balkans, from North Africa, or East Asia. A lot of black folks fret about how light-skinned women are more accepted and more likely to be considered beautiful than their dark-skinned sisters. But maybe their’s is just the flipside of my story, that a bulk of the planet prefers mediocrity to distinction, café-au-lait over straight black, dominant genes to red hair and freckles. Hey, I could be the handsomest redhead on the planet (and I humbly submit that I am towards the upper end of that curve), but I recognize that fewer folks are going to be aroused by me than some doe-eyed Mediterranean who more closely approaches the golden mean of the human gene pool.

Similarity and symmetry, these are the two cornerstones of human attraction. Personally, I’m fine with that, especially considering, at least upon reaching the age of majority, this dissimilar and unsymmetrical soul has never wanted for friendship, or for that matter the joys of more intimate companionship. But it still grates. There is part of me that is decidedly Gnostic in this matter, in that I sometimes think the strictures of our world, including the genetics of human attraction, are not just restrictive, but quite possibly an active malignancy, limiting our individual and collective destinies. Yet bubbling underneath all of this obviousness lies something perverse, in that it calls us to violate our own programming. It is a divine voice, whispering of noble things. But how do we follow this voice if we live in a world where only the obvious is commonly regarded as beautiful? I contend that the first step is too stop trying to conform to the mean. And the second is to start listening to our dreams.

Besides serving as a conduit for our collective emotions, one of the functions of sport is as a benchmark of relative power in the world. Take the Olympics. From the end of World War I through the early 1950’s, the United States tended to dominate the medal count, the one exception being the 1936 games in Berlin, when host Germany won the most medals. Then, in the 1950’s, the balance of power shifted, and the Soviet Union began vying with the U.S. for the most trips to the awards podium. In the 1990’s, China began making a move, and by the 2008 Beijing Olympics actually won more gold medals than anyone else for the first time (although the U.S. still edged them out in the overall medal count). My point is that these shifts in Olympic success have tended to correspond with shifts in national power.

In this vein, the triumph of Spain on Sunday represents the ongoing vitality of the Great Middle, of symmetry, of cleaving to the mean of our social and genetic norms. I would be the first to admit that the Cup final was an ugly game, due in no small part to the bevy of hard fouls committed by the Dutch. But for over 90 minutes, Spain showed only intermittent flashes of being able to break down the Dutch defense. Meanwhile, Dutch striker Robben could have easily scored at least one if not a pair of goals. In short, the Dutch counters had so far proved at least as effective as the Spanish attack. Then, with about 10 minutes to go in overtime, Dutch defender Johnny Heitinga was given a second yellow card, and thus an immediate expulsion from the game.

Upon replay, you can see that, while Heitinga did briefly pull on Iniesta’s shoulder, the Spaniard fell a couple of seconds later of his own accord, once it was clear that the ball had harmlessly passed him by. It begs the question why the Spanish were allowed to pull at Robben or, in the semis, bang into Germany’s Ozil, during much more dangerous runs than Iniesta displayed on that play. It makes me appreciate American football, where Payton Manning can flop on the turf all he wants, it’s not going to build him any sympathy, and even if it did, sympathy doesn’t win football games. But what the rest of the world calls football is susceptible to the vagaries of such things, and in those last 10 minutes of extra time, with the Dutch down a man, the space finally opened up and the Spanish were able to engineer a goal.

To be clear, the Spanish are a very good team, and any goal, even one facilitated to a large degree by a referee’s judgment call, beats having the championship of the world decided by penalty kicks. But what this sequence of events says is that image does matter, that the subjective interpretations of referees, themselves steeped in the myth of the “beautiful” Mediterranean, is alive and well. Combined with Italy’s win in the World Cup four years ago (which featured its own bizarre carding of French star Zidane), the Mediterranean remains triumphant astride the soccer world, and will do so for at least another four years (I will pause so that any female readers of this blog can make the appropriate cooing sounds).

In the midst of all this sporting talk, I wish to advocate for the resplendence of humanity on the periphery, of idiosyncrasy, of personal revelation. And I nominate Copernicus as our patron saint. A brilliant fellow, he was the first to reveal the heliocentric nature of our solar system, essentially changing the way we looked at the universe, all from his isolated perch in the Silesian hills. But he’s not nearly as revered as Galileo, whose most important act involved his public support for Copernican ideas. In essence, Copernicus was the genius, the one who did the heavy lifting. But Galileo was the Mediterranean, from that Middle Land that everyone knows and loves, so he got more than his share of props.

Sunday’s soccer game was a reminder that the most popular sport on the planet remains a fickle one in which image matters. And, while I don’t hate the Spanish or their team, I do hate the state of the world that helped make their victory so predictable.

In Search of My Own Private Sangamon

2010-06-30T22:18:00.000-07:00

My “career path,” such as it is, has been scattered, leading me into some unexpected cul-de-sacs over the past 25 years. From wanna be rocker to copy editor to teacher to journalist and now analyst of the grain markets, I’ve made several rather abrupt shifts during my life. In this, I guess that I am just another product of the post-modern age. But underneath all of these somewhat odd career moves, you could say that, at my core, I have been, am, and will presumably always be, a writer. It is how I define myself. More importantly, it is, in one form or another, how I’ve made my cash (and I am typically American in my belief that internal bullshit like my own “self-definition” is a lot less important than the facts on the ground. To paraphrase the immortal words of Sergeant Joe Friday, just give me the facts, ma’am.)

Today, the fate of the writer is both exalted and imperiled. While I could blather on, suffice to say that, while paying gigs can be hard to come by, writers as communicators have a privileged position in this, the “information age.” However you slice it, though, the status of the contemporary novelist has fallen on hard times. Sure, there are the rare outliers like J.K. Rowling, making hundreds of millions while writing about her expansive fantasy world. But the idea that a novelist can express something relevant, let alone necessary, about the state of our planet has pretty much gone the way of the two-martini lunch. In fact, I need look no further for evidence of this irrelevancy than my own apathy towards contemporary fiction. Which is all the more reason why the first novel that I have really enjoyed reading in months, if not years, caught me by surprise. It’s titled “Left of the Loop” and is by a former Chicagoan named Tim Brown.

I don’t think anyone would describe “Left of the Loop” as a highly polished work. It is self-indulgent, erratically written, and essentially devoid of plot. Entire sections seem like they were plucked out of an entirely different narrative, in particular a chapter on meeting the ghost of the Haymarket bombing, which seems to exist simply to allow the author to discuss the history of the labor movement. A few of the characters are memorable, but even they are allowed to pontificate randomly, often about predictable things like their hatred of yuppies or how horrible it is to work in a corporate office. But these faults don’t obscure what I like about this book: its directness, its headstrong unwillingness to follow tried-and-true narrative methodologies, or to play with the narrative as a way of showing off, of proving how well the author absorbed the lessons of post-modern fiction. I love “Left of the Loop” for its sincerity, the sense that this is a work by a writer who really means it, who is following his own narrative path because this is what he needs to say.

And out of the blue, like an overmatched middleweight suddenly catching the champ with a haymaker, changing the entire nature of the bout, there are a handful of really nice passages in this book. For instance, this line on the joys of living amidst the decaying edge of a city: “Grandeur lies not in the environment, but resides in the archetypal man, one who can open the mind’s eye round enough to encompass the entire horizon and claim it as his own.”

This is from a chapter titled “Philosophical Roots of Outer Bohemia,” which gets at the essence of the novel. What does it mean to live amongst the detritus of the city? And why is this so important to Spungkdt, our narrator? A common thread of the novel is the idea of Sangamon, which is not only the name of the street where Spungkdt lives with his buddy in a decrepit, mostly abandoned loft building, but Sangamon is also the name of a river and a county in central Illinois. The name stitches together all this stuff, urban and rural, a native vein running through this section of the Middle West, from the Sangamon interregnum, a warm period between the Illinois and Wisconsin ice ages, through the Native American notion of “sangamon” as a well-played stroke of bad luck that just misses its target by a little, to the urban moonscape that Spungkdt and company called home.

This thin tome touched a lot of things that are close to my heart: the beauty of decay, of the city, of man-made things, and of wide open prairie; the “dissipated” quest, to use a term from the novel, that all of us seemed to be on in the late-1980’s; and how we seemed destined to fail.

I can’t quite say that this book gives me hope in the ability of the modern novel to mean something, to be transformative, but it does point to why I find most contemporary novels so boring. At least in part, I think it is because much of this writing reeks of the worst kind of professionalism. Brown’s book is a breath of fresh air because it plays the story as it lays, unvarnished, awkward, like an otherwise worthless piece of secondhand furniture that nonetheless calls to me. He may not be a Laxness, a Whitman, a Dostoevsky, from that small tribe of folks who can bring me to tears with the power of their words, but I’ve got to say, “Thanks, Mr. Brown.” Your “hardscrabble Sangamon” as you put it, has become an indelible part of my internal geography, adding another facet to the city I call home.

Teenage Symphonies to God

2010-05-24T20:29:00.000-07:00

The summer has begun, and the sun teems through the windows of my lovely home on the outskirts of Chicago, reigniting my passion for power pop. The world seems fresh and new, and me with it. And when I listen to this music, everything still seems possible.

“A teenage symphony to God” is how Brian Wilson described the songs on the Beach Boys’ “Smile” album (personally, I prefer “Pet Sounds”, or most of their early records for that matter, but to each his own). And there is no question that the Beach Boys were a touchstone. Take their melodies, or the chanted choruses from the English pubs, back these voices with distorted guitars, and you’ve got the basic recipe.

Great power pop is also infused with the enthusiasms of youth. At its surface, the genre tends to be focused on the travails of romance, but beneath the pretty harmonies often bubbles a dissonance. Power pop is the voice of folks still wide-eyed enough to believe in the essential goodness of life, but aware enough to sense that they are bound to be disappointed in this belief. Four themes proliferate: love (lost, found, requited, or not); fate; our place in society; and the joys of a good party.

So I wrote a list of my favorite power pop songs. It’s hard for me to look at this list and not think the thoughts of our politically correct age: “Hmm, is it my imagination, or is just about every one of these songs played by musicians with a notable lack of melanin?” But then I look a little further. These folks are not just white. They tend to be of Celtic descent, whether they hail from somewhere in the U.S. (as with the bands recording nine of these songs), Britain (eight songs), Canada (two), or Ireland (one). Maybe this is what happens when you take a bunch of Celts and place them in the city with all of its diverse influences and its modern technologies. It’s like the ghosts of our Celtic ancestors are pulling us to love this music. Maybe it’s what they would play with the benefits of electronic amplification.

Whatever the reason, this music speaks to me. When I was stomping through my punk rock youth, I felt the need to be too much of a bad ass to admit liking a great pop song. Then I went through a period where I felt that enjoying these songs was a betrayal to my (own perceived) musical sophistication. But now, in my dottering middle age, I can finally admit to the world that I love this music. Here are my top 20 picks. (Along with a warning: I’ve plugged in my old Technics keyboard that I picked up at a resale shop about a decade ago, and I plan on learning all 20 of them. Drop by our house in a couple of months, and I might subject you to a recital).

1. Big Star: “September Gurls”
A power pop hook can manifest itself through melody, vocal harmonies, or a guitar riff. “September Gurls” works on all three levels. It also tells the typical pop tale of young male longing. And Big Star is the power pop band nonpareil. A perfect song is almost like an accident, some brilliant thing, a freak of nature not made but discovered, like a sonic diamond. Most groups are lucky to have one of these gems in their career. Big Star wrote them by the handful.

2. The La’s: “There She Goes”
Another triple whammy, with the melody line, harmonies, and guitar all just picture perfect and cool. In fact, “There She Goes” may actually be more perfectly constructed than “September Gurls,” as even the refrain, that tertiary section usually thrown in just to cleanse the ears before the final rousing chorus, is achingly beautiful, its brief foray into minor chords sounding like a revelation. I still give “September Gurls” the edge, for its obtuse, plaintive lyrics and the Chilton/Bell harmonies, but you can’t write a better pop song than what the La’s produced here.

3. The Flamin’ Groovies: “Shake Some Action”
The guitar is the bell cow here, holding down both the groove and the melody. Dave Edmunds (of Rockpile fame), who produced the recording, does yeoman’s work getting this rockin’ band to sound melodic and pretty. “Shake Some Action” is tight and controlled, but you sense the band wanting to break free, to jam. The lyrics manage to be blunt and cryptic at the same time, lustful and defiant, with an undertone of frustration and maybe just a little bit paranoid. In other words, the band speaks for just about every 20-something rock ’n roll dude listening to college radio, tuning in for his fix. Those were the days.

4. The Replacements: “Unsatisfied”
Are The Replacements a power pop band? I don’t know. They were a lot of things, from drunks to punks to star-struck garage rockers. But if power pop is defined by a pretty melody and a rousing, chant-able chorus backed by a wall of bar chords, and if the best of the genre manages to capture the thrills and spills of youth, then the Replacements wrote two of the greatest power pop songs of all time in “Bastards of Young” and “Unsatisfied”. While “Wait on the sons of no one/Bastards of young” has to be one of the greatest choruses of all time, if I had to live on a desert island and only hum one Replacements song in my life, it would be “Unsatisfied”.

5. The Beatles: “I’m Only Sleeping”
I’m pretty much an anti-Beatles guy. “Sergeant Pepper” has to be the most overrated record in the rock pantheon, and their early yeah-yeah-yeah songs are just kind of lame. But there was a brief period, including “Rubber Soul” but most particularly “Revolver”, where the Beatles wrote some great tunes, and for me, the best of these is “I’m Only Sleeping.” Besides being a very pretty song with a haunting melody, it manages to capture that dazed yet profound feeling that you can get right after coming out of a deep sleep. It almost makes up for being subjected to “Strawberry Fields Forever” in the public airspace for the past 40 years.

6. Big Star: “The Ballad of El Goodo”
I limited this list to one song per band, but I had to make an exception with Big Star (actually, I don’t know how I can leave “Thirteen” off either, but my excuse is that it’s really more of a ballad by a power pop group, while “The Ballad of El Goodo” is a power pop song with “ballad” in its title). “The Ballad of El Goodo” could have easily been the top song on this list, and, in contrast to “September Gurls”, it mines that other great theme of youth: Spiritual righteousness, and how it helps you find your place in this world.

7. Kirsty MacColl: “They Don’t Know”
This perfect little pop song was later covered by Tracy Ullman, but the original is superior. It never made much sense that Ullman, who at the time was a big Hollywood star, would be singing some song about clandestine teenage love. But it made perfect sense for MacColl, circa 1979, a little-known musician floating around in various fourth-tier punk bands, to sing it. I love MacColl’s voice. And I have a soft spot for her Celtic defiance. Her voice graces a few of my favorite records, including the Pogues’ epic “Fairytale of New York”: “You scumbag, you maggot/You cheap lousy faggot/Merry Christmas my ass/I pray to God it’s our last.” Oh, Kirsty! You had me at scumbag.

8. The Jam: “That’s Entertainment”
“Mod”, “punk”, however they were labeled, the essence of early-to-mid era Jam is that they brought classic pop riffs back to the top of the British music charts. They morphed through a lot of phases in the few short years of their existence, but for me the highlight was the Setting Sons/Sound Affects era, as Paul Weller had honed his songwriting yet the band retained a lot of their early aggression. “Strange Town” and “Eton Rifles” are both great songs, but “That’s Entertainment” is my favorite. All three are bitter reflections on an England that they nonetheless love, seemingly against their better judgment. “That’s Entertainment” is poetry as journalism, masquerading as music, a song about the frustrated lives of the British working class: “Two lovers kissing amongst the scream of midnight/Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude/Getting a cab and traveling on buses/Reading the graffiti about slashed seat affairs/That’s Entertainment.”

9. The Buzzcocks: “Why Can’t I Touch It?”
There are so many great Buzzcocks songs, but this one is probably my favorite. I like how it is tethered around this heavy repetitive bass line, which I imagine to be the result of what happens when a bunch of gawky white kids sit around listening to lots of reggae. I’ve always been an advocate of restricting the guitar to the function of rhythm instrument, and in this vein the one-two axework of Diggle/Shelley are as good as they come and are put to great use here. And the minimalist lyrics go a long ways: “And it seems so real (I can taste/feel/see/hear/etc it)/So why can’t I touch it?”

10. Cheap Trick: “Clock Strikes Ten”
Cheap Trick consistently delivers two or three great pop anthems per album. On “In Color and In Black and White,” their sophomore LP, however, they outdid themselves. By my count, eight of these nine cuts are classics. Which one should I list here? The rousing chants of “Come On, Come On”? The pop studio wonder of “I Want You to Want Me,” complete with a bouncy, old school Honky Tonk piano solo that sounds like it came straight out of an old Western movie? Or the more methodical harmonies of “Downed”? I opted for “Clock Strikes Ten” because it really rocks while remaining true to the pop simplicity of the rest of the album. And it is one of great party songs of all time: “Clock strikes ten it’s a Saturday night/Got money in my pocket and it feels alright/Not going home gonna stay out late/Gonna hear some rockin’ music it feels just great.” While the production of this album was somewhat controversial at the time, I love the clean sound, as it highlights what great songs these are. That to me is the point of most great rock ’n roll, to take a pretty little melody and then blow the crap out of it once you get onstage.

11. The Kinks: “Victoria”
Ray Davies is, of course, one of the planet’s great songsmiths, a jewel in the crown of rock. “Apeman” and “Death of a Clown” are other faves of mine. But there is something especially poignant about this anthem to a dead empire, sung with the wistfulness that only an Englishman can bring to the subject. And bonus points for the Fall’s great cover of this tune.

12. The New Pornographers: “My Slow Descent Into Alcoholism”
Another band with a wealth of beautiful songs. “Letter from an Occupant” and “My Rights Versus Yours” are other faves, the latter for its harmonies and the former because it rocks, but both of those are typical pop laments on the nature of relationships and love, while I prefer “My Slow Descent Into Alcoholism” for, well, its rather rapid descent into the mentality that goes along with a great bender.

13. The Undertones: “Teenage Kicks”
Three chords and a cloud of dust (OK, five chords if you count verse AND chorus), but catchy as hell, and I love the sound of those Marshall stacks.

14. Comsat Angels: “Independence Day”
Looking back, I can see that this band was hamstrung by the fact that they looked like a bunch of total gaywads. But it was the 1980’s, so a lot of us never really noticed that kind of thing. This is probably the only pop song whose hook consists of guitar harmonics and floor tom. “I can’t relax because I haven’t done a thing, and I can’t do a thing because I can’t relax.” Ah, the eternal lament.

15. Martha and the Muffins: “Echo Beach”
It’s an almost laughably nerdy topic for a rock anthem: “My life is boring; I’m an office clerk. I wish I could go back to my halcyon days on a quiet, out-of-the-way beach.” As told by a band of earnest Canadians. Featuring a chorus that is catchy as hell, and a prototypical late-70’s sax solo.

16. The Go Go’s: “Lust to Love”
I remember being a freshman in the dorms and taking the bus from Sproul Hall to the Starwood, and paying $2 (I had a half-off coupon from Rhino Records) to see the Go Go’s open for X. It was one of those awesome teenage nights, and this band was a big part of it. They used to play loud and fast, and they had this gang of butch girls who would follow them around and try to dominate the dance floor. It was kinda ridiculous, looking back at it, this mix of drugs and punk and artiness, both self-conscious and totally blotto at the same time. In the end, I guess we were all just a bunch of poseurs (which is probably why that was such a biting insult at the time), and within a year or so, I would snub the stylized aggression of the Hollywood scene for the H.B. punks, who could dish out more than their share of the real thing. But, looking back, I miss the innocent days, pogoing to the Go Go’s or the Zippers with a bunch of skinny kids on speed. While I like how the rich production of “Beauty and the Beat,” the Go Go’s first major label release, brought out the harmonies of songs like “Lust to Love,” check out the early Stiff single for an idea of what the Go Go’s sounded like when they were a punk band.

17. Michael Penn: “Someone to Dance With”
A sidebar to the idea of power pop is that this music tends to be created by a band, not a solo artist, but this song has all the power pop hooks: The jangly guitars, the rousing harmonies in the chorus, the yearning of youthful infatuation. I just know that I turned up the radio whenever I heard this song back in the day. Some may think the allusion to “Wuthering Heights” is a bit pretentious, but I was an English major, so forgive me if I found it endearing.

18. 20/20: “Those Yellow Pills”
This song was in heavy rotation on KROQ during the summer of 1980. “Everybody’s feeling groovy/Everybody’s cut their hair short/And everybody fells like they were/Just made by the Creator.” I remember singing this chorus in my bedroom in the morning, shaking the cobwebs out of my brain after some late night shenanigans, looking out the window at the bright California sun, thinking that this song pretty much summed up the world and its seemingly endless potential. It may not be as cool of a declaration as “today your love, tomorrow the world” or “now I wanna be your dog,” but it spoke to me.

19. Smoking Popes: “Pasted”
I’m not sure where power pop leaves off and emo begins, but the Smoking Popes occupy that space somewhere between the two. Maybe the first step to pop is being able to sing, and lead Pope Josh Caterer can certainly belt a tune. Backed by a wall of bar chords, the Smoking Popes sound like a cross between Sunny Day Real Estate and the Monkees. Which is not a bad place to be. “You Make Me Want To Do Something,” “I Need You Around,” “I Know You Love Me”: the band has written a lot of catchy tunes about the travails of modern love. But I prefer “Pasted” because of its obtuse paranoia and defiance, that confluence of jilted love and rebellion that becomes a deeply-held principle for many an idealistic young man. “I’m pasted on the ground/In a world of rooms/All designed to keep you down.”

20. Spike Priggen: “Every Broken Heart”
I heard this song on my one and only trip to NYC, four years ago. Spike was holding court at the Lakeside Lounge, an unpretentious dive of a bar that kind of changed my thinking about the Manhattan music scene. Musically, “Every Broken Heart” is a dead ringer for a Big Star outtake. Lyrically, Priggen’s songs remind me a little of late edition Nick Lowe. There is something about these tales of lost romance as told by a grizzled veteran that can be particularly sad, almost poignant, but also a little silly. My mind fills in the back story for these singer-songwriters still slogging along, hearts on their sleeve like some 20-year old, still looking for that big hit or that perfect romance.

The Less Than Lovable Losers

2010-04-27T21:46:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday, I caught the late showing of the new Runaways movie at the Century Theatres on Clark Street. I was one of six people in the audience. It was a dead night on that end of Clark Street. The parking lot for the cinema was eerily quiet, other than the automated voice periodically declaring that the lot was now fully automated. The restaurants in the area were mostly empty, and even the Borders bookstore across the street, which I swore used to be open until fairly late in the evening, had locked its doors at 9 o’clock.

This lay in stark contrast to the scene just up the road, as the Cubs had played a game that afternoon, and thousands of 20-somethings still packed the bars. I had to dodge the cabs and the revelers spilling onto the streets, slowly making my way towards Diversey Avenue. After parking in the spooky lot, I had time to hoist a pint at the Duke of Perth, which was probably the only place in the area with people inside, like a last outpost of human camaraderie in a scene out of “The Omega Man.” By the time I wound my way up the ramp past the shuttered shops in the mall and had settled into my seat at the cinema, box of Snowcaps in hand, I was fully primed for a two hour voyage into rock ‘n roll nostalgia. It was with surprise and no small glee that I bopped in my seat to the chorus of Nick Gilder’s “Roxy Roller” in the opening scene, as I’ve been trying to convince my friends for years that Gilder is an underrated songsmith (they remain largely unmoved).

One of the themes in “The Runaways” is that rock ’n roll is for social outcasts, a refuge as well as a reason to party, and the first reel of the movie hones in on how Joan Jett and Cherie Currie were a couple of defiant oddballs. In fact, the fate of this movie seems to underscore its theme. By most measurements, “The Runaways” was a bomb, especially considering that it features Kristen Stewart, fresh off the success of the “Twilight” blockbusters, as one of the leads. It’s as if fate has dictated that, even with the Hollywood hype machine behind them, true fame would skip past the collection of damaged hearts portrayed in the film. That afternoon, there were 35,000 fans of the Lovable Losers at Wrigley Field, the poster children for sports futility, and while thousands still crammed the bars on Clark Street, not one of them managed to make it a mile down the road to catch this tale of real losers turned rock ’n roll sirens (I’m assuming that neither the butch couple of thirty-something ladies, the skinny black dude dressed in tight leather pants, nor the corpulent guy and his buddy chomping on a big tub of popcorn were actually Cubs fans capping off their night).

Because it’s O.K. in this society to be a loser, as long as folks understand you. Most people understand trying hard at a sporting event, only to fall short. In fact, most probably relate to the experience. As the popularity of the Cubs demonstrates, it can even build sympathy and help create a fan base. But being a social loser, an outcast, someone who refuses to follow social norms, that’s the kind of “losing” that the drunken masses on Clark Street want nothing to do with. I’m mean, talk about a buzz kill.

I liked “The Runaways,” although I have to admit that I’m biased, because it reminds me of the California of my youth, down to the disco where Rodney Bingenheimer used to spin, although in my case it was a few years further down the road, at the Starwood, and not Rodney’s English Disco. I also liked the music, although it’s tough when the weakest songs in a musical biopic are the ones composed by the group being portrayed in the film. “Cherry Bomb” is a great song, but the rest of the Runaways repertoire were clearly written by a band on training wheels. So the filmmakers choreographed the best moments of their movie to the Stooges: When Cherie and Joan first meet at the English Disco and “Gimme Danger” blares, and during their makeout montage to “I Just Wanna Be Your Dog.” Even Joan Jett’s own “Bad Reputation,” which plays during the closing credits, underscores that she wrote better songs later down the road. In fact, one implication of the film is that the spirit of the Runaways finds its fruition in Joan Jett’s early solo career, and I concur, as I find that first Blackhearts record to be the by far the best thing that anyone related to the Runaways ever made.

I also have an odd confession to make. I had a bit of a crush on Joan Jett when I was young. Actually, that’s not the confession. My confession is much more awkward. I hardly know how to say it, even in print. OK, here goes. Throughout my dating life, there was this tendency for my ex-girlfriends to turn around and swing the other way, so to speak, after they broke up with me. They would all of a sudden discover that they had a hankering for the intimacy of other women. I mean, I understand that this may happen on occasion, but it seemed to be happening way more often than probability tables would otherwise indicate. According to the grapevine, it happened with at least four of my exes. And those are only the ones that I know about.

One of the plot lines of “The Runaways” is that three of the band members, including Joan Jett, also tended to prefer the romantic company of ladies. Right there in the movie theatre, the scales fell off my eyes. I had a crush on Joan Jett, and she was bisexual….. So maybe it’s not all about my ex-girlfriends, or my relationship with them. Maybe it’s about me. I like vaguely androgynous women with a mind of their own. It’s nothing to be ashamed about. It’s just what floats my boat. I prefer Joan Jett to Cherie Currie, “Suicide Girls” over “Playboy”. I like some sass with my ass. It’s actually very American of me. From the flappers to the Gibson Girls, there is a long history of American women being idolized for their independence, their athletic flare, their androgyny. In fact, I think my lust for these women is downright patriotic.

When I left the theatre, I was looking at things in a different light. Of course rock ’n roll is for losers. That’s why it is so defiant, because it is the voice of people who will not accept their allotted place in life. And, while I’ve enjoyed many a Cubs game at the Friendly Confines, of course the guys getting drunk outside Wrigley Field want nothing to do with this movie, or for that matter with anything a bit odd. Most of them are probably business majors or the type of guy who goes on to become a gym teacher and then maybe a public school principal. They are the kind of people whose instinctive response to creativity is to try and contain it within some sort of productive box. Failing that, they try to extinguish it. Failing that, they just ignore you.

And that’s the truth, in this film, in my life, and in the lives of almost everyone that I care about on the planet: We, individually and collectively, are the less than lovable losers, the weird folks that most people ignore. I hail you, one and all.

An Assault on Happiness

2010-03-10T06:14:00.000-08:00

Happiness. It’s the fetish of the modern age. I come here not to praise our increasing obsession with this mental state, but to bury it.

“Self sabotage is not pursuing happiness,” screams the headline of a financial market letter that found it’s way into my inbox a couple of weeks ago. In it, trading guru Van Tharp advocates a life dedicated to the pursuit of happiness as not simply the highest goal of our lives, but a near sure-fire way to get rich. In a related newswire story, the most popular course at Harvard is Positive Psychology, whose main goal is to “teach students how to be happy.”

“To make others less happy is a crime,” declares Roger Ebert in a recent Esquire interview that seems to have touched a cultural nerve, the venerated film reviewer and long-suffering medical patient filling the role of secular father and spiritual guide, at least through the next news cycle. Ebert continues: “I believe that if at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.”

Well, I’ve got news for you all. There are plenty of people on this planet who need to be made unhappy. Even our friends sometimes need to be told the truth, to be prodded, to be made aware that their life has heretofore been largely a waste of time.

I do not believe we are here to be happy. Not that happiness is a bad thing. It just should not be an end in itself. Trying to make it the main point of our time on this planet is a betrayal of our elevated monkey souls, whether you believe we were pulled up from the muck through an accident of biochemistry or by the hand of God. To be servile to the notion of our own happiness is psychically weak and a waste of our beautifully conflicted minds. Happiness may be a fine pursuit for all those intellectually flaccid folks who want nothing more than to sip pina coladas under a palm tree, but there is a reason I moved to Chicago. I don’t want to waste my life in pursuit of ease, physical, mental, or spiritual.

More than one friend has accused me of being needlessly contrarian, of disliking anything that is popular. But I say that popularity is a random thing, and I’m no more likely to dislike something popular than all the rest of the dross that falls by the wayside without ever being granted the imprimatur of widespread public acclaim. However, in deference to my audience, I’ll play the guilty pleasures game, the one where you are supposed to wax on about your bag of mass marketed joys, because for some reason people have to believe that you’re part of all the B.S. before they take you seriously. So here goes: Kelly Clarkson, Coldplay, the Fray, Abba, John Hughes movies, Marley and Me. Embarrassing enough for you? And I’ll back my bad taste up with a conceit. I like all of the above because of their innocence, their earnestness in describing the world. If I’m going to be enveloped by someone’s middle brow creation, I want it to speak from the heart.

Which brings me to another thing I hate: our culture’s lack of guilt and shame, perhaps reflected most painfully in the literati currently clogging up our coasts. My irritation at them and their “work” is almost constant. This month, I endured David Shields ramble about the “honesty” of lying, that the writer of the false memoir “simply cares too much.” In a similar vein, I’ve had to listen to a series of pop figures defend plagiarism, the outright theft of a more obscure writer’s prose. “Nothing is original,” declares Jim Jarmusch. “Steal from anywhere that fuels your imagination.” For Jarmusch, it doesn’t matter whether this is a book or a cloud. In essence, we are moving into a world where the cultural avant garde believes that if something makes them feel, then they are free to use it in their own work without attribution or compensation. Then I read an interview with Jonathan Safran Foer, who advocates in his high-handed way for a New Joylessness, essentially advocating happiness without pleasure, pontificating about how the sense of taste is “silly, gluttonous, and embarrassing.” All while sipping an $8 glass of juice and picking over some stir-fry.

Browsing through the contemporary literature section of a bookstore these days is like Chinese water torture. The America of the new millennium has bred a literary movement united by a puny cleverness, like a pack of primping poodles looking to show off their tricks, to please the universities, promising to be the well-heeled lap dogs they’ve been trained to be, as long as you’ll give them tenure, or at least put their books on the course list, because that’s the only way that anyone outside of their little cult will ever read them. If I could reign unhappiness on the lot of them, individually and collectively, I would.

Where are the passions of Whitman, the grand quests of Melville, the independence of Thoreau? The men of American letters these days can’t hold a candle to that wind. Where is the conflicted soul of Dostoevsky, the recognition that our lives are brilliant and joyous yet still torn asunder? It seems that what gets sold to us as “literature” these days is a faded remnant.

I’m not sure which was the chicken and which the egg, but our obsession with being happy seems to be woven into all of our watery thoughts. An entire society devoted to the pursuit of an internal state is bizarre, bordering on the pathological . It’s like a culture devoted to the pursuit of mawkishness, or whimsy. Rather than spreading happiness, I say (in descending order of importance) pursue truth, pursue decency, pursue fun. Pursue something greater than yourself, something you can analyze, or at least something active and real. Pursue anything but this Cartesian shell game being sold to you on the idiot box, whose goal is an internal state of mind (so much of the West’s difficulty in seeing the truth in life seems to be traced to the delusions perpetuated by French philosophers).

Part of the quest for truth is a quest to find our own individual and collective destinies, and sometimes this involves doing the hard thing, something that seemingly creates a lot of unhappiness, both for yourself and for others. To paraphrase a line from the Colbert Report (and I hope this trendy reference point helps placate those who believe that I am reflexively opposed to anything that is popular these days): I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads, “What has war ever solved? (other than ending Fascism and Slavery).”

So to the plugged in, to the turned on, to all those in pursuit of happiness as some kind of a grand quest, you can go fuck yourselves. It is a great consolation in this life that I don’t have to be like you.

The Ongoing Battle Between Men and Women

2010-02-14T16:17:00.000-08:00

“The Hangover” wasn’t may favorite movie of 2009. That award would probably go to “The Road”, with “Adventureland” and a couple of movies that I caught on video, “Into the Wild” and a film about the East German secret police called “The Lives of Others”, as close runners-up. However, “The Hangover” was the funniest move that I saw last year, and possibly the most culturally significant in the hard line it takes concerning America’s ongoing cultural trench war between the sexes.

The plot involves three guys who go to Vegas for a bachelor weekend and proceed to lose not only their friend, the groom, but also any memory of the night when they lost him. They then decide to retrace their steps in an effort to find their buddy, and amidst all the wacky high jinks which ensue, the filmmakers posit a couple of ideas on the joys of Vegas and the context of a contemporary marriage: First, that it is our right as men to be allowed these kinds of no-holds-barred vacations; and second, that any woman who would try to deny them from us is an incorrigible bitch who you are better not being with in the first place.

This is a pretty bold shot across the bow, at least from my experience with the modern woman, most of whom would not understand, much less condone, a weekend of drugs, strippers, and general debauchery, not to mention a flirtation with real danger and economic ruin. But, despite all the craziness, the movie still tries to keep a certain moral respectability. There is no outright sex, at least as far as we know (OK, there is a photo collage of some fellatio in the closing credits, played purely for laughs), and the only reason that the guys in the bachelor party all take “roofies” and lose their collective memories is because one of the characters, the crazy brother-in-law-to-be, is tricked by a local drug dealer and then secretly doses their drinks. In short, despite all their misbehavior, we are supposed to buy into the basic moral center of these guys. Amidst all of their naughty behavior, we are expected to root for them.

For such a popular movie, “The Hangover” goes pretty far out on a limb, implying that sex, drugs, thievery, breaking the law, it’s all good clean fun, provided you “don’t bring anything home with you,” as the saying goes. More or less, this is the attitude of the prospective bride in the movie who, despite being given around 45 seconds of total screen time, sets the moral tone for the film. She seems to understand that boys will be boys, stays off her high horse, and, by accepting both her husband and his best men back into the fold, allows for a happy ending. The boys have their fun, the wedding ceremony goes off with nary a hitch, and she has a sheepishly compliant husband to boot (at least for the time being).

The bride in the movie contrasts with the girlfriend of a hen-pecked dentist named Stu, who not only tries to control every move of his life but is naive enough to actually believe that the guys are out touring the wine country on their bachelor bacchanalia. A major subplot of the movie is based around the contention that this kind of woman has a wicked heart, and that the dentist is much better off dating a prostitute with an illegitimate child and the proverbial heart of gold.

The residents of Planet Vagina have also been talking about the state of modern marriage, but the nature of the discussion has been going a little differently. Last month, the Life and Arts section of the Financial Times ran a column titled “I do… don’t I?”, which reviewed a series of books recently written by women about marriage. These women are all very serious about the subject, giving way more thought and moral gravity to the institution than even the most fire-and-brimstone of preachers, and for most of them, it boils down to “shared intimacy” with the person who, by choosing to marry him, you are making “the most vivid representation of your own personality” in your life. Whew. That’s a lot to ponder. No wonder the fair sex also tends to be the grouchy one.

A cornerstone of the column was a review of “Committed”, the latest book by Elizabeth Gilbert, whose “Eat Pray Love” described her roaming the planet to find herself and was probably the most popular book of the year among the Oprah set in 2008. Gilbert also happened to be speaking at the Borders in Oak Brook to promote her new book. As a one-time journalist, punk rocker, and diligent seeker of knowledge, I felt compelled to venture right into the belly of the beast, to hear this spokesperson for her generation for myself.

I was expecting some kind of spooky estrogen fest, and I was not disappointed. I got there about fifteen minutes before Gilbert was scheduled to speak, and all 120 or so folding chairs in front of the podium had already been taken. All but six of these seats were occupied by women, and the conversation waxed at a tittering cackle, as the relatively hushed tone of each individual voice was magnified by its trebled constancy, the babbling soon becoming background noise like some kind of well mannered but wicked brook. It made my hair stand on end, at least for a few seconds, until my reptilian brain had a chance to reorient itself.

Having suppressed my immediate instinct of fight or flight, I leaned against a bookshelf at the edge of the speaking area and made myself comfortable. The crowd continued to swell, eventually topping 200, including a few more men, most of whom seemed either to have stumbled by out of curiosity or to be attached to a book-bearing, autograph-seeking female. The crowd ranged from their early 20’s through late-50’s, with the bulging bell curve of these ladies somewhere in their 30-somethings. In other words, they were just the folks you would expect to attend a reading from possibly the foremost advocate of a woman’s perspective on love and self-fulfillment in America today. Most were white, although there were a smattering of black and Asian ladies, and there were even a couple of scarf-wearing Muslims in the crowd. From my limited observation, very few of these women were wearing wedding rings.

Gilbert entered to healthy applause, but the biggest cheer of the night came when she made some snarky comment about Sarah Palin. This seemed to be a regular line for her, a predictable applause getter used to break the ice. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I guess a personal memoir about the spiritual value of leaving your husband to travel the world is not really much of a red state idea. Gilbert then read from the first chapter of her new book, a tale about her boyfriend’s extensive interview with the Department of Homeland Security at the Dallas airport, and while the writing was competent, the bathos of Gilbert’s prose left me unmoved.

When Gilbert announced, “Thank you, men,” to the dozen or so of us in the audience, and everyone applauded, I felt sort of like I imagine a black guy would feel if the P.A announcer at the United Center thanked him for attending a hockey game. Then she added, “Don’t think you aren’t noticed,” and I even felt weirder.

But Gilbert’s response to questions were a lot more interesting than her prose, in that she wasn’t reiterating some hackneyed narrative but discussing ideas. “You can’t have intimacy without privacy, you can’t have privacy without rights, and you can’t have rights without marriage,” she declared, which is an interesting tautology, although probably an incorrect one, as the lack of government recognition hasn’t stopped many an unmarried couple from being intimate. Gilbert talked about the shift in Western society from an arranged to an “expressive” marriage, and that most societies throughout history would regard our linking of chimera such as love and romance to the bedrock foundation of marriage as “a fool’s errand.” She discussed Aristophanes and Platonic myth. She discussed her own “gaping loneliness.” All in all, it wasn’t bad stuff, far more thoughtful than I had expected. I could see why all these women were at least casual followers of Elizabeth Gilbert, as she seemed to be a smarter, prettier, more driven version of themselves.

After the reading, while Gilbert was busy signing books, I ran into a buddy of mine who was taking photos for a local newspaper. I explained that, much like him, I was on assignment, just one of my own devising. My buddy complained about how ridiculous both the author and the store manager had been, treating him with a dismissive tone and not letting him get in position to do his job. Then the spell was broken, and I remembered that these folks are the enemy. Elizabeth Gilbert speaks for a privileged subset of women. Of course, she was going to yell at the guy trying to do his job. That’s not what she respects. She respects exotic bullshit, because it helps define who she is. It got me thinking about Javier, or whatever the hell his name is, her boyfriend-turned-husband who somehow has the luxury to leapfrog around the planet yet is still supposed to be living the simple life.

Gilbert went out of her way to note that she and her husband now have a home in central New Jersey, with the implication that they are obviously not concerned with the perceptions of others. But you don’t need to prove your hipness once you’ve been a bartender at the Coyote Ugly and then popularized the place by writing an essay about your experiences for GQ. Spend enough time in Manhattan, and you’ve internalized your hipness. You only prove it all the more, to yourself and to your peers, by moving somewhere seemingly unhip and pretending not to care about such things.

Out of curiosity, along with a journalistic due diligence, I tracked down Gilbert’s 1997’s GQ article, “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon”, and found just it just as painfully smug and cloying as I had imagined it would be. It’s offensive and just plain wrong on so many levels. First, Coyote Ugly is less a bar than a concept, a place where you can be served the overpriced beverage of your choice, as long as it’s beer or whiskey, by a beautiful woman, who will “entertain” you with her scathing repartee. As money making ventures go, it’s pretty much a “can’t lose” proposition, assuming that you are in Manhattan, Las Vegas, Orlando, or one of the other cultural gathering points of the young, the self-absorbed, and the beautiful. But most of the country isn’t graced with such talent, and the faux craziness that Gilbert details is not just annoying, but delusional. I’ve frequented more than one too many crazy, drunken bars in my life, and none of the Manhattan wanna be bitches who worked at Coyote Ugly would tolerate being anywhere near them. To imagine that the Coyote Ugly is some kind of real experience, and to write about it as such, is just bullshit. Personally, I’m all for a pretty woman serving me drinks, but she better know how to correctly mix a good Beefeater and tonic. And bonus points if she knows when to shut up.

Towards the end of the question and answer session, Gilbert briefly noted, without elaboration, that she and Javier wanted to have children together. I’m not sure if this rocked many of the single, childless women in the audience, but it brought things home for me.

“Holy, my biological clock is fucking ticking, Batman!” I thought, the scales falling off my eyes. Because that, of course, is what this is all about. A woman may say she just wants to discover herself, or to save the poor children of Haiti. But what she really wants is to be loved, to be “chosen”, and (for most women anyway) to have her own baby to love and to hold. They’ve got all this estrogen coursing through their veins, and they just have to put all that loving energy somewhere.

“Every couple in the world has the potential over time to become a small and isolated nation of two,” Gilbert coos, “Creating their own culture, their own language, and their own moral code, to which no one else can be privy.”

It is a sweet thought, and one of the reasons that I decided to hear Gilbert speak. I’ve ruminated along similar lines about my own marriage, about its wide circumference, its ability to shade us from most of the B.S. of modern culture.

But if a marriage contains the ability to create your own “small nation”, then your children connect that nation to posterity, to the future of the planet. For all their gallivanting about and their wringing of hands, contemporary women are back in the same place they were a generation ago, one where they secretly hope to ensnare a man into the joys of domesticity. But this time, her man better be able to live up to her high expectations, to be devoted yet enthralling, that “most vivid representation” of a woman’s personality.

The contemporary American male has been taking flak from all sides, as witnessed by Katie Roiphe’s essay “The Naked and the Conflicted” and the chorus of hallelujahs (along with a fair share of criticism) that came in the wake of its Dec 31 publication in the New York Times. In it, Roiphe condemns the contemporary American male writer, guys like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Safran Foer, for their flaccid narcissism, using her belated praise for the sexual virility of the Roths and Updikes of the previous literary generation as a cudgel to attack and condemn the legitimacy of today’s men. To argue the merits of each literary generation is an exercise for another day. Suffice to say that Roiphe’s basic premise, if not her conclusion, holds merit. I personally find both David Foster Wallace and Philip Roth very talented but also incredibly annoying, Wallace precisely for making a fetish out of our individual and collective impotence and Roth for his over-the-top sexual braggadocio and bravado. I’ll also note that my favorite writers from each group, namely Saul Bellow from the old school and Dave Eggers in the contemporary crowd, can also descend into the stylized machismo and impotence of their respective generations.

What is important to note here is that for Roiphe, much like for Gilbert, the American male is simply inadequate. A generation ago, we were inadequate because we were macho, grasping, selfish. Now we are inadequate because we are soft and pliable, but with a cool-eyed contemplation that Roiphe interprets as simply the flip side of the old narcissism. My point is that, for this generation of pampered princesses who roam our universities or hold court on Oprah, no reasonable, mortal man would be good enough for them. So, like Roiphe, they flail at literary windmills, or like Gilbert, they hang out on a distant beach and wait to be saved by some exotic stranger. Meanwhile, “Hangover” portrays a world where everything would be just fine, as long as women would lighten up and allow their husbands the occasional trip off the marital reservation to fulfill our seemingly irrepressible need to act like boys.

But do not fret, as reality is a lot less depressing than the fantasies concocted in the imaginary worlds of Hollywood or Manhattan. A CBS News poll finds that 90% of Americans are happy with the spouses they married. Perhaps even more interesting is the economic breakdown, as 95% of the couples making over $50,000/year are happy with who they married, while this percentage drops to 83% for those making under $50,000/year. In other words, those with lower incomes are 3.4 times more likely to be unhappy with their choice of mate than those who are making decent money, and most of those who are disappointed are women (15%, versus 5% for men). Meanwhile, statistically, 0% of those polled said that money was the most important feature in a happy marriage. Rather, it was respect (at 49%) and trust (37%) that were viewed as most important. In other words, most folks say they are looking for trust and respect, but this means little if they don’t have the economic freedom to live their lives. As my Dad used to say, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. And let me tell you, rich is a whole lot better.”

So, Happy Valentine’s Day, all my loved and loving friends. I have good news for you. Most of us who have ventured into a state of matrimony will have basically happy marriages, the exceptions generally being those who either married too young or who for whatever reason are just incorrigibly selfish. Assuming that both of you have a normal sympathy for the people around you, about the biggest thing you have to worry about is making enough money to satisfy your basic desires and to buy the mental space that goes along with a sense of personal freedom. Everything else pretty much sorts itself out in the wash.

A Communique from Beyond the Des Plaines

2010-01-01T22:37:00.000-08:00

Most inner suburbs really aren’t that different from the outskirts of Chicago. Oak Park, Niles, Skokie, Cicero: While all have a distinct character, both from the city and from each other, it is an essentially urban character. But travel west of the Des Plaines River, and things change. It is as if the psychic pull on a people corresponds to the continental drift, that all the land that drains into Lake Michigan has one orientation, while the land draining into the Illinois River (and eventually the Mississippi River then the Gulf of Mexico) has another. In short, my new home of Villa Park sometimes feels like it was carved out of farm country, even though most of the town has been around since the 1920’s and is firmly enmeshed in the Chicago grid.

A lot of folks have asked me about what it’s like living in the suburbs. Now, I know that these questions are made mostly out of politeness, along with maybe a little hope that I might dish on some of the absurdities of the suburban lifestyle that I’ve encountered, but I also figure that there is at least a little genuine curiosity behind some of them. Over the past three months, I’ve gotten acquainted with our new town while still having that sense of otherness that goes with being an outsider. So I thought that I’d use this year-end missive to summarize my findings (with the understanding that, while I may aim to be a Margaret Mead on the Prairie, most of my insights are probably more like an admixture of the venom of Philip Wylie with the platitudes of Rick Steves).

Villa Park, much like the city’s Northwest Side where we previously lived, is a bastion of the white working class. While integration has come to both places, they remain very much expressions of an old working class sensibility. There is a real sense of everyone taking care of their neighbors, but also an unspoken understanding that everyone will get down to the business of keeping the place in order, of not letting their neighbors down.

We are one house off the corner, and the odd angle of that corner means that we share a front yard with one of our neighbors, whose name is Bob. On the day we moved in, before most of our stuff was even out of its boxes, Bob came over and noted that typically he and the owner of our house share lawn mowing duties. Two days after that, Bob was out, dressed in a thick flannel shirt and an old hunting cap, mowing our lawn, even though the grass looked perfectly nice to me. I had to tell him that my lawnmower was a piece of junk, that I didn’t move it from the old house, and that it was October already and I wasn’t really planning on mowing the lawn again until spring.

Out here, a person’s yard is an act of personal expression, but there are a limited subset of acceptable ways that this self should be expressed. This is not the kind of neighborhood that looks kindly on unkempt lawns. Nor is it the kind of place where folks pay others to do the yard work for them, although I did notice one house about halfway up the block that has yard service. But in general, it is just assumed that people will do these kinds of domestic tasks themselves. At one point, I told Nancy, one of the neighbors on the other side of us, that we were thinking about getting a housekeeping service to clean our place a couple of times each month, and her jaw dropped so low that I thought she was going to catch flies. It was like I had just told her that I had hired a personal manservant to help clean my private parts. I imagined her thinking, “What kind of yuppie debutantes do we have moving in here?”

Our block is a friendly place. Most folks say “hi” to anyone who walks by. The neighbors on either side of us each bought little Christmas presents for our 17-month old son. All our immediate neighbors have a little post-Christmas get-together each year, and Bob is hosting this year’s party, this coming Sunday. So, it’s a very neighborly place. But then so was our block on the Northwest side. From my experience, that’s just how these working class neighborhoods are.

In this sense, I am instinctively much more comfortable here than I would be in, say, Evanston or Naperville, two of the many suburbs for which I admit having what amounts to an irrational dislike.

Naperville is pretty easy to dismiss as the star child of planned suburbs, a place where the city fathers have somehow managed to maintain its image as a rural haven while becoming the fifth largest city in the state, a place where many of the fancy downtown Chicago restaurants have set up satellites, with the added benefit that the homeless are not welcome there, a place where you can have your cul-de-sac monstrosity with attached garage to keep your Sequoia nice and warm yet still eat overpriced linguine and swing with the neighbors on the weekend.

Evanston is a somewhat different story. It is the kind of town to which a lot of urban bohemians flee when, like us, they have kids and are looking for a bigger home, as Evanston has the requisite bookstores, cafes, and art movie houses to keep them in touch with the aspects of contemporary culture that have become defining parts of their identity. I actually had a short debate with extended family at the Christmas dinner table over my idea that Evanston is a pretty insufferable place. My argument, in a nutshell, is that the town was founded back in the 19th century by teetotaling Methodists as a refined refuge from the hustle-bustle of Chicago, and that everything about its development, from its lack of expressway access to its beaches, where city residents are not welcome, reeks of the kind of North Shore privilege that makes me want to punch someone. To me, the current residents, all these pseudo-bohemians, drinking fair trade coffee and feeling good about themselves, are really the contemporary equivalent of the uptight folks who originally founded the town. Hey, I know a fair number of otherwise fine and decent people who decided to move there, and I don’t begrudge them this, to each his own utopia, but living in a town like that would raise my blood pressure by at least 20 points.

Villa Park, on the other hand, is pretty much a creation of the Greater Chicago working class. Founded in the 1920’s around the Ovaltine factory, the housing stock is a mix of comfy 1920’s Queen Anne and Tudor homes (like the one we recently moved into), 1950’s ranch houses and bi-levels (like the kind my sister-in-law just bought), and post-WWII apartment complexes. The Ovaltine factory itself, which had been vacant since the company moved its operations to Minnesota in the 1980’s, was recently turned into relatively upscale condos.

Villa Park’s shopping pleasures trace mostly to its working class roots, and foremost amongst these joys are the pleasures of drink. I can walk to a handful of local watering holes, including the ubiquitous Irish pub with good beer and tolerable food, along with Lunar Brewing, a great brew pub that features not only its own first rate suds but also most of my favorite beers on the planet on tap, from European imports to Midwest microbrews, almost all for $4.50/pint. Up on North Avenue, about a three-minute drive away, there is Chicagoland Winemakers, which not only sells everything you need to brew or ferment your own elixir, but also makes its own stash of home brew on the premises, which after throwing a couple of hints you’ll usually be offered to try. I can vouch for their first-rate pilsner, a relatively hard beer to brew at home due to its low fermenting temperature and a crisp taste that can’t hide any off flavors. I also like the fact that the husband-and-wife team who own the place are direct and courteous but don’t kiss any ass. There is no pretense of them being extra nice to you just because you are giving them your money. And right across the street from the winemakers shop, up against Salt Creek, is the Golden Pheasant, with a biker bar up front and a supper club in back, reminiscent of small town Wisconsin. The German food they serve is quite decent, and on Sunday they feature a buffet of homemade desserts, including some of the most awesome sugar cookies on the planet.

The shopping area on Villa Avenue south of St. Charles Road is just a five minute walk from our home and features the kind of quirky stores that tend to congregate in dilapidated downtowns. There is Pioneer Garden & Feed, which specializes in bird feeders and where, if business is slow, one of the owners will give you a short dissertation about anything from the local forest preserves to how to attract birds to your home. The Rampant Lion is just down the block from Pioneer Garden & Feed. Most of the small storefront is devoted to folk CD’s and Celtic trinkets, although I’m intrigued by the bagpipe classes they have every Wednesday night. The mini-mall at Villa and St. Charles includes a butcher shop, a bakery, a coffee house, and a used bookstore housing mostly old paperback mystery novels and pulp science fiction. Other than the butcher shop, none of these places ever seems to be doing much business, raising the question of how they pay their rent each month, let alone find the cash to pay their employees. But that is the great thing about a neglected old downtown: the place is so sleepy and I assume the rent is so comparatively minimal that it allows the space for small, quirky businesses to open up shop and survive, if not thrive.

Tucked between the hustle-bustle of Oak Brook and the cut-rate emporiums on North Avenue, downtown Villa Park remains an odd backwater, at least in part due to the history of its train lines. Originally, four rail lines ran through town, mostly to transport goods and raw materials to-and-from Chicago. Two of these rails, the Great Western freight line, which ran right by the old Ovaltine factory, and the old Elgin passenger line, have long since been decommissioned, and both have been turned into extended bike trails, where you can ride from the inner suburbs all the way out into farm country. The two remaining rail lines, the Union Pacific and Canadian National tracks, both of which are within a few hundred yards of our home, are still actively used, and it is not unusual to see 100+ car trains rolling on the tracks near our house.

Eighty years ago, the Elgin line was the main transportation node to get out of town. When the Elgin line shut down, the Union Pacific became the only line with passenger rail service in Villa Park, and the train station was moved to what had been the backside of town. As a result, Villa Park is one of the few suburbs that does not have a commercial business district abutting their Metra station, while its old downtown lacks the accompanying foot traffic and is somewhat stranded.

I’ve always gravitated to the working class. I just feel more comfortable around them. This dates all the way back to high school. If I told you that I grew up in Newport Beach, California, you’d probably imagine some kind of fancy house on the ocean. Well, there are parts of Newport Beach that are like that, but we lived in the “heights”, a plateau about a mile away from the water (as the crow flies), a neighborhood of cute, California bungalows, mostly built between 1945 and 1960, homes not that different from the ranches and bi-levels of north Villa Park.

In high school, the two kids in my class who lived nearest to me were Ivan Kovalenko, who lived a block away, and Alex Olson, who lived the next block over. Both grew up in small bungalows and were being raised by single mothers who didn’t have a lot of spare cash. Along with Eric Hesse a few blocks over, whose Chilean father worked as an electrical engineer while investing all his spare money in local real estate, they were the closest I had to good friends as a teenager. To be honest, we really weren’t that close, but they were nonetheless a significant part of my life. The first few times I got drunk were with Alex, and it was at his house that I first heard the Sex Pistols (some skateboarding friend of ours brought “Never Mind the Bollocks” by one afternoon). What I remember best about Ivan is that he used to like challenging me to wrestling and/or boxing matches, where he would ritually kick my ass (it helps being 30 pounds bigger and raised by two older brothers). But there was an unspoken bond, in that we had none of the gifts of the guys growing up on the waterfront, neither the cash and the confidence of the Lido kids nor the hip flair of the surfer dudes from West Newport. We weren’t very good athletes and only adequate students. We were all rather awkward around girls. What we had were the things that most working class kids have, a willingness to push the envelope and our love of rock ’n roll.

To be strictly factual, my dad was a real estate broker in Southern California and not a factory worker in the Midwest, and there were some years when he made a lot of money. But there were others where he made nothing, and we lived off my mother’s teaching salary. Which means that we never struggled, but also that we never had the rather ridiculous prosperity of the families down on the water. So I guess, strictly speaking, you would probably label my family upper-middle class, but I hung with the working class kids because they were my neighbors. And I think those associations have shaped me to this day.

This has presumably influenced why I feel so at home in Villa Park. Now, don’t get me wrong. Once I get on the main suburban drag, I often feel like a beached sea creature, or maybe a whale trapped in the shallows, awaiting the inevitable harpoon. For instance, I refer to the intersection of Butterfield and Finley Roads as Shithole Central. Every crappy concept restaurant in the corporate firmament seems to have landed in this blighted moonscape: Red Lobster and The Olive Garden, of course, but also the Jimmy Buffet-inspired Cheeseburger in Paradise and something called “Fudruckers” (what you’d serve at a place called “Fudruckers” is beyond me, but I assume it’s another corporate concept, and I’m sure it’s ruckin fun). One Friday night not long after moving here, I got the brilliant idea that we would follow up some remarkably bad Thai food we got at a mini-mall on Roosevelt Road with a quick visit to the Verizon store, situated within the 4th circle of one of these big Butterfield malls. I just assumed that the store would be relatively empty that late on a Friday night, but we could barely navigate the traffic jam in the parking lot, and once I was inside the store I was then asked to “put my name on the list” if I wanted to speak with a representative. The store was full of people, encompassing a wide gamut of Chicago’s diversity. Just about every age, every shape, every ethnicity was represented in this room, all united by the pleasures of a full belly followed by the prospect of conspicuous consumption. I quickly drew two conclusions: first, that the U.S. economy really couldn’t be doing that badly; and second, that this kind of life is fucking crazy. This was quickly followed by a third thought: Get me out of here! I would much rather spend my Friday night hanging out with my wife and son at home, without a new cell phone.

And that, my friends, is why I like my suburban life. I’ve gotten to the point where I really don’t need all that crap, the latest phone or culturally significant book, to be happy. In fact, I’ve still got a bunch of old, unread texts gathering mold on my bookshelf that could fill my time for the next 20 years. But I like my yard, I can play music in my basement until the wee hours without disturbing the rest of the family, and I like being within easy access of the dog park for my Schip and an indoor pool for my son. If I can also walk down the street and enjoy a nice IPA, so much the better.

Boys Night Out

2009-11-22T20:03:00.000-08:00

Melissa, my wife, sometimes jokes that my allusions all seem to relate to one of three things: punk rock songs, Monty Python, or episodes of Star Trek (actually, I think she’s a little off base, as she never even mentions Stanley Kubrick films or my lengthy analogies to the game of tennis).

“I married such a nerd,” she’ll note.

In that vein, I remember an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” when Picard left the ship for a little R&R, only to be embroiled down on the planet in some convoluted intrigue with the locals, which left him little time for any R or R. But by the end of the show, Picard realizes that this adventure was his R&R, and it was just what the doctor ordered.

Last weekend, I went into the city for my first night out since moving to the suburbs a couple months ago (not counting an indy rock show that I attended on my way home from Bible study one Wednesday). I met three buddies at the Globe Pub, where we drank pilsner beer and watched the Fire lose their MLS semifinal match to Real Salt Lake in a penalty shootout.

That was a bit of a downer, so after the game we walked around the corner to the Lincoln Restaurant, where the College of Complexes was holding court. In explanation for the uninitiated, the College of Complexes is a loose collection of misfits and outsiders who have been debating a wide range of topics of the day for the past 58 years, an organization which I believe has its roots in the public debates of Bughouse Square.

It was around 10PM, and the meeting began at 8PM, so we were a little late, but a waitress snuck us in through the back door of the “meeting hall”, essentially an annex of the restaurant where the College holds session each Saturday night.

The room was packed, but the four of us were able to find a spot at an unmanned bar in the back. Looking around, my first thought was that this is a room full of folks who aren’t getting any, unless by “any” you mean social security checks, either due to old age or the early retirement known as functional insanity.

The main presentation had been long concluded, as had the question and answer period, but we arrived in time for what is typically the best part of these gatherings, the rebuttal period where audience members get 5 minutes to respond to the presentation. From our perch on the barstools in back, we sipped our Weiss beers and absorbed the knowledge.

“I agree with tonight’s speakers: the New World Order is behind the war in Afghanistan,” said a relatively young guy at the podium. “They were behind 911; they are behind our wars; they are behind the chemtrails (this triggered giggles in the audience). Hey, the chemtrails are real, just look it up. I’ve got a list of websites right here if you’re interested. Just find me when this is over and get some education.”

A middle aged gent with black plastic glasses stood up to declare: “You ask why we are at war in Afghanistan. I’ll tell you why. It’s because we are at war with Islam, and for good reason (this was met with some guffaws and hissing from the crowd).”

A woman in her 30’s whose hard nipples, the business end of pendulous, sagging breasts, faced towards the floor at a 45 degree angle and were clearly visible through her shirt, got up to pronounce that she was “shocked and angered that anyone could say we were at war with Islam.” She said a bunch of other stuff, but I was too distracted to tell you what.

A young black guy, probably in his early 20’s, tried a softer approach, saying that his Christian faith teaches him that love is a better response than the urge for retribution and asked the dude in the black glasses to live by a more positive philosophy.

I was almost persuaded by the kindness in this kid’s demeanor and the reasonableness of his argument, but then another conservative old crank spieled off all the strategic reasons to have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting as an aside the math and logic demonstrating that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by Muslim terrorists flying commercial aircraft into the buildings, and that the masterminds of said attacks have since admitted as much.

It didn’t look good for the conspiracy theorists and their left-wing sympathizers, as the eight original speakers stood up in their matching “Investigate 911” T-shirts to defend themselves. A couple of younger white guys, who I’d bet dollars-to-doughnuts were full-time political protestors and part-time Kinko’s employees, stumbled through more minutiae about chemtrails and the melting point of metal alloys used to construct skyscrapers, but they managed neither to convince nor entertain. The crowd grew restless. A young Muslim started solidly, stating that “Islam is a religion of peace”, but two minutes later he was talking about his visit to Pakistan and that it wouldn’t be long before bombs would be blowing shit up in this country, and the wistfulness which he had for said bombings pretty much refuted the main thesis of his argument. Like I said, it didn’t look good for the home team in this one. But then an old black dude approached the podium, leaned over the mic, and stood up for the dignity of the New Revolutionary.

“I remember Vietnam, when pappy raped me in the ass,” he began. “I remember Iraq, when pappy raped me in the ass. I remember Tuskegee, when pappy raped me in the ass. And now, here we are in Afghanistan, and pappy’s raping me in the ass again. I gotta tell you, I’m tired of gettin’ raped in the ass.”

It was the most fun that I’ve had in awhile. I laughed my ass off, it riled me up, and on my drive home I entertained myself with a series of exuberant interior monologues, a couple of which I will elucidate for you now.

The first relates to Islam being a religion of peace, a platitude you hear a lot these days. I know it’s a real downer for a lot of folks, but I think we must be willing to dive into some pretty deep waters if we are even going to attempt to understand what it means for 1.3 billion people on this planet to call themselves “Muslim”. Maybe a lot of them are only culturally Muslim, sort of like my dad and many in his generation were culturally Christian. Maybe, like my own generation, their children will slide into the secular melting pot, in which there are no religious beliefs to interfere with being a good consumer, where the vestiges of their forefathers gets ameliorated by a safe, accommodating pragmatism. I know this is the vision with which most of the prosperous parts of our country and our planet have comforted themselves.

But what about those several hundred million Muslims who actually believe in the tenants of their faith? Let’s start with the most elemental of these beliefs, namely that Mohammed was a prophet who brought us the final revelation of God, and that the manifest destiny of Mohammed’s revelation is for Islam to rule the world, at which point there will be ushered in an era of universal peace and submission to the will of God. Without this belief in the manifest destiny of their religion, Islam loses much of its potency; it’s like Christianity without the Resurrection or Judaism without the part about being the chosen people of God.

Anyone who has made even a cursory exploration into the faith understands this. The problem is that most of our cultural elite, from educators to politicians, believe that the ultimate goal is to make the world’s religions more ecumenical, filing off their rough edges until they become safe, if not all together irrelevant. So they conveniently ignore prima facie evidence that most practicing Muslims believe in the ends if not the means of Al Qaeda.

My second thought is about how the new revolutionaries, if that is what you call these conspiracy theorists, are playing into the hands of the old right. Last year, on a trip to L.A., I debated the merits of the current wave of political conspiracies with my friend John. I defended their enthusiasms, if not their logic or evidence. But John argued that the shaky basis of their theories was precisely the point, as a truthteller without the truth on his side is nothing more than a sideshow, a distraction that facilitates the twisted powers who were behind the rise of the latter Bush Administration, who still lurk in the shadows, looking to resume pilfering the country and undermining its laws.

So John, if you are reading this, let me acknowledge that, after closer examination of these folks, I think that you’re right. As you pointed out to me, it’s no wonder that a show like “Coast to Coast”, whose bread and butter are conspiracies ranging from the government cover-up of UFO’s to the secret history of the Fed, comes to you courtesy of the same broadcast network that brings you Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Most of these conspiracy theorists, while anti-establishment, are carrying the water of the Right, because by focusing on chimeras like death camps and chemtrails, they distract from the real public betrayals right under our nose.

What this country needs are acts of radical moderation, not self-absorbed radicalism. The laissez-faire capitalists who spearheaded the deregulation of the banking industry want you to forget that this deregulation caused the current economic crisis. Every citizen more concerned with the lingering influence of the Rothschilds than the more recent malfeasance managed by Greenspan and company is a victory for the folks who put this country’s economy at risk. In a parallel vein, the Republican Party is more than happy to have you fret about chemtrails, as it distracts attention from their gutting of consumer protections and environmental laws over the past 25 years and the very real harm this has caused. From Bush’s “Healthy Forest Initiative” to the billionaires who bring you Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, their Orwellian Newspeak and its poisoning of the American mind is the greatest crime of this new century, and the sad fact is that we probably ain’t seen nothing yet.

These are the things that I’ve been thinking about since coming back from my little Saturday night out with the boys. I know that my life would be less complicated and more titillating if we were the kind of guys who thought about nothing but sports and titties (whereas these two subjects take up no more than a strong plurality of our time), but much like Captain Picard in that Star Trek episode, I got the kind of night out that suits my nerdy and unequivocally combative brain.

Living in Skinner’s Box

2009-10-28T13:40:00.000-07:00

What follows is a tale of just desserts, where the protagonist (namely me), makes a life altering decision on what began as mere whim, partly out of greed, partly out of boredom, and partly on the innocent notion that the world really is all flowers and jellybeans, and that everything is bound to turn out fine in the end. So prepare yourself, my dear reader, to feast on a healthy portion of schadenfreude.

About three weeks ago, Melissa and I moved from our old home, a small, 1920’s-era bungalow in Portage Park on the Northwest side of Chicago, into a two-story Tudor house of similar vintage in the suburb of Villa Park.

The move was rather impetuous. While we’d talked about buying a bigger home for the past couple of years, it was an amorphous plan, filled with vague dreams about dark, quiet skies and sitting by the fireplace, of having enough space so I could play music while at the same time Melissa and Milo enjoyed the peace of an early bed in another part of the house.

While we liked our home in Portage Park, and we liked our neighbors, the house is essentially a subdivided box with a kitchen and breakfast nook attached at the end. The three bedrooms, living room, and dining area all occupy the same sonic space. I could be working on the computer in my office, located in a small back bedroom, and hear Milo’s every peep in the front bedroom, even with his door closed.

Any talk about moving, however, had been just that. When faced with a specific opportunity, we’d demure. This summer, our friend Beth noted that her mom was looking to sell their 1920’s Queen Anne in Villa Park. At the time, we knew almost nothing about the town, and while the price was a little steep for us, Beth said that her mom might be willing to negotiate, and so we drove out there one Friday afternoon, more on a summer joy ride than with any serious intent.

We really liked Beth’s mom’s place. It had charm, the town seemed sweet, and her house was next to the Prairie Path, an old rail right-of-way that had been converted into a 50-mile long bike path from the inner suburbs out into farm country. However, Melissa’s dad, who’s done most of the major work on our house in Portage Park over the past several years, noted that Beth’s mom’s house was in need of significant repair (and, at least in my mind, essentially implying that he’s getting too old to be bailing out his clueless son-in-law every time some new “emergency” cropped up). So, much like the condo in Palm Springs and the farm house in Wisconsin that we considered earlier, we held off.

However, mostly out of curiosity, we decided to go on a few more Villa Park house tours. We are so stupid-innocent-crazy about these things that we found three more houses that next week we wanted to put an offer on. The first one was a little out of our price range and ended up being sold to another buyer before we could make a move. The second was on a fairly busy street, so we were able to walk away from the property without making an offer. But on one of these house tours, we found a place where it was harder to walk away. It had pretty much everything we wanted: a large, beautiful backyard that was fully fenced; a large deck for hanging out and having barbeques during the summer; three upstairs bedrooms; a living area on the first floor with four rooms, a fireplace, and a lot of old school charm; and a finished basement that could serve as both an office and music studio for me. The house had new windows, a new roof, a remodeled bathroom on the first floor, and had been very well maintained. And the asking price was significantly less than the other options we had been considering. Melissa and I toured the house twice, three times if you count the inspection. We looked out on the sunny backyard and imagined spending many a tranquil afternoon out there with our son and our dog.

In one of the disclosure statements, the old owners had checked the “Yes” box when asked if there were noise issues associated with the house. Our realtor said that the box was checked due to occasional noise from the airplanes flying in to O’Hare, about seven miles away. I peppered her with questions about this, as our realtor lives just a block away from the house, but she didn’t seem to think that the aircraft noise was a big deal. Besides, we had been in Villa Park several times over the previous few weeks and never noticed any airplanes. At the walkthrough, the day before we were closing on the sale, there were some planes flying overhead, but I kind of shrugged it off. After all, the property was about the same distance away from O’Hare as our old place in Portage Park. How bad could it be?

Since we’ve moved in, I’ve found out how bad. It turns out that on days when the wind is blowing in from Lake Michigan, Villa Park is directly on the path for the planes heading towards the 4R landing strip, which is tilted at a SW-NE angle. During the balmy August days when we’d visited the house, the wind had been blowing from the west, but in the three weeks since we’ve moved, the wind has been blowing from the northeast a lot, including virtually the entire week after we first moved in.

Which means that a significant percentage of the nation’s air traffic has been flying over our house. And I mean RIGHT over our house. Well, I guess that’s not strictly true. I’ve triangulated it on my dog walks. From best I can tell, the bull’s eye of their trajectory is about four houses to the north of us. With GPS, they are pretty exact in following this path, although there is the odd straggler that may drift 50 feet in one direction or the other, with the bell curve of flights running from somewhere right above our house to somewhere about 150 feet to the north. These flights start at around 6AM, with an interval of five minutes or so, and then increase in frequency, to the point where they are running about every 150 seconds during much of the day, before tapering off in the evening and then typically stopping for good somewhere between 9:00-9:30 PM.

I can be a bit neurotic about lights, noises and other distractions around my home. As soon as we moved in, I was semi-consciously looking for something that would bother me. Could it be the traffic on Villa Avenue, a block away? No, it’s really not that bad, except during the afternoon rush when folks are trying to avoid the traffic on Kingery Highway about a half-mile further down the road. What about the traffic on Kingery? Hmm. No, it’s only audible late at night, and then as nothing more than very low, white noise. Actually, during those first couple of evenings, the first seed for my ire was a bright light that one of our neighbors kept on all night above his side door and which shined right in most of our windows, including into two of the upstairs bedrooms and three of the rooms on the main floor.

“Do you see how bright that light is?” I kept asking Melissa. “I think it’s going to drive me crazy.”

Well, now that the planes have begun their relentless descent, I’m certainly not worried about the neighbor’s nightlight anymore. I guess in this one way, the fact we are on a flight path towards one of the world’s busiest airports has done me a favor, in that it’s given me a legitimate target to focus my neurotic obsession. I am like an animal who just paid a lot of money to live in his own Skinner’s Box, getting a steady series of little psychological shocks every time I notice another plane is roaring over our home.

I’ve always known that Chicago is a place with a mostly man-made topography. Other than Lake Michigan, a few rivers, and a series of very small permutations separating the higher land from what are essentially the drained remains of frozen swamp, the rest of our landmarks have all been shaped or created by people. This is true not just of the buildings and the urban grid that contain us, but even the forest preserves and a lot of city parks were originally lowlands and other difficult places that the early pioneers decided to leave alone and which then got forever defined as open spaces by our city planners.

But the reaction of most suburbanites living around O’Hare takes this to a level I had heretofore never known. The planes flying in to O’Hare are our Old Faithful, an external clockwork in the sky that all of us living below can keep time to.

“About twenty more seconds, and we should get another plane,” I find myself noting. This is a thought process that might eventually drive me totally batty if it doesn’t somehow extinguish itself. Which, at least according to most of my new neighbors, it will. Besides, we’ve been given assurances by folks from Park Ridge to Addison that next year the 4R runway will be moved as part of the O’Hare reconfiguration, and that Villa Park will no longer be directly under the flight path. It seems that almost everyone who lives in these ’burbs knows the fine details about the airport master plan. O’Hare is like a relentless and unmerciful god, a Sumerian deity raining jet noise and diesel fumes down on a different set of victims, depending on the vicissitudes of the Chicago aviation commission and the Midwestern winds.

Like the hitters at Wrigley Field, I’ll be hoping that the wind will be blowing out all year, as those balmy southwest winds will not just be lifting baseballs out of the ballpark but will keep all the planes coming in off the lake and away from my new home.

As Daniel Burnham Spins In His Grave

2009-10-08T18:47:00.000-07:00

While relatively quiet about it, I was a proponent of Chicago’s Olympic bid. My friends and acquaintances seemed to be about evenly divided on the matter, reflecting the populace at large, at least if the polls that the local media conducted on the issue are to be trusted.

I found the fairly widespread and often passionate opposition within Chicago to hosting the Olympics a bit perplexing. Leaving out the usual knee-jerk opposition by the confused fringe who oppose any kind of civic improvement as a matter of course, what remained were two legitimate gripes: first, that the Olympics might not make money like it’s organizers imagined, eventually sticking the Chicago taxpayer with the bill; and second, that many of the contracts generated by the games would wind up in the pockets of the well-connected.

But these opponents were all playing small-ball. The reality is that the Summer Olympics have been a consistent game changer for at least half a century, vaulting the host city into the rarified air of places that matter.

Before hosting the Olympics, Atlanta, Munich and Barcelona were each a center of their respective regional economies but lacked a significant global footprint. For each, the Olympics were a coming-out party of sorts, helping to catapult them to the forefront of the global imagination, at least for a couple of weeks, and, coincidently or not, the fortunes of all three have been much brighter since hosting the games. Atlanta vaulted into a clear frontrunner as the first city of the New South; Munich has become a more prominent economic and political force within Germany; and Barcelona has become a preeminent tourist destination while Catalonian culture in general has gotten a boost.

This civic boost is even true for some of the more powerful and influential cities to host an Olympic games. Take Beijing. I was there to speak at an agricultural conference in 2005, three years before the 2008 games. Never mind that the city itself was an irredeemable shithole, with 17 million people plopped into a barbaric outpost on a dry, dusty plain without a source of decent drinking water, subject to lung-wrenching smog and periodic dust storms that could literally blot out the sun on a cloudless day. The city was out to transform itself into a worthy capital of what will soon likely become the most powerful country on the planet, and that optimism was expressed in every crane that dotted the city skyline. There wouldn’t be just one crane working on a building, there would be seven, and the hotel or the aquatic center would span two city blocks. Beijing may have been an unlikely spot to build a capital, but the collective will of that town was out to prove that the city could be a worthy host to the rest of the world.

The actual profit or loss that a metropolis makes hosting the Olympic Games is essentially irrelevant. So are whatever jobs that come with hosting the games. What counts is the prestige that goes with hosting the Olympics, particularly if you run the games well.

I lived in L.A. in 1984, and I can tell you first-hand that it was a lot of fun to be in the city when the Olympics were there. The Los Angeles Olympics were not just well-run but profitable. To be blunt, it was a two-week demonstration of the pleasures of fascism. Peter Ueberroth, the organizer of the games, worked out an arrangement with the business leaders of the city, and for two weeks, the oil refineries in San Pedro didn’t run during the day, and most of the major corporations staggered their work schedules. The result was that, over virtually the entire Olympic fortnight, there was an almost total absence of traffic jams and smog. The L.A. Basin reverted to its natural state, the kind of sunny utopia it must have been when my grandparents first pulled up stakes from central Illinois and southeast Kansas, respectively, and made California home.

I pictured Rahm Emanuel leaving his role as White House Chief of Staff in 2014, knocking heads and taking names, making the trains run on time, providing Chicago with two weeks of its own taste of beneficent fascism. There aren’t many opportunities in our tawdry democracy where one can enjoy the benefits of that kind of corporate-state coordination, and I was really looking forward to it.

But alas, Chicago was not chosen by the International Olympic Committee. In fact, it was the first city eliminated in the final round of voting, leading to a lot of soul searching in this town as to why, a question being asked by both proponents and opponents of the bid. I think the answer is three-fold but fairly straightforward, and that it is important to correctly ascertain these reasons because they imply a call-to-action and because the truth serves as a necessary corrective to some of the wishful thinking and misinformation being sold as insight in this town, including ridiculous ideas like that Chicago lost the bid because of the corruption of its government leaders (The International Olympic Committee has to be one of the most corrupt and bribe-able institutions on the planet, and the inside deals made in the corridors of power of Brasilia or Beijing make what goes on inside the Daley Center seem like child’s play. And does anyone remember the personal favors that Mayor Andrew Young, former ambassador to the U.N., called in to have Atlanta chosen over Athens on the 100th anniversary of the modern Olympics? If anything, the Chicagoans who came to Copenhagen last week needed to be more corrupt, or at least not so wide-eyed and innocent at their prospect of winning a fair vote).

First and foremost, Chicago didn’t get the Games because the bid leaders put all their chips on an out-and-out gamble of being everyone’s second choice, a calculated risk taken by necessity, because even these Chicagoans believed that Rio de Janeiro had the strongest emotional appeal. Meanwhile, Madrid and Tokyo focused their energies on an entirely different strategy, namely not being the first one out. Both were long shots, and thus tried to solidify a base of support in that first round, to the point where Juan Antonio Samaranch, the leader of the Madrid bid and former head of the IOC, gave a teary-eyed speech asking the committee to give him this last vote before he died (conveniently ignoring the fact that Barcelona hosted the Summer games in 1992). The result was that Madrid, which was never going to get the games, ended up with the most votes in the first round, while Chicago was knocked out of the competition. For all we know, Chicago may have won a one-on-one matchup with Rio de Janeiro, but it got outplayed early and would never get the chance to attempt it’s gambit of being everybody else’s second choice.

The second reason Chicago lost goes to the point of why the bid leaders felt the need to play the role of pragmatists: Chicago really didn’t really believe in itself. If everyone agrees that Rio de Janeiro is the most exciting option, then you have to find another angle. But we did, and still do, have a competing story to tell the world, that Chicago is the great American city, capital of the Midwest, heart of the nation’s breadbasket and an elemental part of the American character. Chicago in the summer is a stunning place, from our beautiful lakefront to our skyline and architecture, a metropolis freed from the grip of winter whose pent-up energy is then released in a thousand ethnic and neighborhood festivals. But we never really attempted to tell this story, never tried to make the rest of the planet truly excited to come here.

Lastly, the Chicago bid did not have the whole-hearted support of the city, and this has its roots in the Daley Administration’s top-down distrust of the people. Actually, I don’t entirely blame them for this. The reality is that there is a big chunk of our populace who shouldn’t be trusted. As a community, most of us collectively realize this, and that’s why we keep voting to reelect the Mayor, because we intuitively understand the man’s arrogance is a necessary bulwark against most of the blow-hards and ignoramuses who skulk around City Hall or have the phrase “activist” attached to their shingle.

The problem is that the Mayor’s arrogance, which one brimmed with enthusiasm to remake the city, is now a tired arrogance, a paint-by-numbers authoritarianism. Once he signed on to the Chicago Olympic bid, he got together the requisite civic and business leaders and then assumed he could set up a Potemkin Village of public support. Hey, it’s not like Brazilian President Lula da Silva doesn’t have his own underclass that he needs to sweep under the rug, it’s just that he was able to generate enough civic pride and enthusiasm that the activists decided to come on board.

In terms of corruption, I viewed the Olympics a lot like I view Millennium Park. For years, all we heard about about Millennium Park were the politically-connected dealings, the construction snafus, and the cost overruns. But now that it is finished and part of our urban landscape, who isn’t glad that it’s there? Millennium Park is our generation’s gift to our posterity. I understand that the city is going to take a lot of my money, and a lot of that money will probably either be wasted or end up in the hands of shady characters. All I ask it that I get something real in return. Give the people a Millennium Park, modernize the CTA, make a real attempt at a Midwestern high speed rail network, and I’ll gladly give you my taxes and barely squawk when you skim off the cream. But don’t raise my taxes just to keep your patronage army in place.

The Chicago Olympic bid never should have been about money, or jobs, or even neighborhood redevelopment. It never should have been about getting “what’s mine”. Rather, it should have been a call to civic pride, of being part of something greater than yourself.

The Olympics should have been our coming-out party, probably the first time since the Columbian Exposition when Chicago was the center of the world. And we all blew it, from the mayor on down, because of a begrudging pettiness.

Renouncing My Faith

2009-09-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

After almost 30 years of diligent, if sometimes skeptical, service, I have made the irrevocable decision to renounce the faith of my peers. I am speaking, of course, about the faith into which we were all indoctrinated in our youth, the faith in liberal democracy.

For these past three decades, I have almost always done my civic duty, voting the Democratic party line ever since I was an undergraduate (although I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Rod Blagojevich in the last governor’s race, and I voted Ed Clark for President on the first election when I could cast a ballot, back in 1980, as neither Carter nor Reagan seemed like an acceptable option).

But I’m fed up. Maybe this has been a long time coming, maybe it is a reckoning postponed for the past eight years by the unmitigated disaster of the Bush administration, a national calamity that we were all civically obligated to oppose by any and all means at our disposal, but I no longer can be held captive in the liberal democratic tent (both small and large L and D) by fear alone.

I realize this is a declaration that, combined with my impending move to the suburbs, may get me excluded from all the finest cocktail parties in Andersonville. But, much like many a lapsed Catholic, I have finally grown so tired of the hypocrisy of my religion that I seek to make a clean break.

So, like a Christian is asked to reject the Devil and all his empty promises during baptism, I hereby renounce the tenants of my old faith. I invite you to do the same as I echo the old ritual:

Do you renounce the Democratic Party and all its empty promises?

I renounce it.

Do you renounce modern American liberalism, with its need to creep into every nook and cranny of our private lives, scolding us for eating meat or drinking bottled water, finding new taxes and old causes with which to cudgel the general populace, seeking to mold the planet in its own image, one ordinance at a time?

I renounce it.

Do you renounce a public educational system that stifles creativity, forcing our boys and girls to sit in chairs all day and behave themselves, getting them well practiced at giving the correct answer, a system that resists oddity and enthusiasm unless it fits into the lesson plan?

I renounce it.

Do you renounce a university system that rewards the go-getter and the do-gooder, that confuses a hollow academic consensus with truth, that recognizes the value of almost all cultures other than the Scotch-Irish rednecks and hillbillies, my forebears, the ones who by and large tamed this country, won its wars, and made it a place worth living in?

I renounce this system.

Do you, fellow Chicagoan, renounce a police force that identifies more with the criminal than the citizen, who seems uninterested in enforcing property crime but is voracious in ticketing the working man and then booting his truck, in skimming cream off the top but not enforcing the law?

I renounce it.

Do you renounce a judicial system that is too weak-willed and weepy-eyed to impose justice on the motley lot with which we share our great metropolis, too lazy and dumb to track down the perps of most murders but only too eager to slap the cuffs on the easy targets, such as the violators of our draconian drug laws or those engaged in high profile white collar crime?

I renounce it.

Do you renounce a political class that looks at public service as a hereditary right, rejecting the decentralized origins of our Republic, turning our political capitals into modern versions of ancient Rome, where the patricians debate what’s best for the rest of us between trips to the vomitorium and canoodling in the public baths?

I renounce them.

Do you renounce the government as a massive public works project, where pork barrel projects are handed out to the politically connected and where everyone is guaranteed a job for life and a comfy pension, all on the public’s dime?

I renounce it.

Do you renounce everything you were told to believe, out of hand, be it right or wrong, if for no other reason than to get a new lease on life and to quit behaving like a well-trained seal?

Yes, I renounce everything I have been told to believe.

So, where does that leave us? For one, I hereby christen myself an urban libertarian, never to look back on the safe harbor of knee-jerk liberalism. I live in the city, not a cave in the wilderness, so I expect a government that will protect its people from the ravages of laissez faire capitalism, to keep our prescription drugs safe and our water clean. I look for a government that will expand and then maintain a reliable public transportation network, that will do its best to see that all of our children have a shot at a decent education. I believe in public parks, and public roads, and public safety. So I remain eager to contribute to the commonweal but am unwilling to be its slave.

I want my government to rescind its claim on vast tracts of our public landscape. I want it to quit trying to bamboozle the people with a hollow egalitarianism whenever it needs to justify another power grab. I think one reason academics and politicians have reached an understanding is that most of them are like children, counting on the government to give us everything we need, as most of them have never had to balance a budget or meet a payroll. To them, government is like a benign sugar daddy, handing out candy and watching out for the weak. But that thinking is a trap, man. It’s poison. It’s the reason why our founding fathers revolted from the motherland. It’s the reason my family has fought and died for this country untold times over the past 200 years. And they did not shed their blood just so America could become yet another nation of semi-informed busy bodies, another council tenancy.

A Pox on Both Your Houses

2009-08-20T13:23:00.000-07:00

Let me preface my vitriol by noting that I have been waiting almost 30 years for our country to elect a leader wise enough to shepherd some type of health insurance reform through Congress. I voted for Barack Obama at least in part under the assumption that he could be that man, and I remain somewhat confident that this year a common sense health bill will still become the law of the land.

But listening to the public debate over the past few weeks, I am inclined to wish a pox on the houses of both the supporters and opponents of changes to our health care system. More ominously, the nature of the discussion has me fearing for the future of our Republic.

I believe in freedom. The freedom to lead our lives, to raise our families, and to openly engage in public debate is why this country is still worth dying (and killing) for. But one of those freedoms should be the freedom to get sick, or more specifically the reassurance to know that you will be cared for if you are unlucky enough to become ill. That is a freedom that many of us don’t have. Not even counting the millions of uninsured Americans, I think most of us at one time or another have kept a job that we hated at least in part because we did not want to lose our health care coverage. The stark reality is that we have become a society of shriveled minds and aborted potential, and our country’s employer-based health insurance system has played at least a small role in this shrinking, as the perils of the Cook County Hospital or the L.A. public health care system hang over our necks like Damocles’ sword.

So, let’s start with a few common sense proposals, all of which the Obama Administration has proposed and all of which would make the lives of almost everyone in this country a whole lot better: When someone leaves or loses their job, they should be able to keep their health care coverage. Insurance companies shouldn’t be able to deny coverage to anyone because of “pre-existing conditions”. For those of us who are either self-employed, work for small businesses, or are between jobs, there should be some type of insurance exchange where we can find and buy the right kind of insurance to meet our needs. While medical care shouldn’t be free, it should be affordable, and we as a society should find a way for everyone to be able to buy into some type of basic plan.

Just about everyone is in favor of these things. You think that it wouldn’t be that hard to pass a bill that provides them to the American people. But instead, what we’ve witnessed in the public square over the past few weeks is a display of our internal ugliness, of selfishness, ignorance, paranoia, and delusion on one side, and of thinly-disguised paternalism and cultural imperialism on the other.

Because they are the easier target, let’s start with the right wing nut jobs carrying around firearms and pictures of the President photoshopped into Adolf Hitler to what are billed as “town hall meetings”. Actually, the behavior of these goof balls doesn’t surprise me. We’ve become well acquainted over the past couple of decades with the lunatic fringe of the right wing in this country and their tactics. Do the words “Oklahoma City” mean anything to you? Rather, I’m surprised that a modern version of the Black Panthers hasn’t stepped forward to confront these S.O.B.’s head-on. But then, the race war all these wigged-out crackers have fantasized about will be on, so we should probably thank all the black activists for their restraint.

If you bother to sort through all the “death camp” mumbo jumbo being bandied about by the opponents to health care reform, what’s left is a bunch of mewling by folks on Medicare or Medicaid, worried that they will no longer be able to get elective hip surgery for free, or that the copays for their son with some rare genetic disorder will go up. In essence, they are saying: “I’ve got mine, so screw you.” The reality is that Medicare and Medicaid will break this country over the next quarter century if we don’t do something about it, just like excessive government entitlements are well on the way to breaking most of the economies of Western Europe.

My wife Melissa works at a nursing home, and she marvels at the ridiculous expenditures being paid for by Medicaid, like giving calcium pills or cholesterol medicine to a 92-year old who has nine months to live. Everyone from the nursing homes to the drug companies make money off this system, and the bureaucrats running it don’t want to upset a constituency, so they rubber stamp a lot of this stuff. Almost like it wasn’t their money (OK, it’s not, it’s actually ours, or more accurately our children’s and grandchildren’s, as we will just add it to the burgeoning debt that they already owe on our behalf).

To me, the symbol for all this waste is the motorized “scooter” that Medicare will buy for folks when they reach the point of no longer being able to get around on their own. Have you seen those ads on TV where some old woman is being presented with a new scooter? “For most patients, this will be paid for entirely out of Medicare,” the commercial assures us. Then you see the old lady in the commercial doing a 360 with her new scooter, a smile beaming on her face. Talk to anyone in the health care profession. These scooters are generally a big waste of money. Once a patient’s body is so degraded that they can no longer use a walker to get around, their minds tend to be in similar shape, and they have little or no ability to control their new scooter, which will soon either sit in a corner gathering dust or be returned to the seller.

But here is Howard Dean boasting about how, whatever else happens to the health care bill, the Democrats are going to see to it that included in the bill is an expansion of government-run healthcare, even if that means just an expansion of Medicare. Screw all the parts of the bill that will actually help the average American, Howard Dean and his ilk will jettison that in order to expand the government’s role in our lives, whether we want it or not. If, as you get older, you need a motorized scooter or hip replacement surgery, they’ll see to it that you are not denied, and then send the bill to your children to pay, twenty years down the line.

Like I said, I believe in freedom. And all of those advocating a “public option” regarding the country’s health care are advocating anything but. Rather, they are offering us more servitude to our government, gratitude to the politicians spending away our children’s futures, and a legacy of debt. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, it’s that when a doo-gooder starts talking about how he is going to improve the world for the rest of us, it is time to grab your wallet and run.

But more than just healthcare, it is the entire American ethic that is in trouble here. I certainly cannot advocate the tactics nor the positions of most opponents to President Obama’s health care proposals. But neither can I relate to all the East Coast social engineers out to “improve” society.

I trace the roots of our current “culture war” back to the presidential campaigns of William Jennings Bryan. In 1896, Bryan was a defining Populist, out to topple the East Coast moneyed interests then running the country. He wanted to support the little man, he wanted to stop America from becoming an imperial power, and he wanted to break the hegemony that the Wall Street banks had on our economy. And he almost became President, except the Republicans in power found a cultural wedge to separate Bryan from the immigrant communities in the big cities who should have been a natural constituency, portraying Bryan as a hayseed who can’t be trusted. It worked. Instead, most of the recent immigrants in the cities voted for William McKinley, a supporter of corporate monopolies and global adventurism. America got a friend of the Wall Street bankers in the White House. We got the Spanish-American War, and new colonies in Cuba and the Philippines.

In “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”, Thomas Frank portrays a rural underclass convinced to ignore it’s own economic interests through the ruse of a cultural war. In reality, the state of America is just the opposite. Most of us urban Americans value our freedoms above almost anything. We picture ourselves as “urban pioneers”, happy to engage with all the various cultures around us, proud of our independent spirit. Unfortunately, we’ve been bamboozled by a class of political apparatchiks who run our governments and who’ve convinced us that their opponents are a bunch of hayseeds, not to be trusted.

And certainly, someone like Sarah Palin is not to be trusted. She encompasses all that is wrong with America’s populist tradition: it’s willful ignorance, it’s knee-jerk defiance, and a cultural inferiority complex that plays itself out as an almost comic bluster.

But it is all these self-righteous folks from places like upscale Vermont who are to blame for her success. They are the ones who have, as a political strategy, intentionally marginalized a huge chunk of the country. White evangelical Christians are about 35% of our population. Guess how much of the student body they make up at Yale. Or Harvard. Or any Ivy League school. In most cases, it is well down into the single digits. If a white evangelical Christian makes it to a major university, the chances are good that he has done it on a football scholarship. An evangelical girl? Well, I guess there’s always women’s crew. The odds are probably better that a white evangelical makes it into the NFL than that he makes it into Harvard. It’s easier for him to compete against some black dude who can run a 4.5 40 than it is to fight the social and economic headwinds working against him. Is it any wonder that they are suspicious of the decisions made by this country’s elite? It is a club in which they are not welcome. While promoting “affirmative action”, we’ve become increasingly comfortable throwing them and their belief system under the bus. Little wonder that they now threaten to respond with guns and bile.

Pitchfork 2009

2009-07-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

I attended the first two nights of the Pitchfork Music Festival, which is held in Union Park, an otherwise anonymous patch of ground tucked between Ashland Avenue and the Lake Street El.

I am conflicted about these outdoor music fests. On the one hand, they get me out of the house and into the world of music. But I hate their casual nature, their I’m-in-it-for-the-long haul-so-let’s-bring-out-a-blanket-and-get-stoned mentality. I’m sorry, but I love music too much to hang with that kind of crap. There are plenty of occasions when I might want to stare mindlessly at the sky or talk with a friend, but being 50 feet from the stage is not one of those times. And, in my middle age, I have developed an almost complete intolerance for the reprobate behavior of oblivious jackasses.

That said, the lineup for Pitchfork this year was just too strong to pass up. I could have easily gone all three days. In fact, probably the two bands that I most wanted to see, The Thermals and Vivian Girls, were playing on Sunday. But Melissa had to work that day, and we didn’t want to push our baby sitting welcome with her parents.

I caught eight bands over the two days, not counting the ones I only heard on the periphery. Here is my critique of these bands, rated from top to bottom:

1. The Jesus Lizard: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band change the mood at an outdoor festival like The Jesus Lizard did Friday night. Before their set, it was all beach balls and harmony. If they started blasting Olivia Newton-John’s “Have You Ever Been Mellow?” over the loudspeakers, it wouldn’t have been out of place. Then The Jesus Lizard stepped on stage. The band banged out the opening chords to “Puss”, then David Yow leapt into the crowd and started in with his best yowl. Yow emerged a couple of minutes later, blood dripping from his mouth, a smile on his face. Next to me, a couple of increasingly nervous looking young girls with flowers in their hair hightailed it for the concession stands, but The Jesus Lizard seemed to be conjuring their own animal spirits to take the places of those not up for this kind of full frontal assault. About halfway through the set, some dude so out of his brain he could hardly stand bashed into me at full throttle. He was wearing a lavender shirt and women’s silk culottes. He flashed a smile at me, revealing stained yellow teeth that made me think that he must have just left his day job at the meth lab, apologized for “getting in my way”, and then rushed full-speed into another person in the crowd. The entire experience was electric, and Yow has to be the most intense middle-aged dude this side of Iggy Pop. Perhaps the most fun thing about this is that it came as a total surprise. I’d never been a member of the cult of The Jesus Lizard. The band has some great riffs, but most of their songs have almost no discernible melody, and I always thought David Yow was just another singer with indy rock disease, one in a long line of white guys trying to make up for his lack of singing chops with sheer enthusiasm. But I stand corrected. What I witnessed Friday night was one of the most intense, over-the-top performances by a band that I’ve ever had the privilege to experience. Thanks guys.

2. The National: I heard two great sets at Pitchfork, either of which alone were worth the price of admission. One was by The Jesus Lizard, and the other was by The National. I keep flip-flopping which one I liked the best, because each brought something entirely different to the table. For me, it is kind of a moral judgment. Do I prefer the intensity of the crazy punkers, reviving their old schtick for the uninitiated? Or would I rather hear a set by a band that I’ve seen before, one show among many in their ongoing coronation tour, but a band on their knife’s edge, at the peak of their powers and popularity? Man, I love The National, and Matt Berninger is probably the most magnetic front man in music today, but I think, if I could only be there for one of these sets, it would be The Jesus Lizard’s. First, the crowd was REALLY into The Jesus Lizard’s set, and the band and audience fed off one another. By contrast, during The National, a guy behind me kept trying to quip clever to his lady friend (“try“ being the operative word), which eventually drove me further towards the stage, where I could enjoy the set free from such distractions. And speaking of distractions, that Aussie fiddler player they tour with was driving me crazy with his head-bobbing, foot-stomping, seaside-inspired fun. “Watch out for scurvy, me matey!” I half-expected him to shout every time he approached a microphone. But the crowd ate it up. Which of course is why playing too many shows like this one is probably the best way to ruin a great band, because those cheers get subliminally stored, like Pavlov’s dog, until the band might as well be backing Bruce Springsteen. That said, The National remain a magical act. My favorite moments: When Berninger introduced “Green Gloves” as a love song and sang it so tenderly that you could almost forget it is about creeping into the homes of his friends and riffling through their shit; and hearing a new song, “Blood Buzz Ohio”, that was a revelation, tender yet powerful, which is just what makes the band so great.

3. Tortoise: I really like early Tortoise, everything through “TNT”. After that, they got a little jazzy for me. I prefer the early concept stuff, heavy on the electronics, where they are just tripping out on sounds rather than jamming on guitars. And the great thing about this set was that it featured a lot of that earlier music. I would have rather heard them play the same set at a smaller indoor club, like the Double Door, where everyone was grooving with what they were doing, but it was also fun to see them outdoors, with the storm clouds threatening overhead.

4. Beirut: I have a soft spot for soaring Balkan melodies. I’ve often wondered why some American pop star hadn’t thought of mining this rich vein of musical ideas. Well, now someone has. I love the accordion. I love the horns. Most of all, I love the music’s maudlin flair. Too often, when an American band kypes musical stylizations from some other part of the planet, they are more concerned with mimicking the superficial elements of the sound but totally ignore the music’s passion, it’s purpose, it’s soul (Vampire Weekend comes to mind, but the culprits are many). Thankfully, Zach Condon and company are swinging for the fences here, and their live show had moments of real beauty. Unfortunately, we spent most of the set standing next to a nearby stage, getting a good spot for the National, so I think that I need to see Beirut again in a more intimate setting. But this taste had me wanting more.

5. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: So clean, so young, so poppy, in that 80’s, Teenage Fanclub-meets-the Psychedelic Furs kind of way, I immediately wanted to love these guys. Then I remembered the brief dalliance I had being a Dashboard Confessional fan after grooving on all the young girls screaming along with them at Lollapalooza a few years back, and I was put on guard. In the four years that I’ve done this blog, I’ve only regretted two of the entries, and my review of Dashboard Confessional is one of them because, upon further reflection, I must admit that Dashboard Confessional pretty much sucks. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart looked like well-scrubbed college kids, singing happy songs, so excited to be there, and I tried not to reflexively love them. Yes, they’ve got catchy bass lines, and that atmospheric, 4AD guitar fuzz is a cool sound, but both the male lead and female back-up singer really didn’t have much resonance, at least live, and all their songs were pretty much plowing the same narrow ground. So I kept telling myself at the time. But I’ve caught myself unconsciously humming “Young Adult Friction” several times in the past three days, so they must be doing something right. A bit of a guilty pleasure, certainly nothing original, but a pleasure nonetheless.

6. Built to Spill: I’ll start off by saying these guys were playing a solid set, and they had some catchy hooks, but after Jesus Lizard’s incendiary performance, it was kind of a drag to stand there and watch them slog through their show. Then Doug Martsch began one of his 5-minute guitar solos, and I made my way to the exit.

7. Lindstrom: Let me note that if this Norwegian trance beat composer was blasting his tunes in my backyard, I would probably have danced for hours. But a lot of this was way too hyper for the setting. It was like we were listening to a soundtrack for some 2nd tier 80’s action movie, like Rutger Hauer was about to burst on stage and kick Lindstrom in the groin.

8. Yo La Tengo: I’ve tried with this band, but I just don’t get it. The set list had been requested beforehand online by the audience, so I guess I can’t blame Yo La Tengo for the song selection. But there was a lot of generic rocking out that totally bored me. I’d occasionally perk up when they’d play one of their catchier songs, like “Stockholm Syndrome”. I was about to wind my way closer to the stage, to give them another chance, when Ira let loose with what had to be at least an 8-minute guitar solo, while the rest of the band kept repeating the same 3-note riff ad nauseum. This sent me scrambling away, figuring I’d get a good spot for the Jesus Lizard show. So I guess that I should thank Yo La Tengo for that.

The Importance of Being Earnest

2009-06-30T23:14:00.000-07:00

From my mid-teens through my early 30’s, music and writing were my life, my reason for getting up in the morning to face all the sundry crap the world was going to throw at me that day. This obsession with music, in particular rock music and the nightlife associated with it, began to wane when I reached my late-20’s, and by the time I got married in 1997, it had shriveled into a much smaller space, still a cornerstone perhaps, but one comprised mostly of bygone bands and memories.

Over the past few years, I have experienced a renaissance of my old fandom, lured by a new generation of musicians, ones not just rehashing the same old shit but looking to expand the notion of what one can do with electronics and sound, bringing passion to their playing out of a sonic idea, bands like Sigur Ros, Wolf Parade, Arcade Fire, and the National. But recently, this fandom has started to wane. I still love Sigur Ros and the National, eagerly looking forward to their every release, but I have to say that, as a whole, I have felt letdown by this latest wave of new bands, although I couldn’t tell you exactly why.

A couple of weeks ago, I was playing a Yo La Tengo mix tape that my buddy Brendan made to prep me for the upcoming Pitchfork music fest. Listening to this well-loved band, I began to feel a little empty and stupid, because I just wasn’t getting it. Not that their music was bad, or even uninspired, just that it wasn’t really doing anything for me. But it all became clear when I heard Yo La Tengo do a sincere, pretty cover of Jackson Browne’s “Somebody’s Baby”: “That’s it! These guys are like an alternative version of Jackson fucking Browne! That’s why I don’t like them.”

And the world once again made sense. It’s why so many of this current generation of “underground” alt bands are so irritating: they are little Jackson Brownes, using song to prove their earnestness to all the unshaved ladies in the crowd, these young bards strumming their guitars and seeking to change the world, one lay at a time.

As a primer for those too young or forgetful to know better, Jackson Browne encapsulated every thing wrong with music in the 70’s. His smug whininess was marketing as being “deep”; his absence of any kind of eroticism was sold as somewhere sexy because it was “sincere”; his total whiteness and lack of soul was marketed as somehow countercultural. And the scam worked, at least for a time, as Browne sold oodles of vinyl to an audience too stoned to know better. To add insult to injury, Jackson Browne was the first rocker from Orange County to score a gold record, although I will always think of him as a carpetbagging army brat who has almost nothing to do with the essence of my old home. He was the beast that punk rock came to slay.

As I get older, it is both messed-up and oddly reassuring to see how the same cultural currents keep circling around over and over again. Over the past few years, a raft of new bands have arrived, practicing their chops and looking through their thesauruses, eager to prove that they are artists, earnest to seduce you and just maybe change the world. Last week, I watched one of these bands, the Dirty Projectors, a Brooklyn-based outfit with a ton of buzz, play a free show at the Pritzker bandshell in Chicago. After the set, I turned to one of my old punk rock buddies, who was visiting from out of town, what he thought of the set.

“Too much like the Grateful Dead for my tastes,” he summarized. “It’s like they were in a time capsule and never heard any music from 1977 to 1997, like it was still OK to just noodle around for an hour.”

Going all the way back to the courts of the French aristocracy, the recurring virus of the troubadour, who looks to prove his sweet sensitivities through song, has periodically plagued the music of the West. And now, for some reason, this has become the new alternative.

I think the band in this new school that I hate the most is Airborne Toxic Event, with its insufferable indie hit “Sometime Around Midnight,” a five-minute jam session in which the singer whines on about an old lover that he sees at a club, a tale made even more annoying by being told in the 2nd person, chock-full of pretentious lines such as “all these memories come rushing like feral waves to your mind”. “Shut the fuck up, already,” I’ve felt like shouting at the stereo the three or four times I’ve had the misfortune of being subjected to this seemingly never-ending song.

In the original “Bedazzled”, Dudley Moore is granted seven wishes by the Devil, who then proceeds to mess up Moore’s life. At one point, Moore wishes to be loved by women, and he is turned into a pop star, crooning his love live on television, surrounded by dozens of adoring female fans. Then Peter Cook arrives as the Devil, wearing black, looking bored, a cross between Bauhaus and the Velvet Underground. He stands almost motionless on stage, backed by eerie synths and spacey female vocals, and announces to the stunned fans: “You are nothing to me. You bore me. You fill me with inertia.” Then they all leave Dudley Moore, with his “love you”s and his “yeah, yeah”s, in the dust.

The point is this: Using your music, or your writing, or your art, to prove how earnest you are makes not just for wimpy songs, overwrought writing, and bad art, it’s also not a very good way to get laid. Take the age-old debate: Who’s better, the Beatles or the Stones? Personally, I’ll take the Stones because they came to rock, while the Beatles morphed into a bunch of guys out trying to prove how earnest and precious they were. But even when it comes to getting the ladies, who would you rather bed down with: Yoko Ono or Marianne Faithful? Linda McCartney or Bianca Jagger? The evidence is clear: it’s better to act like a man than a courtier; you’ll end up with hotter women, and you won’t have to play the simp for the rest of your life.

It Takes Balls to be a 3-Piece

2009-05-08T07:35:00.000-07:00

There has always been something daring about the rock trio, about three people with enough guts to stand up on stage and shout their yawp to the world. You can’t hide if you’re in a 3-piece; you have to really mean it. And maybe because of this, some of the best rock ‘n roll has come from trios, from Buddy Holly and the Crickets to Johnny Burnette’s group, Cream, the Jam, Husker Du, Nirvana. If you had to choose one group as a distillate of the rock ‘n roll spirit, you couldn’t do better than any of those bands.

Last week, I saw the Thermals play the Bottom Lounge, a cool new club against the Lake Street El just outside the Loop, and I might have to add them to the list. The Thermals are a 3-piece from Portland who play stripped-down punk rock in the melodic, West Coast style. They remind me of a cross between the Avengers and the Wipers, with a bit of Buzzcocks chorus-guitar work and a dollop of anarchist sloganeering thrown in to the mix.

As a one-time bass player, I appreciate a solid, heavy bass groove. I think it is an underrated component of a great band. The simple, repetitive groove that is a lodestone of almost all great rock ‘n roll finds its essence in the bass line. One of the secret strengths of the 3-piece is that it allows enough sonic space for the bass to come to the fore. Take the bassists in some of the great trios mentioned above: Cream’s Jack Bruce, the Jam’s Bruce Foxton, Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, and the Huskers’ Greg Norton. None of these bands would be the same without them.

In general, many of my favorite bands feature charismatic bassists who form a fundament of their sound: X, The Pixies, Joy Division, Cheap Trick, Thin Lizzy. And I might just have to add the Thermals to that list, because their bassist, Kathy Foster, really rocks. Their songs are like a primer on how to utilize a catchy bass line as the foundation for a song, everything else hanging off it like ornaments on a Christmas tree. And live, this is even more the case, as Hutch Harris’ voice and guitar parts are just a little too thin and reedy to carry the day without the ballast of Foster’s bass. Together, in combination with new member Westin Glass’s solid drumming, the results are awesome.

I was beginning to think that I was too old to appreciate really great live punk rock. Thanks to the Thermals, I stand corrected.

Here is a link to their myspace site. Check them out for yourselves: http://www.myspace.com/thethermals.

Bread and Circuses

2009-04-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

I opened up my box of Frosted Mini-Wheats this morning to find a small Donald Duck in a sealed plastic package on top of the cereal. While I like Donald Duck more than most Disney characters, finding him in my cereal box before I’d had a chance to drink my first sip of tea was like taking an ice pick to the face. I looked at the front of the box, and there was a drawing of Mickey Mouse, advertising a free stuffed Disney character in every box.

A few days before my Mini-Wheat surprise, my parents-in-law threw out a trial balloon: Now that each of their three kids had recently delivered a grandchild on which they could lavish attention, what they really wanted for their 50th wedding anniversary, which is still a few years down the road, was to take their entire family, the whole kit and caboodle, including in-laws like myself, down to Disney World.

I know this makes me a walking cliché, one of those goofy urban dorks that most of the country likes to laugh at because they think we are trying to act culturally superior, but I mean it from the bottom of my blackened heart: Disney is Satan. I have really done my best to ignore them, but growing up 20 miles from Disneyland made it hard. I know all about the secret tunnels running underneath the facility. I know about the Disney jail under Tom Sawyer’s Island, which a couple of college buddies got thrown into while dosing because they tarried too long in the Disney parking lot, making the security crew manning the cameras that blanket the park suspicious. I remember when punk rockers were banned from the park, and I remember the day when the Disney Corporation, in all its wisdom, changed this policy, commemorating it sometime around 1983 by having “Punk Rock Day” at the Magic Kingdom.

I can already see myself breaking down in a few years, succumbing to the dual cajoling of my in-laws and my kid. I may very well be dragged to Disney World, spending large sums of hard earned money (whether mine or Melissa’s dad’s) for something that I morally oppose. I may lose this one. But that doesn’t mean that I have to feel good about it.

Along with Microsoft, Home Depot, Fox News, et al, Disney is part of the Capital Imperium out to destroy the fabric of our country, paving the way for quick bucks and the New World Order. In the last couple of weeks, it seems like these forces have collectively conspired to tighten their circle around my life.

About two weeks ago, I broke down and bought a PC, which I needed for trading my commodity accounts, as most trading platforms were not designed for Macs. Now, I’m not really a gadget guy, which is why, four years ago, I sprung for an iBook in the first place, because with the purchase of a Mac comes unlimited use of the support staff at their stores. While I had a PC at most of my old jobs, I never realized how nosy Microsoft is about getting into your personal shit, cross marketing and periodically taking over your computer for their automatic updates. Add to that all the information that Google is steadily gathering on my life and interests. I halfway expect my Google search to one day read something along the lines of, “You are a misanthrope who craves excitement and has a fascination with fetishes and other mild perversions. You might like… Boyd Rice.”

Soon, these corporations will know pretty much everything about you, from where you live and how you spend your money to what you do all day. While this information will be coded in packets based around an anonymous user name, it is only a matter of time until it all gets merged into a Federal database near you, just like the security cameras at Disneyland eventually morphed into the electronic Cyclops now casting their eyes across the streets of Chicago.

Not that I am against every corporation. As a whole, the act of incorporation serves us well. This was demonstrated in a couple of recent news headlines. In the first, salmonella was found in a Georgia facility that made peanut butter. Interestingly, several brands of organic peanut butter had been shipped through this facility, but all the peanut butter made by established American brands, like Skippy and Jif, were untouched by the outbreak. A couple of weeks later, salmonella was discovered in a California pistachio warehouse thanks to the testing Kraft Foods made on these nuts as a standard protocol before taking ownership of them, thus nipping another potential outbreak of food poisoning in the bud.

The fact is that it is generally safer to buy food from a major conglomerate, which is concerned about a possible class action lawsuit and thus looking to cover its backside, than it is to buy from a small company that can’t always afford to take the same precautions. As the father of a nine-month old, I’ve been bombarded with a steady barrage of information designed to make me paranoid of the world around us in order to sell me some overpriced product, and the organic food scam is among the least rational of these appeals. So I’m all for cheap, reliable, corporate food. But that is all the more reason why finding Donald Duck in my Mini-Wheats made me want to spit up my tea, and just because most corporations provide a useful service doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye to the creeping evil that some of them represent.

The Bible is persistent in its evocation of an evil thread woven into some of the institutions of Western Civilization, beginning with Babylon in the Old Testament and shifting to the Roman Empire during the time of Christ. These were ruthless civilizations, materially focused, the literal Antichrist of Revelations. You can see where this evil found a home in the hierarchies of the past two thousand years, in institutions ranging from the Church to some of the more decadent European aristocracies and then in the fulcrums of European Empire (Spanish, British, French).

Opposed to the institutionalization of Evil is the revelatory nature of Western Civ, the strand that informs our demand for independence and freedom, our questioning, questing selves, embodied in the lone odd-balls who have spurred most of the great achievements in the short history of our species, folks like Newton, Copernicus, Beethoven, Kierkegaard, Einstein, et al.

America harbors both instincts in large measure, sometimes acting like the successor to Rome, and sometimes seeking to create a New Jerusalem, to be a shining city on a hill. I worry when I see the corrosive effects of folks like Gates and Disney on our culture. I worry that soon the corporations will pretty much know everything about us, at least everything that can be codified, enumerated, and defined, that cameras will document our every mistake, that the media will have done such a complete job of replacing insight with entertainment that we won’t even notice anymore, and that they will have bought us all off with a raft of government-sponsored entitlements. In short, I worry that we will become a nation where the powers-that-be have placated the public with Bread and Circuses, just like the plebeians were placated in Imperial Rome, oblivious to the fact that the only thing their country stood for was the facilitation of evil.

But I also have at least a modicum of faith in the human spirit, that we can transcend this collection of billionaires out to skew our minds, that almost all of us, in our better moments, are susceptible to the call of our divine imperative.

Jonesing for Patty Schnyder

2009-03-21T12:32:00.000-07:00

We just got back from our annual trip to California, where I satisfied one of my sports obsessions: I got to watch Patty Schnyder play tennis.

Patty Schnyder hails from Basel, Switzerland, which is also the home of Roger Federer. She is officially listed as 5’6”, but having seen her in person convinces me that she’s more like 5’4”. Schnyder is a lefty, with a nice topspin forehand that she hits with an extreme Western grip, but Schnyder lacks a big power shot, other than a down-the-line counterpunch that uses her opponent’s power to her advantage. Actually, Schnyder’s best weapon might be her quick feet, her ability to get in position to return a shot or, when that fails, flick her racquet in a last-second lunge to keep the ball in play, something she’s forced to do a lot against some of the game’s more powerful players. She’s been around the pro tour for over a decade now, has beaten most of the big names of her era at least a time or two, and has outlasted most of her peers. Schnyder has won a handful of tournaments and has spent several years in the Top 20, but she never quite made it into the top tier and has never won a Grand Slam.

While not your typical beauty, I think Schnyder is really sexy. With her long, curly brown hair that sometimes clumps together, she looks like a girl you might meet at a rave. Patty is so unlike all the cutesy Florida types, the tall blondes, and the Amazonian Slavs that dominate today’s women’s tennis tour. She flies a different jib than most tennis players, and I’ve always imagined that she must be a little crazy, in a good, FTW kind of way.

Seeded 13th at Indian Wells, Schnyder earned a first round bye and then drew China’s Na Li in the second round. My favorite part of Indian Wells is going to some of the back courts, where you can sit in the first couple of rows and watch one of the Top 30 players in the world from a better vantage point than you can watch the pro at the local club hit back home. Schnyder was playing a late-afternoon match on Court 4, an intimate, open court whose back bleachers are rarely full. I got there just in time to watch the end of their warm-up and chose a chair in the second row, close enough to see the beads of sweat on the players’ faces but a couple feet up so I that had a good view of the entire court.

I had never seen Li play, but she has powerful groundstrokes, and it was clear from early on that Schnyder would be playing much of the match on counterattack. This suits her style of play, so I was not worried when she struggled through the first few games, often having to block back defensive shots just to stay in the point. Li and Schnyder had each broken serve early in the set, and when Schnyder broke Li a second time to go up 5-4 in a long game that featured several 15 to 20 shot rallies, it looked like she was well on her way to winning the match. But Schnyder served a weak game after that, got broken back, and Li was again on serve, at 5-5.

It was then, while struggling gamely to stay in the match, that I really began to appreciate the style of Schnyder’s game. Li would hit hard, relatively flat balls down the line, driving Schnyder back, forcing her to pop up these defensive floaters, balls that had an uncanny ability to land within a couple of feet from the baseline, and the rally would continue. Then Schnyder would counter, setting up with a forehand crosscourt before smacking her own shot down the line for a seeming winner, which Li would then retrieve. It was intriguing stuff, with Schnyder using her experience to cope with the younger, stronger Li. Unfortunately, Schnyder couldn’t seem to win any of several game points, eventually losing the first set 7-5.

Schnyder then picked up her serving pace, winning her first couple of service games in the second set and threatening to break Li to go up 3-2. Again, there were several pretty amazing rallies, but Li won the key break points and ending up holding serve. This gave her confidence, and Li then began blasting away at Schnyder’s serve, hitting a couple of returns for outright winners and putting Schnyder back on her heels with several more. Li broke Schnyder, going up 4-2.

Schnyder dug in and began hitting a little harder, with a little more topspin, essentially overhitting to try and stage a comeback against a competitor who was now clearly feeling it. At a key moment, Schnyder took one of Li’s few short balls and tried to drop shot her. It was a deft little shot, but Li got to it, flicking a half-volley for what looked like a winner down the line. Schnyder scrambled and just got to the ball but couldn’t control it, hitting it out and then scrambling towards my spot in the second row, just on her side of the net. Schnyder almost ran into the guy in front of me, then looked up at us, her face flushed and kind of mottled, the growing realization, almost an anguish, of having to endure this first round loss against an unseeded player, seemed to flicker in her eyes. It felt almost obscene to witness Schnyder’s duress. She lost that game, once again after multiple deuces, going down 5-2, and then fought gamely but again lost her serve to lose the second set 6-2.

While I really would have liked to watch Patty Schnyder stage a comeback, I was strangely satisfied having watched her struggle. I think that’s what I like best about athletics, the struggle against odds, the ability to use wit and guile to combat a seemingly superior foe. I rarely root for the superior athlete, but the clever one, the defiant, the determined. When I was growing up, my favorite baseball player was Brooks Robinson. I loved the way he could spring up from his crouch and snare a ball, diving to the ground and then getting up in time to throw out a batter. He seemed so cool, way cooler than the big stars with the more obvious skills, the home run hitter or the strikeout artist.

I guess that I tend to root for a different kind of athlete than most people, or at least most Americans. As a teenager, I rooted for UCLA and their clever passing attack during an era where the college game was dominated by running backs, in particular the tailbacks of rival USC. I was also a big fan of the Bruins basketball team, which was in the midst of the Wooden dynasty, but even though they were usually the favorite, I always felt like the Bruins were a step away from disaster, kept at bay only by the superior strategy and discipline of the Wooden system (of course, having athletes on your side like Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton didn’t hurt). One of my favorite boxers was Thomas Hearns. I liked how this tall, skinny guy would go toe-to-toe with the bruising Marvin Hagler or the smooth and speedy Sugar Ray Leonard. In fact, I think Hearns-Hagler might be the best eight minutes in the history of boxing, and even through my guy lost, what a way to go, trying to out-punch one of the toughest guys in the history of the sport.

As a child, I never understood the appeal of Superman. Here was this guy with overwhelming strength, superior speed, and an ability to fly through space by himself, unaided. He had no psychological flaws, just a consist determination to do good, like a programmed robot. His only weakness was kryptonite, which I always felt was kind of a bullshit weakness, a cop out. Nuclear waste, hey no problem it’s Superman, but watch out for that kryptonite! But for some reason people liked this guy, they rooted for him, while I was drawn to the more vulnerable superheroes like Spiderman (just a guy with relatively normal strength who happens to be able to spin webs and act like a spider) or to odd birds like the cartoon-version of the Pink Panther, who I guess technically isn’t a superhero but who I thought was pretty cool, nonetheless.

A lot of today’s sports stars, at least in America, are like Superman, these guys with incredible physical talents, with the crowd on their side. But I rarely root for the favorite. It’s just too boring. I don’t understand the mindset that roots for the New York Yankees to buy themselves another World Series title. In fact, I’m thinking about becoming a Milwaukee Brewers fan, just because I think the Cubs are turning into a Midwestern version of the Yankees.

Ladies tennis today is dominated by these tall, muscular women whose best attribute is that they can hit their serves and groundstrokes almost as hard as the men. In this world, Patty Schnyder is a throwback, and if they forced the women on today’s tour to use the old-school wooden rackets with the small frames, rackets that put a premium on shotmaking as opposed to today’s tactic of just hitting the hell out of the ball, I think Schnyder would have won that elusive Grand Slam title. As it stands, she remains a remarkable athlete in a sport whose advancing technology has conspired against her.

After watching Patty Schnyder play in person, I did a little research on her. I’ve always suspected that Schnyder was a little off-balance, but in a good kind of way. Watching her face during a match is like watching the character in a Doestoevsky novel, except one in a skimpy tennis outfit, if that makes any sense.

It turns out that Schnyder is working on a book about her life with her husband, an investment analyst and private investigator named Ranier Hoffman. The book, which is a mélange of poetic musings melded into an autobiography and remains a work in progress, is tentatively titled “The White Mile”. It has its own website, which features Schnyder in tennis gear standing forlorn in front of a rotting house with big spiders and creepy-crawly things running across it, with ambient, haunting music in the background. Here’s a link to the site: http://www.the-white-mile.org/whitemileenlish.htm

There isn’t much content on the site, but what there is I think is awesome. It reminds me of the crazy Swiss girls who used to come by an old bachelor pad I lived in back in graduate school, with their stream-of-conscious raps in broken English about death, or food, or wanting to climb the trees on Logan Boulevard at 3 o’clock in the morning. I really hope that Patty and Ranier finish their book for, as they note, “What do we say in a world of silent cries? Hunting season is launched or the rabbit is running.” Will this book be an existential cry for our age or the confused rantings of a minor sport celebrity run amok? I don’t know, but bring it on because, man, I need something to satisfy this major Patty Schnyder jones.

I Hate My Cat

2009-02-28T19:30:00.000-08:00

I openly admit that I’m a dog person, that I probably never should have saddled myself with a creature that offers so few pleasures for me as a cat. A good defense attorney would quickly submit this as evidence that my cat may be largely guiltless in the matter, and that I only have myself to blame. Point taken. My counterargument is that, while I did choose to bring this beast into our home of my own free will, this was a will twisted by the twin demands of guilt and courtship, the sad sirens responsible for the flotsam of many a man’s freedom.

I should probably introduce the subject of my diatribe. Our cat’s name is Delwood. She is most likely 13 years old. We’ve had her for over 12 years now. We found her one early autumn evening living under a dumpster for a restaurant in Andersonville, my wife’s old neighborhood, called the Delwood Pickle. Melissa and I were dating at the time. She had just lost her own cat, Courgette, and we had begun nightly searches of the neighborhood for him. While combing the area for Courgette, we found Delwood, meowing crazily for food, half-wild. We felt sorry for her and, after a lot of coaxing, managed to scoop her into a blanket and take her back to Melissa’s apartment.

That would be my first lesson from this story: be careful who and what you save, because you then become responsible for that life. Actually, that’s probably the second lesson. The first is that, at some point, there is a usually a price to be paid for extraordinary kindnesses made during the hot flame of courtship.

When Melissa and I began dating, I pretended that I didn’t hate cats. In fact, in order to pass muster, I almost convinced myself that I actually liked them a little. I can still remember when Courgette and I first came to terms with one another, after it became clear to both cat and man that I wasn’t just another brief romance in Melissa’s life and that the two of us would have to find some kind of arrangement. Courgette and I would eye one another. I would diligently feed him, pet him, let him in and out during the night. We’d negotiate for the good spot in the bed next to our mutual beloved. Then, one day, we both looked at each other and seemed to say, “You know what: You’re O.K.” After that, I was in.

Soon after taking in Delwood, Courgette returned home. Courgette was a typical tom, a wanderer, and I guess a gay couple down the block had locked him in their apartment, as Courgette looked a lot like a cat they had recently lost themselves. Fortunately, a neighbor recognized Courgette from the fliers we had plastered around the neighborhood. She literally stood there arguing with one of the guys in their doorway until Courgette had a chance to scoot through their legs and make his escape. It was a sweet homecoming. Unfortunately, Courgette had feline leukemia and had to be euthanized less than a year after his return.

Meanwhile, we’ve been stuck with Delwood for the past dozen years. Here are the particulars: Delwood is a long-haired cat, which I’ve never liked. Long-hairs can’t seem to take care of themselves, and Delwood is no exception. She barely even tries to groom herself, and her own crap sometimes hangs off the back of her ass fur, like a merry dingleberry tree. She is also dumb as a box of rocks and pretty uncoordinated for a cat, but with an odd defiance I particularly hate that is totally cat-like.

I should probably break my hatred of my cat Delwood into two categories.

Here are some of the things that I hate about all cats: they don’t really care about you; they can’t be trusted; they aren’t loyal, at least by any human standard of the word; they won’t protect your home; they won’t protect your person; they won’t’ protect anything that you value in your life, in fact they destroy your personal property and are secretly proud of it, even when they get caught; they kill cool animals like birds, lizards, rabbits and other wild things that should be left alone; you have to clean up their litter box, and both their piss and shit are among the most foul-smelling compounds on the planet; they spend most of their day just sitting around like a hairy flesh lump, offering the planet nothing but carbon dioxide; they have an unjustified arrogance that is absolutely infuriating; and I’m allergic.

And here are some of the things I hate that are particular to Delwood herself: she can’t groom herself; she prefers to spend much of the day in low, dirty places, in fact, if you allow her outside, she will look for someplace dark and ugly to go, like the crawl space under our breakfast nook, where her long fur will gather dirt and spider webs; she insists on scratching up our couch as soon as we leave the house, even though she has a scratching board; she is lethargic, even for a cat; she will let our dog Ahab manhandle her for long periods of time, but then in a random moment will strike out, aiming to scratch out his eyes; she is affectionate in a demanding sort of way that means nothing other than being an unfulfilled need of the organism; and we repeatedly have to clean her upchuck off the basement floor.

One of the problems that I never realized about cats until owning one is that cats seem to take forever to die. They just sit there, immobile most of the day, like some kind of monk, as if the continuance of a drab, minimal existence is a perverse type of triumph. In fact, if cats were people, they’d probably be monks, doing nothing other than making an occasional pronouncement about the Immaculate Conception or the Noble Eightfold Path, imagining that for some reason this puts them closer to God. Or cats would be members of an anarchist collective, debating how to fix the state of the world over coffee and then doing nothing about it other than casting their languid contempt towards the folks who actually work for a living.

As there is no one else to speak up for her, I will note that Delwood is relatively tolerant for a cat, and she has a relatively kind disposition (again, at least compared with the standards of her species). Considering how much we have neglected her, it is kind of amazing that Delwood has done none of the standard cat antics that tend to happen when they get ignored, pissing on the bed and that kind of thing. And she seems to be pretty chill in dealing with our baby, Milo, although I don’t trust her enough to give her the chance to do otherwise.

To paraphrase Charles Bukowski’s thoughts on humanity, maybe I don’t exactly hate my cat, I’ll just feel a lot better when she’s not around. And I guess that’s my cat’s biggest failing right now, that she just won’t fucking die.

The Long Slow Decline of the Northwest Side

2009-02-10T22:13:00.000-08:00

The following is my favorite obituary, which I copied into an old notebook back in 2003. It is from the March 27, 2003 edition of the Portage Park Times:

His day would begin the same way every day. Wake up at five, take a “constitutional” and grab an “el muncho” at Central Market. Then he’d stroll over to the record store.

Michael Gaines, owner of Interval Records, 5905 W. Irving Park Road, died March 4. He was 53.

Mr. Gaines lived a quiet and fulfilling life, residing in the small apartment above his store. A staple in the neighborhood, everybody knew him, from the shoemaker who worked next door to his landlady he shared Christmas and Thanksgiving with.

Yet he died alone.

He had a tendency to Spanishize his speech, using words like “el muncho” for food and “el stiffo” for bad music.

He didn’t know many of his friends’ last names. “What’s the need?” he’d ask. No last names are necessary in a friendly record store.

His friends came to know one another as “Pool Hall Victor”, “Bum Knees John”, and “Classical Ted”. The youngest was dubbed “Pete the Pup”.

“If you had your nickname, you’d be in,” recalled Mike Bratta, better known as Bookshelf Mike.

Mr. Gaines’ illness, and the quickness in which it defeated him, took his friends by surprise.

Mike Kessler, also known as “Promo Mike”, said he realized Mr. Gaines was sick after he went in one time and saw that Mr. Gaines wasn’t in his usual spot behind the drum set, or bending over a guitar.

“I’d see him sitting in a corner with a sweater, looking a little cold and a little scared,” Kessler said
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I never met Michael Gaines before he died, nor did I ever frequent his record store. But his story reminds me of many of the shop owners in the neighborhood. I have a particular soft spot for these, the very smallest of petite bourgeoisie. There’s the yarn store with the dusty tam-o-shanter in the window, a store whose clientele is definitely more housewife than hipster and that has been around for decades, packed with big, dusty boxes full of spools of pastel yarn. There is We Are Music, which gives music lessons and sells musical instruments on the side, owned by an aging folk chick, a place that seems to have had the same stock of amps and guitars on sale for the past several years and where I recently bought a bass amp (they let me have the dog hair that covered the amp, courtesy of the occasional shop visit by the owner’s Lab, for free). There is Karl’s Barber Shop, which is owned and operated by a 72-year old German refugee from the former Yugoslavia who, besides giving a great haircut and telling tales of a childhood spent in a refugee camp, always has a chess puzzle to solve and sometimes even offers you a piece of his wife’s strudel.

Melissa and I have lived in Portage Park for eight years now, and while we miss the microbrews and food options of Andersonville, where we used to live, I have developed an affinity for the quirky, down-home nature of the Northwest Side. Besides the fact that I know almost all of my neighbors and can count on them to plow my sidewalk or watch out for my dog if I happen to be out of town or otherwise predisposed, I have a leisurely, convivial relationship with my doctor, my dentist, my optometrist, and my tax accountant, all of whom have offices in the neighborhood and any of which I might end up talking with for 20 minutes about tennis or the markets before even getting to the business at hand.

It being winter and my mind tending to dwell on uplifting topics like death and decay, I’ve been thinking about how the commercial landscape of our neighborhood is slowly changing, storefronts and bars being the landmarks in which an urban community defines itself, so I’ve listed some of the one-time establishments in Portage Park that are no more (in explanation for the geographical stickler: Irving Park Road and Central Avenue being the bull’s eye, the community of Portage Park extends approximately a mile in all directions, running from Belmont to Lawrence Avenues south to north and from Cicero to Narragansett east to west):

Joe Dano’s Bucket O’ Suds: Joe Dano was an old jazz dude who back in the day hung out with some of the major bopsters around town. His bar, Bucket O’ Suds, garnered a sizable following among indy music hipsters and the occasional traveling troubadour, who would venture west among us, the unwashed, to take in the vibe, eat some of the grub (which was cooked by Joe’s sister in the kitchen behind the bar), and down some Lucifer’s Elixir, Joe’s officially contraband hooch, based on a secret recipe that he claimed to have learned from an old moonshiner. Sometimes, the bar would seem to be locked up, and you’d have to knock on the door to be let in. The Bucket O’ Suds also figures at least peripherally in my courtship of my wife, as Melissa was at the BOS one Friday night when a guy who was sitting on the next stool over from her quietly leaned over, set his head on the bar, and kicked the bucket right then and there. This rather creepy experience was followed by a car ride home with the radio tuned in to WZRD, where I was playing a set of off-kilter, disturbing music, further freaking them out but also forming an odd bond between the DJ and his listeners (at least that is Melissa’s retelling of the evening). Joe must have been 80 and barely functional when he finally shut the doors of his bar for good, and he reportedly then moved somewhere out in the desert and has since passed away (located at Cicero and Belmont).

The Emperor’s Headquarters: By the time that I moved into the neighborhood in 2001, the Emperor’s Headquarters had already been shuttered, but it still cast an intriguing shadow looking down on Irving Park Road, as if Napoleon III was about to open the French colonial windows on the 3rd floor and make a decree. Eventually, Karl the Barber filled me in on the details. Apparently, the Emperor’s Headquarters was a meeting place for fantasy and war game geeks, where they could plot world conquest in an appropriate setting, and it has sat vacant ever since its demise somewhere around the beginning of the new millennium, a victim of declining sales and the growing popularity of computer games (Irving Park and Menard)

Circuits: A punk rock dance club without the frills or even a hint of pretension, a crew of us would occasionally be lured from our apartments near the lakefront to the club by their drink specials and the opportunity to dance to “White Riot” or “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” one more time. Circuits shut down suddenly and without ceremony at some point in the early 1990’s (Cicero and Montrose)

Club Stodola: A neighborhood Polish bar turned music club, it would occasionally host local punk bands, including Rugburn, a WZRD-based group that I briefly played in during a last gasp of delayed adolescence the year before I became a teacher. I remember watching a very memorable fight there one night during a set by a local punk group (I think it might have been the Defoliants). Four guys, each of them quite drunk and at least 250 pounds, had started a mosh pit. They were careening from one table into the next, sending beer flying. At one point, a jockish-looking guy took offense. He started swinging at the drunk who had knocked beer into his lap, but the offender’s belly was too big for the jock to reach his face. Eventually, the big drunk kind of stumbled backwards onto the stage in an attempt to avoid these punches, and the jock then tried kicking him in the stomach. I can still picture his sneaker as it was entirely absorbed by the drunk’s beer belly. The drunk then reached out, grabbed the jock, and bum rushed him right onto another table, at which time the drunk began pummeling him. I don’t think either guy really got hurt, but it took a good minute before the bouncers put a stop to that one. Oh, and Club Stodola has another distinction: it was the only club ever to officially ban Rugburn from the premises. As I recall, one of our friends started mouthing off at the owner, who then fired back, “Alright fine, your friend’s band will never play here again.” (Belmont and Central)

Empire Records: Never went there, but it was a small independent record store during the 80’s and 90’s which published an occasional music fanzine that had a fair amount of street cred. (Cicero and Montrose)

Mr. Steer: You could eat third-rate steak and down first-rate drinks (I particularly liked their Tom Collins, made the right way, with superfine sugar, so that it really fizzes) in the red naugahyde booths while being served by waitresses in beehive hairdos. The salad bar featured “bread pudding”, which literally had small pieces of Wonder Bread stuck into vanilla pudding, all of which was topped with a thin layer of pink icing. (Milwaukee Avenue, just north of Six Corners)

The Vienna Bakery: Just a decade ago, there were still a slew of these independent bakeries on the Northwest side, all serving a similar menu of cakes, cookies, breads and Danishes. Having attended culinary school and then worked as a baker, it took a couple of years for Melissa to warm-up to the idea of this bakery. She would complain that it used “packaged ingredients”, meaning that they made a lot of their stuff out of pre-made mixes that featured vegetable shortening as the basic fat ingredient rather than butter. However, everything was made hot each morning, their pastries tasted a whole lot better than the lard-based ones at the Mexican bakery down the road (fat being the flavor vehicle of all bakery goods, with butter being the best option, then vegetable shortening, and lastly lard) and the consistent freshness eventually won her over. As far as I was concerned, it reminded me of the Cupcake Bakery back in California as a kid, which my Dad would drive to every Saturday for bear claws and lemon Danishes. I used to love grabbing the neat wax paper bag from my Dad, opening it up, and then breathing in those sugary flavors, and I would do the same thing with the pastries that I’d get at the Vienna Bakery. Like a lot of the old school neighborhood bakeries, the Vienna Bakery was run by a family and, also following the typical pattern, the kids did not want to follow in the footsteps of their parents, getting up at 4AM every morning to make bread for the neighbors, so the family sold out to a developer, who promptly tore down the building and replaced it with condos. (Addison and Long)

The Patio Theatre: Originally one of the grander of the old school movie houses, the Patio had been kept intact as a single large theatre showing 2nd run movies for $3 until just before we moved into the neighborhood in 2001. Unfortunately, time got the best of the cavernous building, which has been “closed for renovation”, according to the marquee, for the past eight years. (Irving Park and Austin)

Mike’s Alehouse: This place opened right before we moved into the neighborhood, serving a variety of first-rate microbrews from many of the Midwest’s finest, including Summit and Three Floyds, two of my personal favorites, and the bar food, while typical, was good and cheap, particularly the daily specials. I remember having many a fun night there during our first couple of years in the neighborhood. In particular, I remember one night with the Portage Park tennis team where we managed to round up most of the tickets for a raffle and ended up going home with three cases of craft beer, along with a couple of bar glasses and a hat. Sadly, the owner and the manager decided to go their separate ways, the owner fired his two best waitresses to cut back on expenses, and Mike’s eventually merged with another restaurant several blocks down the road, which featured bad food and worse service. It wasn’t long after that they closed their doors for good. (originally at Irving Park and Menard)

The Red Frog: Another restaurant/bar, located catty-corner from the park, the Red Frog opened not long before we moved into the neighborhood. Run by a youngish Mexican-American woman who grew up in Chicago and her Mexican husband, it was trying in its awkward way to bring something a little hipper to Portage Park. They had great drink specials, good burgers, tasty quesadillas, and I liked their juke box, which featured a mixture of alternative rock, house music, and comparatively melodic hip hop. Unfortunately, the owner began to get more and more bitter, I think at least in part due to the shaky finances of the place. She began watching her favorite television programs, which tended towards reality shows along with the occasional drama like “Sex and the City”, on the bar TV, and she would blast these shows so loud through the stereo speakers that you couldn’t hold a conversation. The last straw was one night when she sneezed all over our food just before serving it to us. “I’m never going back there if that bitch makes me sick,” Melissa noted. Melissa did indeed catch a cold a few days later, and we never returned (I had to talk her down from taking more drastic action in retribution for the offending sneeze). Suffice it to say that no tears were shed when we drove by and noticed that the front door had been padlocked and that a disconnection notice from the gas company had been plastered on the front window. Years later, the sign above the bar still reads “Beer of the Month: Erlinger Oktoberfest.” (Irving Park and Long)

Manee Thai: Although technically just outside of Portage Park, this one was particularly close to my heart. It was one of the best Thai restaurants in the city, and one of the cheapest. Great avocado bubble drinks, along with the usual array of Thai dishes and curries, made fresh and well, without a lot of fuss. A favorite of the Thai consulate. Unfortunately, it burnt to the ground about a year ago. (Pulaski and Addison)

Toots: A classic ice cream joint on Central Avenue that had been family-run for 40 years, featuring outdoor tables that on most summer nights were packed with teenage kids. Torn down to make room for condos, an idea that was jettisoned with the recent collapse of the real estate market, and instead of condos the developer built… an ice cream parlor. (Central and Montrose)

Super Cup: A solid, prototypical diner, run by an old, chain-smoking Greek guy. Featured decent food at reasonable prices, the highlight of which was the homemade soup. The owner sold out literally the day the city changed the smoking laws, and the food went straight downhill. None of the regulars I know will eat there anymore, and it is rumored to be closing down. (Central and Lawrence)

Johnny’s Uncle Jim’s: A real dive of a diner, this was an institution that I never got to visit but which had a reputation for serving copious amounts of food at reasonable prices. According to neighborhood lore, Johnny died in some horrific and violent way, and his Uncle Jim then took over the diner, keeping the Johnny’s part of Johnny’s Diner as a way to pay him his respects. Johnny’s Uncle Jim’s was recently torn down, I assume to make room for condos. (Central and Montrose)

Jack Robbins Clothes of Distinction: Offering a range of men’s dress clothes, from dark Italian suits to a bright, pimped-out zoot suit, this clothier tried to appeal to a diverse demographic. I personally bought a fine, powder blue summer suit here on clearance that makes me look like a preacher from Alabama about to rain down fire and brimstone on your ass. Unfortunately, most men don’t wear suits much anymore, and this store shut its doors for good about a year ago. (Central and Belmont)

Metro Golden Memories: Owned and operated by Stan Freberg, an oldies radio DJ and archivist of radio dramas and soap operas, this store featured a huge collection of old records, movie memorabilia, and general nostalgia for everything from the 1920’s through the 1970’s. The store smelled like old sweat and was frequented mostly by the kind of overweight mouthbreather who probably hadn’t been on a date in at least a decade. The wonder was not that it shut down but that it had managed to remain in business for over 20 years. (Addison and Linder)

Baltika: A crafts store run by a Polish woman, it was a great place to go whenever you needed a quirky Christmas present, a religious icon, or a hand-painted teapot. We were on their mailing list, and last summer she mailed us a post card that read, “On second thought, I think I’ll quit…. Thank you for your support through the years.” (Milwaukee Avenue just south of Lawrence)

Paprikash: A Hungarian restaurant that served traditional, hearty, stick-to-the-ribs food that was a must for us at least once each winter. The owner would generally make an appearance, coming by your table and then buying everyone a shot of traditional liquor. He eventually sold out and moved to the suburbs, and the place was never the same, closing for good not long after his exit. (Belmont and Long)

Elisa’s: A small restaurant run by a Bosnian woman, featuring a mix of Balkan and American staples, Melissa and I would sometimes meet there after work, when she would reminisce about Croatia with the owner. While it was more of a place for lunch, we were sometimes her only dinner customers, and so it did not surprise me when this place closed. (Irving Park just west of Milwaukee Avenue)

And here are a few of the institutions that still stand:

Alexandra Foods: Pretty good pierogies made on the premises at cheap prices, something like $4/dozen, this place is a taste of the Eastern Bloc right in Chicago. This store sells one thing and one thing only: pierogies. You walk into the small storefront and there is a large, gleaming, stainless steel counter that comes up past your shoulder, with large freezers full of pierogies across the entire back wall. Polish girls in white butcher outfits fill your order. (Central and Roscoe)

City Newsstand: Claims to either have or be able to acquire any periodical. I will occasionally drop in to peruse the music zines and financial journals, but it seems like half their business is done selling adult material to lonely men. (Cicero and Irving Park)

Hagen’s: A fixture in the neighborhood for something like 50 years, this is one of the great proletarian fishmongers. You can buy an assortment of raw fish and cook it yourself, but I generally prefer to have them deep fry it for me, usually opting for either lake perch or cod sticks, with side orders of hush puppies and spicy cocktail sauce, both of which they make on the premises. The store also has a good selection of Swedish delicacies, and they will smoke any fish you catch for you, which my neighbor Mike has them do each summer during the Lake Michigan salmon runs. (Montrose and Menard)

Marie’s: Technically in Mayfair, just east of Portage Park, this was my first introduction to the fine dining establishments of the Northwest side, as I’ve been going there since soon after moving to Chicago. Most of the frontage on Lawrence Avenue is taken up by the adjoining liquor store, so if you’ve never been there, the size of the restaurant catches you by surprise, with a bar and small dining area in front leading to the main room, with its red naugahyde booths, gold leaf tables, and frosted mirrors on the wall depicting the Chicago skyline, circa 1980. It is very old school in that the main room has no windows and is temperature controlled all year, making it is a great place to down a pitcher of Leinie’s during an August heatwave or a January snow storm. The original owner passed away about a decade ago, and the place is now run by his daughter Nadine, a tough Greek broad with a wide ass and an even bigger attitude. Look at the place the wrong way and you’re likely to be asked to take your business elsewhere, but she treats her regular customers well. They serve top-rate thin crust pizza, in a very old school kind of way. If you’re looking for a pepperoni pizza with a nice crispy crust, an iceberg lettuce salad with Thousand Island dressing, and a cold pitcher of beer, this is your place. As an added bonus, the Christmas decorations they hang from the ceiling during the holidays are a sight to behold, like you’ve just entered a low-hanging cave of silver and gold stalactites. (Lawrence just west of Pulaski)

Porretta’s: There are several good pizza joints in Portage Park, but this is the closest and one of the best. While their thin crust is pretty generic, their pan pizza is first rate, with superior sauce, a flavorful crust, and not too much cheese. (Central and Waveland)

Portage Theatre: This old-time cinema was kind of a dump when I used to see movies there back in the early 90’s. The main theatre had been divided into three separate little cubby holes in an attempt to compete with the cineplexes. But after years of renovation and I assume millions in public financing, the new owners reopened the theatre a couple of years ago to great fanfare, and while still underutilized, staging only a half dozen or so events a month, with the most consistent user being a silent film society, it is by all accounts beautifully remodeled, as both the spacious lobby and the theatre proper have been restored to their former glory. (Milwaukee Avenue just north of Six Corners)

Smoque: A little outside Portage Park proper, I had to mention it because the barbeque here is awesome, as are the sides (baked beans, peach cobbler, etc). I personally recommend the shredded brisket sandwich. It opened a couple of years ago and is run by two younger guys who toured all the great barbeque towns, from Kansas City to Memphis and points further south, looking for the tastiest recipes, and their research has certainly paid off. (Pulaski between Addison and Irving Park)

Hot dog stands: The neighborhood remains littered with independent hot dog joints. Each has subtle differences that define their character. These are my three faves:
1) Dog Stop (Belmont and Menard): Serves a good, inexpensive burger. The lettuce and tomato are always fresh and the condiments are put on right. I also like the premade crinkle fries.
2) Bubs (Irving Park and Menard): This used to be run by these two old Hindu guys who would sit on upside-down plastic barrels and wait for customers to come in, and it was so filthy that is was pretty rare that anyone did, but about three years ago the place got taken over by a couple of typical Northwest side dudes, who hired a Polish woman to be their chef, and things have improved greatly. They grind the chuck for their burgers themselves, they serve good pierogies, I like their Philly cheese steak sandwich, and they also serve homemade desserts, including pretty awesome lemon bars.
3) Bowser Dog (Irving Park and Kilbourn): This place dares to mess with the standard Chicago style hot dog by using shredded lettuce as one of the toppings, which I actually like, but it drives Melissa crazy because “that’s not how you make a hot dog,” so we don’t go there that often, although it also has an outdoor patio with elbow room, which is an added bonus in the summer.

As you can see, a lot of the institutions that I value in my neighborhood have recently met their demise. In part, this is a result of demographics, as many of the kids of the blue collar, white ethnic families that made up the bulk of the community went on to college and then to trendier climes, be it Lincoln Park, Schaumburg, or Boulder, leaving a smaller base of folks willing to work long hours for little pay in the pursuit of some idiosyncratic mercantile dream.

But I also blame the government, in particular Mayor Daley and the Democratic machine, for much of the problem, as they have taxed and regulated a lot of these mom and pop stores to death, government being the parasite of all creative enterprise. Clean water, clean air, safe streets, and reliable public transportation: these are the mandates of government. After that, their only duty is to stay out of our way. An amusement tax, a fee to play live music, a fee to put a couple of tables out on the sidewalk in the summer, not to mention the grease that must cross the palms of the inspectors and regulators who periodically snoop around to exact their pound of flesh. For almost any business, it adds up to thousands of dollars per year, while the tax dollars of the neighborhood are siphoned off into increment finance districts and other shell games designed to keep all the well-connected developers and their sundry yes men in the pink. The only surprising thing is that more independent operators, the kind that give this town character, have not yet bitten the dust.

So I salute the virtues of the small-time entrepreneur, salt of the earth, the cream in our collective coffee cup.

Bedrock Bedlam

2009-01-25T19:19:00.000-08:00

I should have a new blog out in a few days. In the meantime, check out a video clip of me in a So Cal punk band, the legendary Stukas Over Bedrock, circa 1983.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=37537643

2008 Lists and the Mommy Matinee

2008-12-27T22:05:00.000-08:00

With the arrival of Milo into our home has come the inevitable narrowing of our cultural window into the rest of the world, which I guess in retrospect is no big deal.

I did see some good concerts ahead of his July arrival, the best of which were: 1) Stars of the Lid at the Lakeshore Theatre; 2) Los Campesinos at the Empty Bottle; 3) Klapa Groelin at the Chicago Cultural Center. We also caught a pretty cool interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov, my favorite novel, at the Lookingglass Theatre earlier this month. My favorite CD’s of the year are: 1) Sigur Ros: “Med Sud Iegrum Vid Spilum Endalausf (I think I got that right); 2) Los Campesinos: “Hold On Now Youngster” (that’s the first CD and not the new one); and 3) Bark Psychosis: “Codename: Dustsucker”.

My reading has been dominated by a lot of investment books, which I felt somewhat compelled to peruse in light of the fact that I’ve been rapidly frittering away our small family fortune with nothing to show for it other than fret and tears. One thing that I’ve found about investment writers is that even the good ones are much better at the investing than they are at the writing. These guys are the kings of turgid, paint-by-numbers prose. They almost make academics look interesting by comparison. That said, I also did a little reading for my own enjoyment, and my favorite reads this year were 1) Janna Levin: “A Madman Dreams of Touring Machines”; 2) Tim Flannery: “The Eternal Frontier”; and 3) Seneca: “On the Shortness of Life”.

I’ve never been much of a movie guy. I just don’t relate to most visual media; I prefer music and literature, and most movies make me feel like I’m being manipulated. However, the movie theatre, in particular the mommy matinee being offered at some theatres on Tuesday mornings, has now become one of my few cultural lifelines, and I look forward to our treks to the cinema each week, Milo and I rolling into the theatre, hot dog, large cup of cherry Coke, and milk bottle in hand. I’ve actually been surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed many of these films. Here then is a complete list of all the movies that I’ve seen over this past year, rated in approximate order, from first to worst:

Three Brilliant Ones:

1) Heima: Chronicles Sigur Ros’ summer concert tour across Iceland, where they play everywhere from open fields and the bowels of an abandoned fish cleaning factory to a large festival in Reykjavik. The music, the countryside, the people, everything about this film is beautiful, in that gnarled, Icelandic kind of way. Seriously, by all rights this band should be bigger than Coldplay or the Beatles.

2) A Winter’s Tale: Ingmar Bergman’s tale of doubt, centered on the pastor of a dying church and his crisis of faith. The spider God makes his return (see “Through A Glass Darkly” below), but the movie concludes with possibly the most moving apologia for the passion of Christ that I have ever heard, touching on Jesus’ own torment and doubt as he cries out “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani” - My God, my God, why have you forsaken me - on the cross.

3) Juno: As an adopted child who recently adopted a child myself, I’m probably a bit biased here, but I think this is a great film. The best aspects are its humor and its small triumphs, capturing with simple brushstrokes the intensity and idiosyncrasy of Juno, a pregnant teen in small town Minnesota. Having recently hung out with some of the teenagers of McHenry, Illinois as part of the adoption process, I can vouch for their enthusiasm, their passion, their ability to make a joke out of just about anything. That enthusiasm was something that, as I creep into middle age, I had almost forgotten about. This movie helped me experience both the feelings of betrayal and the wide-eyed excitement that go along with being young.

Twelve Good Ones:

4) What We Do Is Secret: Hey, I was there, or at least on the periphery, and I can say that this movie does a better job encapsulating the appeal of the Germs, warts and all, than I could have imagined. In fact, I’m surprised that the movie even got made, because it lays out the scene just like it was, portraying Darby Crash as a nihilist, and a bit of a fascist wannabe if the truth be told, who through the sheer force of his persona created a musical cult around himself, with the best evidence of his cultural divinity lying in the riots that accompanied almost every Germs show, blood and broken glass the bread and wine of his punk rock sacrament. See my Aug 26 entry for more detail about the film.

5) Sunshine: A beautiful film, both visually and sonically, about a manned space probe loaded with a large nuclear weapon that has been sent to reignite the heart of our dying sun.

6) Lars and the Real Girl: A sweet, funny story of a loner, his love for a blow up sex doll, and the small Wisconsin town that comes together to support him. I’d like to believe that small Midwestern towns are both this kind and understanding, so I guess this is my type of feel good movie, where I suspend any feelings of disbelief to live vicariously through the world being portrayed on film. Actually, I think most of my neighbors here on the Northwest side would pretend that a blow up doll was my fiancé if they were told beforehand that I needed their support, and I know our church collectively shrugged its shoulders and then welcomed the gay threesome that joined us a few years ago, so I guess things are changing, and maybe we just need to expand our standard Middle American kindnesses and courtesies to everyone, that it’s really that simple.

7) Through A Glass Darkly: Back in the 1950’s, Bergman won an academy award for this movie, but it is such a prototypical European art film that it was hard not to laugh at times, like when the family ran out back and performed some overly stylized play as a birthday present for their recently-returned father. The movie tells the story of a self-absorbed middle-aged writer, his insecure teenage son, his crazy older daughter, and the daughter’s husband. Like a lot of Bergman, it dives right into deep subjects, such as the nature of human creativity, our purpose in this life, and whether there is a God. In the end, God does make an appearance, but the certifiably loony daughter is the only one who sees him, and he is actually a Spider God, with a fearful maw, a ruthless Shiva of a god that offers little consolation for our tarnished lot in life.

8) Mama Mia: I typically hate musicals, but you gotta love Abba, and it was fun to hum along to all those great tunes.

9) Flash of Genius: “Flash” is an appropriate part of the title, because this underrated little gem was in and out of theatres before anyone noticed, and the fact that I saw it at all was kind of an accident, as I decided in the ticket line that day that I didn’t want to subject Milo to the sonic bombast of “The Dark Knight” and opted instead for a quieter alternative. “Flash of Genius” is about the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and his decades-long lawsuit against the Ford Motor Company for stealing his invention. I liked the characters, and I liked its evocation of Stooges-era Detroit. Perhaps most meaningful for me was the film’s contemplation of the tension between the inventive mind and the joys and obligations of family life.

10) Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist: Kind of a guilty pleasure. It’s really just a harmless little romp through teen flirtation, circa 2008. But I guess I’m a pushover when it comes to watching attractive young folks running around the city, club hopping, drawn to the music underground, whose flame seems to burn eternal, even when I no longer recognize either the bands nor their appeal.

11) Grant Gee’s Joy Division documentary: A solid retrospective about one of my favorite bands, one that honors the music without delving too deeply into bathos. But my most lasting memory of the film can be summed up with the question: Can Genesis P Orridge get any weirder? (here’s a YouTube link to an unrelated GPO message if you don’t know what I mean by this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qFq03QAn3w)

12) Rachel Getting Married: The fact that Jonathan Demme got me to care about these folks is a testament to the strengths of this film, as movies about the joys and tribulations of the rich and pampered on the Eastern Seaboard are not really my cup of tea. Of course, it helps if your lead is the eminently watchable Anne Hathaway. I guess my biggest issue with the movie is the self-congratulatory way Demme presents the marriage ceremony to his audience, as if to say, “Isn’t it great that I’m letting you in to such a cool party?” I like to hear a Middle Eastern folk jam as much as the next guy, but at a certain point it got to be a little cloying.

13) Encounters at the End of the World: Warner Herzog’s view of life at a scientific station in Antarctica. There are some cool images of sea life underneath the ice, but this is a decidedly little film, one of subtle pleasures, and I think Herzog goes overboard at times with the “spiritual” music as a soundtrack for these images. Hey, I love Medieval Russian hymns, but we get your point already.

14) The Duchess: I’m a sucker for well done period pieces like this one. The movie tells the story of the Duchess of Devonshire, an 18th Century English bonne vivante, who marries into power at an early age. This kind of movie depends a lot on the actors, who must convey drama and meaning as the camera slowly pans across their powdered faces, and the leads were all quite good. Ralph Fiennes in particular does a good job bringing some emotional complexity as the Duke of Devonshire in what could have been a one-dimensional role.

15) Appaloosa: A relatively straight-forward Western that has three things going for it: 1) I loved the New Mexican scenery; 2) I could probably watch Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen play tiddlywinks for two hours and be entertained; and 3) if I’ve got to see Renee Zellweger’s cartoon-like face beam larger-than-life across the screen, she might as well be playing a real bitch.

Eight Mediocre Ones:

16) Ghosttown: A comedy with a relatively light touch, about a grumpy, sarcastic, self-absorbed English guy who has a near-death experience and can now talk to dead people. It is a film of small chuckles rather than big laughs, which I appreciated, and there was this one scene where the dead are one-by-one redeemed and allowed to let go, that out of the blue brought me to tears right there in the movie theatre and alone justifies the existence of this film. But tell me this: Why do all the ugly English guys in the movies always get the girl?

17) Twilight: A simple tale, almost to the point of being simple-minded, with vampire fangs a (very) thinly disguised metaphor for a young man’s penis, this had HIT written all over it from day one. The young stars are all very pale and easy to look at (other than the black guy, who is very dark and easy to look at), and the panoramic scenes of the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest are equally beautiful. So I was adequately entertained.

18) No Country For Old Men: This one was a big disappointment, although I guess that I shouldn’t have been surprised, as I don’t generally drink from the cup of Coen worship. “Fargo”, “The Big Lebowski”, and maybe “Raising Arizona” are all classics, of course, but I can pretty much give or take the rest of their films. “No Country” had just won Best Picture at the Oscars when we rented the DVD, which should have signaled that it was a mediocre piece of Hollywood crap, but I had bought into the hype, especially on the hope that Cormac McCarthy’s translucent prose would rule the day. I have an ambivalent reaction to Mr. McCarthy’s writing, one that alternates between a revelatory shout and a shrug, and while I’ve never read this particular novel, I can see how both the strengths and limitations of the film had first been established in the book. Strong dialogue, interesting characters, the grasping at universal themes, such as what it means to lead an honorable and a moral life: All are hallmarks of both the film and of classic McCarthy. But there are also the dead ends where major characters wind up, unable to engage meaningfully with anyone but themselves, this odd post-modern frustration of expectation into which McCarthy sometimes devolves, deforming the story to the point where it just kind of wanders into a shrugged denouement and then a weak, whimpered close. And then there is both McCarthy’s and the Coen’s languorous, unflinching gaze at the physical manifestations of human bloodlust, which is also cloyingly postmodern, not to mention a cheap stunt and generally a cop out. At the end of this movie, I just sat there, shrugged my shoulders, and wondered why. Why do we need to know this story? Why did the filmmakers think we’d enjoy watching it? And why did so many folks think this is such a good movie?

19) Slumdog Millionaire: Breezy and generally enjoyable, with a very likeable lead, Dev Patel from Skins, as the slum kid from Mumbai who is on the verge of winning the grand prize competing on a nationally televised quiz show. But I was disappointed with this one, which is edited like a shoe ad or a music video. The directorial use of all the temporal tricks of the trade, jumping around from the present to the distant past and many points between, couldn’t hide the hackneyed storyline: Can this good kid, an orphan from the slums, through personal pluck and destiny, win both the money and the girl? Did I mention that this was a “feel good” movie? Then you probably know the answer.

20) Ironman: I have a bit of a soft spot for Robert Downey Jr., and he does a fine job in this role. And for what it’s worth, I bought into his rich-guy-inventor-turned-vigilante character. And any movie that incorporates a Black Sabbath song into its theme can’t be all bad. But, as with most action films, the last reel was pretty lame.

21) Role Models: I thought this comedy about two 30-ish California party dudes forced to work with a couple wayward kids as a form of community service had a lot of laughs. But the finale, in which all the major characters meet at a Medieval role playing competition, was embarrassingly lame, even by contemporary comedic standards.

22) I Robot: I really don’t remember much about this movie, other than that the computer-generated robot was probably the best actor in the film.

23) The 40-Year Old Virgin: I think part of my problem with this movie is that I don’t like Steve Carell’s face, and I had a hard time looking at him for two hours. There were a couple of funny scenes involving a horny boss and a middle aged Indian dude acting like a hip hop pimp, but you’ve probably already seen them on the promo. I didn’t really laugh that much at this movie, and I find its underlying Puritan attitude (the guys that obsess about sex are kind of lame at it, while the 40-year virgin, who is so tight that he doesn’t even like to masturbate, expending all that excess energy on the stair master, actually turns out to be a wonderful lover) almost as annoying as Carell himself. Also, like a lot of comedies, I hate the ending, when they feel a need to humanize everyone (hey, isn’t the point of comedy to break us down into our constituent parts, to dehumanize us… why do we have to be so relentlessly “humanized”?), and I hold a particular grudge against the kind of cutesy dance montage that they played over the closing credits.

Two Disasters:

24) National Treasure II: OK, let’s see if I’ve got this straight: Nicolas Cage needs to talk to the President because there is this secret document that only Presidents know about, and it is the only thing that can save Cage’s family’s reputation. So he kidnaps the President in a storm drain, gains access to the top secret document, and then high-tails it to Mount Rushmore, where he uncovers an ancient Aztec treasure in a cave below the four Presidents’ granite heads. Alright, I’ll buy it. Oh, and the current resident of the Oval Office is actually a kind, intelligent, misunderstood man? Now that’s ridiculous.

25) Australia: This movie is a monstrosity. Everything bad they say about Kevin Costner or Michael Cimino would more be appropriately pinned to the makers of this celluloid deformity. I seriously think it might be the worst movie ever made, when you consider its pretension and expense. Start with the tepid chemistry between Nicole (Chicken Bone) Kidman and Hugh Jackman, the underwhelming scenery shots (it made the Outback look like an ugly stretch of central Nevada), the insipid dialogue, and the cardboard characterizations, then throw in a meandering plot that seemed to never end (I’m sorry, but I didn’t care if Kidman and Co. would get their cattle to town in time, and the Australians didn’t so much fight the Japs as stand around and get the living crap bombed out of them), and top it off with some heavy-handed symbolism that bordered on absurdity (for instance, the half-breed kid tapping into his Aboriginal roots, racing ahead of 20,000 head of stampeding cattle and then, just before the cattle race off a cliff, getting them to all stop on a dime with a wave of his dark, tiny hands – hey, if the Aborigines were that good, a baker’s dozen of them could have kicked the entire English army all the way back to the Northern Hemisphere). I think my favorite scene, in that laugh-out-loud, this-is-so-stupid kind of way, was the Aboriginal medicine man wandering through Darwin, made up in face paint and doing some kooky dance, while the Japanese were dropping bombs and blowing shit up all around him. This was the only movie in all my visits to the mommy matinee that, when I left the theatre to change Milo’s diaper, I almost didn’t return. But it is only on reflection that I realize how truly awful this film is.

Privatize This, Motherf**kers

2008-12-04T21:12:00.000-08:00

Today, the Chicago city council passed Mayor Daley’s proposal to privatize the enforcement of the city’s parking meters, essentially giving a private company a 75-year lease on these prime swaths of the public roadway, betraying the public trust in exchange for $1.15 billion, much if not most of which will undoubtedly be used to perpetuate the waste and patronage that has come to characterize local government.

I have three words to summarize the perversity of today’s vote: Lincoln Towing Service. Steve Goodman and Mike Royko must both be rolling in their graves. But what needs to roll are heads. Actually, the guillotine is too good for these folks. A lynch mob would better fit the dignity of their station.

Politicians should not be able to sell the parking spaces on a public city street, especially not to a firm represented by Morgan Stanley, which just happens to employ the mayor’s brother. Even though I’ve voted for him in every previous election, it is clear that Mayor Daley needs to go. Add him to the list with Blago and Stroger. They have to be the worst political trifecta in the country. It’s almost enough to make me into a Republican.

Lies the Wall Street Journal Told You

2008-11-27T08:20:00.000-08:00

I’m not going to delve into all of the right wing ideology espoused on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, their free market blather and extensive apologia for President Bush, which not even a misguided war and a failing economy could discourage. It’s like arguing against the Detroit Lions. The abysmal judgment of the Journal’s editorial staff is there in black and white and doesn’t even need to be debated. But let me point out one thing: can you imagine the panic right now if the country had listened to these guys and privatized Social Security?

Actually, I’m not even here to rail against the Wall Street Journal, per se, but at the business media in general and in their seemingly uncanny ability to be wrong about almost everything. Here are a few generally unrefuted pearls of wisdom that have been floating around during the recent financial crisis, ideas that are at least misguided, if not outright lies:

1) The U.S. consumer matters: Once upon a time, the U.S. consumer was the engine that fueled world economic growth, but that is no longer the case. Over half the planet is rapidly growing, or at least it was until a couple of months ago, and the people in these countries have a voracious demand for all the good things that we take for granted. Demand growth is the mother’s milk of capitalism. The biggest problem with the current banking crisis is not what it has done to the U.S. consumer, or even how it has saddled the banking system with bad debt, it is how the crisis has cut off the spigot of financing that had been fueling rapid growth around a host of developing countries, from India to Russia to Brazil. The sooner these folks can resume expanding their economies, the sooner things will get better for the rest of us.

2) Giving the American people a rebate check is a good way to stimulate the economy: Does anyone remember what most folks did with last spring’s rebate checks? Sure, people saved some of it, which for some reason is supposed to be bad. But what they did with most of the money was a whole lot worse. Tens of millions of Americans went out to some big box retailer and spent their rebate checks on cheap plastic crap from China, hurting our balance of trade payments but doing almost nothing for our economy. This time around, the U.S. government might as well buy all of that plastic crap directly from the Chinese at wholesale and then open up warehouses to disperse it directly to the public, like we used to do with government cheese. I figure that the actual cost from the Chinese manufacturers must be pennies on the dollar, thereby saving our kids and grandkids, who will end up paying for this scheme, tens of billions.

3) Investing in infrastructure will not help us today: It takes awhile for new projects to get started, the theory goes, thus limiting the impact of infrastructure spending as a stimulus. But one of the first rules of trading is to “buy the rumor and sell the fact.” So the market tends to move in anticipation of an event, not from the event itself. The “smart money” will be looking forward to the long-term boost that infrastructure spending will bring, a slow burn that should, if nothing else, limit the pace of any market slide. Meanwhile, a host of businesses will begin looking to take advantage of all those freshly paved roads, the new mass transit, and the growing alternative energy industry.

4) U.S. heavy industry does not matter: All those expanding economies in the developing world are full of people looking to buy their first car, their first refrigerator. For most of the planet, what the U.S. media refers to as “old industry” is new to them. There are plenty of American companies that can step in to meet this new demand, and this should be a cornerstone of the coming economic rebound.

5) The U.S. computer industry has a bright future: We all have computers, and we all know how often they break down, ranging from program glitches and overheated batteries to the dreaded blue screen of death, but for some reason the computer industry gets a free ride in the media. The reality is that most American computer manufacturers make an undependable product, and most American software companies aren’t much better. It’s only a matter of time until the Japanese, the Koreans, or the Finns learn how to kick our ass at this, too.

6) Corporate consolidation is a good thing: Now that we’ve bailed out the major American financial institutions to the tune of $350 billion and counting, the talk is about how the financial industry is too diffuse and needs to “consolidate”. But the questions are: why is it too big, and who is going to do the consolidating? Because the corporations that are most likely to be in the buying mode, such as Citigroup, or Bank of America, or Goldman Sachs, were key players in the recent financial collapse, while many of the smaller regional banks kept their heads down and were just busy doing their job. In this context, “too big to fail” is a crazy concept. Rather than giving the large banks hundreds of billions to swallow up everyone else, the government should be breaking these banks into their constituent parts, returning the American banking system to the patchwork of regional banks concerned with servicing their local communities, which is the way things used to be before the banking deregulation of the 1980’s.

Oh, and BTW, Happy Thanksgiving.

Who To Fear

2008-11-11T22:13:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reluctant to discuss last week’s Presidential election, mostly because my guy won, and I think it would be rude to gloat. But it remains on my mind. Here are a few observations:

Obama has been compared to a lot of predecessors, from Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy to Adlai Stevenson. But my own comparison is with another Illinois politician, namely John Anderson, who ran first as a moderate Republican and then as a 3rd party candidate for President back in 1980, eventually garnering a little under 7% of the vote. For a time, Anderson had a grassroots, charismatic appeal, much like Obama, garnering a lot of attention for his “fresh”, non-partisan approach to politics, and Anderson was the darling of political cliques in college campuses around the country. I was living in UCLA’s Sproul Hall in 1980 and witnessed more than one Anderson rally, and the do-gooder unctuousness of these folks really turned my off. I have the feeling that I would have felt the same way about Barack Obama if I was on a college campus today.

In fact, I didn’t care for any of the three major candidates in 1980 and ended up voting for Ed Clark, the Libertarian, back when many Libertarians were actually progressive on social issues. Clark campaigned on a platform of reduced military engagement and “low tax liberalism” (the frightening pro-America, anti-rights folks, a la Bob Barr, didn’t gain a stranglehold on the Libertarian Party until the late 80’s.) Clark ended up getting a little over 1% of the vote, the best nationwide performance for a Libertarian Presidential candidate to date.

Another thought about the recent election originated from my wife, Melissa. A guy we know here in Chicago had been an enthusiastic Obama supporter from early on. When his Brooklyn-based sister-in-law would fret about “the herd that went for Bush” also going moving en masse against Obama, he would, having been raised in Ohio, come to the defense of the mass of middle Americans, saying that “sometimes, you just have to trust the people.” When this debate was reprised after the election, Melissa responded, “They’re just another herd, it’s just that this herd voted for our guy.” Well put.

With two or three possible exceptions, just about everyone in my circle of friends voted for Obama. But the same cannot be said for my in-laws. I’m not exactly sure, but my guess is that there were 2 votes for McCain, 5 for Nader, and 1 for Bob Barr. To the best of my knowledge, the only folks in her immediate family who voted for Obama were Melissa and I. Anyone who has read this site knows that I don’t think much of Bush, McCain, Palin, or just about any of the current crop of Republicans. But I’ve come to the conclusion that, despite the fact that George W. may have set this country back a generation, Republicans are an essentially manageable threat to our democracy. The same cannot be said for Ralph Nader.

There is nothing more dangerous than an idealist, particularly one that dreams of attaining power. When you hear a political leader promise “Peace, Land, and Brotherhood” or call for “A Campaign of One Hundred Flowers,” it is a clear signal to collectively kill that movement by any means necessary, because by the time you realize that they mean to take away the life and liberty of all who oppose them, it will do no good to grab your gun and run for the hills.

Nader’s bloodlust, his preoccupation with “arresting the executive crooks” in corporate America, in fact his desire to eliminate any rights of “corporate personhood,” a path whose logical end is that anyone who opens a business would be subject to the confiscation of his personal property by the legal system, reminds me of nothing so much as the rantings of the Khmer Rouge against the business class of their own country, to whom they proffered the slogan, “To keep you is no benefit; to destroy you is no loss.” As we subsequently found out, Pol Pot meant that quite literally. History has repeatedly demonstrated that when a political leader threatens to spill blood in the name of his cause you should take him at his word.

I admit, I first grew to hate Ralph Nader as a child. Our neighbor, who we called Uncle Bob, was a real car buff, and at one point he drove a Chevy Corvair. He would talk about the mechanical wonders of that car, and how it was a tragedy that it was railroaded out of existence by Mr. Nader, who Uncle Bob referred to as “a real Bozo.” I may have been a child at the time, but even then I hated the tearing down of something beautiful for personal notoriety or out of some oversized notion of justice, and, as it turns out, Uncle Bob was actually right, as the Corvair was eventually tested and found not to have most of the structural flaws that Nader alleged. But it was too late for the vehicle, whose sales had already plummeted

But it is one thing to cripple a car brand and entirely another to cripple your country. Nader had to know that his presence on the ballot in 2000 could tip the balance to George Bush in a close election, and, as it turned out, it did, as Al Gore would almost assuredly have won the state of Florida, and thus the election, if Nader’s name were not on the ballot. Now, I was never a big fan of Al Gore. I didn’t vote for him in the Democratic primary, and I don’t care for him now. He and his hollow blond wife are such typical Baby Boomers, with their smug presumption that they are at the cutting edge of everything interesting and cool, when actually they are two of the dullest fucks on the planet. However, I had the common sense to see that, while Al Gore was personally repugnant, George W. was a national calamity in waiting.

For some reason, Nader never realized this. In fact, years later, he claimed that the election of George W. Bush was essentially no different than a Gore Presidency would have been. Tell that to the 5,000 dead and 50,000 maimed U.S. soldiers in Iraq, or to our children and grandchildren, who will be paying off the budget deficits engendered by the Bush Administration for decades. Nader never did exactly admit he was wrong about Bush not being any worse than Gore, although he did eventually change his tack, claiming that it was actually Al Gore’s fault for not having the competency to win that election by enough votes so that Nader’s impact wouldn’t have mattered. Like I said, if there’s one thing that people need to fear, it is an idealist with no shame.

Admittedly, Nader has become a harmless, irrelevant force in our country. But our collective goal should be to keep it that way and to actively oppress the ability of others like him to spread their virus to, as Melissa calls them, “the herd”, or in more polite terms, the general public, because if history has taught us anything, it’s that we are a bloodthirsty species, easily cowed.

My Tribe

2008-10-09T08:12:00.000-07:00

As a redhead, I’ve always known that we were different than the rest of humanity. Growing up as a redheaded teenager in sunny California, I saw having red hair as a physical manifestation of my differentness, a sign to the planet that I wasn’t interested in doing things in a straight-forward, obvious way, like all the tanned, blond folks laying out next to me at the beach. I lived my life as the proud inheritor of recessive genes, a scrawny kid, subject to allergies, not at all the upfront kind of winner like my cousins, most of whom were not only blond and a few years older than me, but high school football heroes, then fraternity boys, and then the prototypical fair-haired young men who go on to glad-handed success in the world of American business. I knew that I wasn’t going to be like them, that constitutionally I couldn’t be like them, and that I wouldn’t want to be, even if I could. Not that I didn’t like my cousins; it was fun to go to their football games, and I kind of admired the easy way they seemed to slide into all the good things in life. But I was never interested in doing things in a straightforward, obvious way.

I looked at fellow redheads as my tribe, and most of us seemed to be setting out in life using a different jib than the rest of the planet. Our rock stars were surly and missing teeth, like Johnny Rotten. Our sex symbols were a little weird and off-kilter, like David Bowie. Even our sports stars, like Bill Walton, seemed to dance to the beat of a different drummer.

I am also a lefty, and the one sport that lefties tended to dominate was tennis, a much more cerebral game than most, one where an off-kilter individualist would have a shot. The greatest player of all time was, and probably still is, that red-haired lefty, “Rocket” Rod Laver. It seemed for a while that tennis was destined to ruled by a left-handed king, be it Laver, Connors, or McEnroe. Which is why, back in the day, I despised Bjorn Borg, a worthy number one and possibly the best athlete of the bunch, because he was not only right-handed, but also blond.

Whenever I saw some successful, attractive lefty who had capitulated to the status quo, I always wondered what had gone wrong, be it a beautiful, red-haired girl dating some obvious guy, or be it a red-haired dude who had joined a fraternity or who I saw hanging out with the jocks and talking like a dipshit. On those rare occasions, I would feel that person had betrayed our tribe. “I know that you’re better than that,” I would think.

Sometime in my early 20’s, I read Tom Robbins’ “Still Life with Woodpecker”, and it filled out my thoughts on the matter. A major theme of the book is about what it means to have red hair, and, while I’d probably find the book a bit sophomoric now, and I quickly tired of Robbins’ indulgent phantasms, it meant a lot to me at the time. Here it was in black and white: redheads were people of the moon, while the rest of the planet were people of the sun. Robbins even listed the most famous redheads of all-time, and how, while a diverse bunch, all were manifestations of the same rebellious spirit. I forget most of the names on the list, but I remember that one was Thomas Jefferson, and he seemed like an intellect imbued with the spirit of the redhead: cantankerous and diffused, yet probing.

Being a redhead has always been an important part of my identity, but I haven’t given it much thought for about 20 years now. That all changed when we adopted our son. Milo has pale skin and a big shock of reddish hair. Just about everyone says how much he looks like me, although Melissa is convinced that he is destined to be even more handsome. It’s almost creepy that I, an adopted son myself, have adopted a son who looks just like me.

I keep hoping that Milo will grow up to have red hair, that my son will be one of the tribe, so I did a little research on the subject. As it turns out, recent scientific studies have validated much of my late-adolescent musings. Redheads have a recessive mutation on their MC1R gene, which dictates the production of melanin. Whereas both brunettes and blondes have the dominant MC1R gene, triggering the production of eumelanin, redheads instead produce phaeomelanin, which generally leads to pale skin, freckles, and, sometimes, red hair. If only one of your parents pass on the recessive MC1R mutation, you will tend to be pale and freckle easily. Only when both parents pass on this recessive gene will you have red hair, and this is the case for about 2% of the planet. The scientific evidence now suggests that there are other characteristics associated with this gene that go beyond simple hair color, ranging from the susceptibility to certain diseases to a greater tolerance for anesthetics (maybe that explains why I popped up, fully conscious and eyes wide open, during the middle of my colonoscopy a few years ago). The recessive MC1R mutation has even been found in the DNA of Neanderthal remains, and, while it remains controversial, some suggest that our own recessive MC1R mutation is evidence that some Homo Sapiens of northern Eurasian descent are actually part Neanderthal.

So what does it mean to think like a redhead? It means to challenge convention, to look askance at the world, to lift up rocks in the forest and celebrate the bugs underneath. Let me give you an example: I work in the futures markets, where probably the most repeated trading advice is that “the trend is your friend.” In other words, if you want to make money, the best and easiest way is to try to find out what everyone else is going to do, and then to do it with them, preferably finding a place near the front of the herd, just before every shoe salesman and cabbie in town catches on to the idea. The fact that everyone around you starts to parrot the same thoughts as you is proof that you have struck a vein. This is how most folks get rich.

But I have no interest in trading like that. I trade like a redhead. When I start hearing a bunch of folks parroting the same idea, I immediately want to do just the opposite, even if what they say makes sense, because I just hate all of that obviousness. So as soon as I can find a reason to go against these folks, I do. And sometimes it even makes me money. But I wouldn’t trade like all those other guys, even if their way made me tons of easy cash, because I am just not built that way. My mind won’t stand for it. All of those guys who’ve made money the easy way, the obvious way, I want to fight them, to knock them down a few notches. And hopefully make a little money in the process.

Whether it be Mark Twain or Vincent van Gogh, Oliver Cromwell or Malcolm X, folks with red hair, feeling the pull of the moon (and captivated by sex and sugar, as Tom Robbins would have it) have left a mark on this planet far greater than our numbers would dictate. Sometimes, when I look down upon my sweet, blessed son, I dare to believe that he might be one of us.

A Shining City on the Hill

2008-09-12T21:27:00.000-07:00

With the current dearth of prophets and wise men, it is up to the writers and the poets, to the defiant, to assholes like me, to sound the clarion: After eight years of watching our sitting President actively doing the Devil’s work, I am telling each and every one of my readers that we are individually and collectively responsible: If we elect another jingoist, tax cutting, laissez faire war monger into the Oval Office, we won’t need the wrath of God to finish us off, because He will have given us enough rope for us to do the job for Him. Let’s be objective here: interminable war, shrinking global influence, a corporate world teetering on the brink of widespread collapse, not to mention a lack of progress on any of the important issues of our day, be it global warming, a workable immigration policy, or the access to health care; it is clear the last eight years have been an abject failure. And now the same folks who foisted this disaster on the American people, all in the name of combating “global terrorism”, cutting taxes, and giving free reign to Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, are trying to bamboozle us with their shell game, where personality replaces policy, trying to turn some tarnished son of an Admiral, another one of those guys born on third base, who has spent half of his adult life in Washington, into an outsider, the ultimate Maverick. Well I’ve got just one word to say to them: Bullshit.

And I’ve got a few words for this supposed Christian running on his ticket: you and the folks you rode in with are an embarrassment, a betrayal of your own faith, talking about the war in Iraq as “God’s work”. Well, if that’s true, then God must really have grown sick of our materialism and our perfidy, because that war has gone a long way to bringing down our economy, dividing our house, and sucking dry our resolve. Speaking of which, “resolve” is a mental concept, an abstraction; it only has meaning once you put it to use. To be resolved to end poverty, or corruption, or environmental degradation is one thing. To be “resolved” to winning a war at all costs is another. The lesson from Vietnam is not that we must be resolved to “win”, it is that sometimes it is better to take our toys and go home. Our country, our future, and our planet were a whole lot better once we took our hands out of that cookie jar, and all the right wing eggheads prattling on at the time about how the rest of Asia would then fall like dominoes turned out to be selling nothing but their own hot air.

It is time to tell these supposed Christians that they sully their faith every time they wave the flag. It is time to give them a lesson in reading their Bible:

For all the boots of the tramping warriors
and all the garments rolled in blood
shall be burned as fuel for the fire,
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

These lines from Isaiah 9, announcing a future Savior for both Israel and the Gentiles that is to come out of Galilee, is one of the cornerstones of the Christian claim that Jesus Christ is indeed the Messiah. The rest of the chapter promises the wrath of God, which is to be brought down on his unrepentant people, “for those who led this people led them astray, and those who were led by them were left in confusion.”

Isaiah 10 describes their sin:
Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees,
who write oppressive statutes,
to turn aside the needy from justice
and to rob the poor of my people of their right…
To whom will you flee for help,
and where will you leave your wealth,
so as not to crouch among the prisoners
or fall among the slain?
for all this his anger has not turned away;
his hand is stretched out still.

I don’t know if I believe in “American exceptionalism”, but I do know the contemporary conservative version of it is wacked. I have family that goes back to the Mayflower, and I admit to having a soft spot in my heart for the notion of a Shining City on the Hill, one where there shall be endless peace, a world of the just who, to quote Bill and Ted, are all excellent to one another. And then there is the stunted version of this exceptionalism being promulgated by the right wing in this country, where our weapons are exceptional, our luxuries, our vanity, our arrogance, but little else. Let’s be clear: I am no big fan of liberalism, in some ways it is the back side of the same sullied coin, and a vote for Barack Obama may not be a vote for good. But I know evil when I see it, and, in this day and age, its biggest proponents are members of the Republican Party.

Lexicon Devil

2008-08-26T21:24:00.000-07:00

On Thursday night, I went to the Music Box, bought a box of Snowcaps, and then settled in to watch “What We Do Is Secret”, the new Germs biopic, on the final night of its one-week stint there. I left the theatre a little stunned, I’m sure partly because I don’t get out much nowadays and am easily impressed, but mostly because I’ve never seen such an accurate fictional portrayal that touched on events in my own life. “What We Do Is Secret” is obviously a labor of love, but it is also ruthlessly clear-eyed in its mythologizing, to the point where I’m surprised that the film ever got made at all, because it makes few compromises to any Hollywood notion of how to create empathy or tell a story so that the uninitiated will understand. The reviews of the film reflect this, as they seem to be looking in askance for some sort of exposition on the band’s supposed genius and have been somewhat incredulous when a conventionally acceptable portrait was not provided.

The movie begins with a teaser of a concert scene, followed by the opening credits and then a series of documentary-style monologues by some of the characters in the film, notably Darby Crash, the singer of the Germs, waxing on about the appeal of fascism and how he likes to antagonize “the Jews.” From there, the movie flashes back to tell the story of Paul Beahm and Georg Ruthenberg, aka Crash and Pat Smear, their forming of the Germs as teenagers, and their consumption of copious amounts of drugs, interspersed with segments where the band flails away on their instruments behind Darby’s cockeyed ramblings. I can see how some folks might wonder why in the world they are watching a movie about these guys.

While the Germs are an acquired taste, they are also an unrepeatable phenomena, Smear’s impressionistic guitar thrash, Darby’s surreal invective, and Bolles’ frenetic drums sounding like the Shaggs and the Stooges got together and made a record with Captain Beefheart sitting behind the mixing board. Watching the movie, I for one was struck at the timelessness of the Germs’ sound, at what a rush it was to take in the concert scenes.

Critics have also complained about the hackneyed storyline, relating “What We Do Is Secret” to a cartful of other biopics, ranging from “Dewey Cox” to “Sid and Nancy.” I’ll just note that, from what I can tell, the filmmakers of “What We Do Is Secret” were relentless in their pursuit of being factually accurate, and that if the story line is a bit hackneyed, well that’s the way things went down, and if Darby expounds on some things in a less-than-enlightened way, it’s probably because the filmmakers weren’t out to doctor the original source material to touch up the blemishes. This lies in stark contrast to most celluloid fantasies. For example, by all accounts, Sid Vicious most likely murdered his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, and then intentionally O.D’d on heroin shortly thereafter, whereas the film version features some far-fetched fantasy where the two of them are star-crossed lovers, taking a mystical cab ride through New York City and getting down with the natives before heading off to what one presumes is heaven. In “What We Do Is Secret”, it’s just the facts ma’am, and I presume if Darby says some cornball line to the members of his entourage after their last show, then there is a reliable source that said it actually happened that way.

There are several scenes in the movie that actually raised the hair on the back of my neck, so exact was the reliving of detail from my own memory, from the band interviews on Rodney on the ROQ to the scenes at Oki-Dog and other Hollywood locations. In particular, I remember being a sophomore in the dorms and getting a phone call from a friend, who told me that Darby Crash had died from a heroin overdose. Having seen Darby hanging out in front of a club just the week before, I was stunned by the news. While I was still on the phone, a girl from down the hall knocked fairly frantically on my door to tell me they just announced on “Monday Night Football” that John Lennon had been shot. I said, “Wow, that’s really weird, because I just found out that Darby Crash has died.” The dorm crier then proceeded to tell everyone on the remainder of her rounds that “You’ll never guess what: John Lennon has been shot and Darby Crash died.” The phone call in the movie captured both the facts and the feelings of that moment.

So, the question remains: Why would anyone to whom the Germs were not a direct part of their life be interested in this movie? First, the Germs, albeit the playing-out of clichéd late-adolescent fantasy, were a band like no other, before or since. While riots were a common occurrence at punk shows, it was like a bad moon followed the Germs around. They were banned from virtually every place they ever played, and these “riots” were by all accounts serious deals where people got hurt. I personally never saw the Germs, although I did catch the Darby Crash Band at the Starwood shortly after Darby’s return from England. While the movie accurately conveyed the stagnancy of that show, even here, I remember a wild night, the bouncers having shut the gate into the small Starwood parking lot before I got there, dozens of us waiting and looking through the fence at the bloodied faces of guys getting pulled out of the club during the opening set, a bunch of us rushing past the fence when the bouncers opened it to let in an ambulance to cart off the injured.

As the movie makes clear, Darby was in hot pursuit of his own myth, quoting Nietzsche and making a 5-year plan at age 17 that concluded with the taking of his own life. The plan may have been both sophomoric and egotistical, but Darby had the intellectual chops to pull at least some of it off. Lyrically, two of my favorite Germs songs are “Manimal” (I came into this world / Like a puzzled panther / Waiting to be caged / But something stood in the way / I was never quite tamed), and “Richie Dagger’s Crime” (I’m Richie Dagger / I’m young and I’m haggard / The boy that nobody owns). However, Darby’s attempt to become an Ubermensch, to lead the crowd into some type of evolved hysteria, is perhaps best conveyed in “Lexicon Devil”:

I’m a lexicon devil with a battered brain
And I’m looking for a future – the world’s my aim
So gimme gimme your hands
Gimme gimme your minds
Gimme gimme this
Gimme gimme that

I want toy tin soldiers that can push and shove
I want gunboy rovers that’ll wreck this club
I’ll build you up and level your head
We’ll run it my way, cold men and politics dead

I’ll get silver guns to drip old blood
Let’s give this established joke a shove
We’re gonna wreak havoc on the rancid mill
I’m searching for something, even if I’m killed

Empty out your pockets – you don’t need your change
I’m giving you the power to rearrange
Together we’ll run to the highest prop
Tear it down and let it drop…. away
So gimme gimme your hands
Gimme gimme your minds
Gimme gimme this
Gimme gimme that

A lot of bands have aimed to turn their live shows into that kind of mini-Apocalypse, but the Germs came closer than most to achieving it.

As an impressionable 19 year old, lacking a direction or a cause, I sought a charismatic figure, a leader among peers, who would show me how it’s done, kind of like the Sting character did for all the Mod kids in “Quadrophenia”. There were five guys who I tried to at least briefly put in that role: Johnny Rotten, Darby Crash, Mike Ness, Jack from TSOL, and Wattie from the Exploited, the basic requirement being a personal magnetism, defiant and strong, and someone who wasn’t afraid of a little blood, if that’s what the situation required. But there was always something that quickly disabused me of this nascent hero worship. In Darby’s case, it’s hard to admire someone who’s typically so strung-out that whenever you see him he can hardly stand.

Being a man is a bloodsport. Sometimes, in our comfortable middle class lives, it is easy to forget that, but it’s the genetic justification for why men got to run around and kill things for the past 25,000 years while women did all the work. One of the things that the passing of my father last year sunk into my head is that there’s no point in buying into that safe kind of middle class life; you’re going to end up dead soon enough in any case, and in the meantime you might as well have done something meaningful. Not that raising kids and contributing to the national GDP isn’t something, but I believe that most American males are totally ill-served by all of these schools and jobs they make us endure in order to get a piece of the pie.

But while being a man is bloodsport, macho behavior tends to be reactive, stupid, a waste of energy. The blood oath that all thinking men need to take is the one where we look to drag civilization forward. Most of the time, we can ignore the stupid, the corrupt, and the obvious among us; we have other fish to fry. But I think there are also times where, for our own mental hygiene if nothing else, we need to show some balls.

Darby certainly understood this idea of the greater cause, although he found his cause where you’d expect a sideswiped adolescent would, looking to drugs and the cult of totalitarian personality to be his saviors, his bridge to the other side. But one look at today’s pop charts, which remain peppered by “cute” Disney creations such as the Jonas Brothers or paint-within-the-lines rock acts like Linkin Park, and it is clear that the number of this beast continues to ride high, and to which Darby’s twisted, faux fascist view of the world still serves as a welcome tonic.

How do you confront the rich, the powerful, and their minions who perpetuate this dull, material, and obvious culture? I believe in an oligarchy of the passionate and the purposeful, and that through tools like the internet, we just might begin to find one another and rearrange the world. Look, the fact is that the great mass of humanity has always needed to be told what to think, how to vote, what to buy. That’s why advertising works. But that’s also why the original thinkers throughout history have always had at least a puncher’s chance of changing things.

Talk to folks and there is, despite our generally comfortable lives, a deep discontent in the air. This past weekend, my kindly, low-key father-in-law, a former Navy man who taught high school math for almost 30 years, was talking about how the French had it right back in the day and that maybe it was time for a real revolution in this country. Folks see the government and the legion of lobbyists who too often dictate policy as being increasingly distant and working against the people’s will; they see the media offering bland pabulum, turning the lights out on anything interesting, anything honorable. Not to be paranoid, but there may come a time when the future of our homes, our culture, our neighborhoods, or even our country as we know it may be at stake.

In the short term, that means getting ready, because women and the men who act like them will be of little use if that next curtain drops. And when I’m at the shooting range, I’ll dedicate the first round that I pop off with my new Ruger to Darby Crash.

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In a related vein, Tuesday is the Mommy Matinee at the local movie theatre. Today, Melissa, Milo, and I met Melissa’s sister and nephew at a showing of “Mama Mia!”, the Abba vehicle which I believe is now the highest grossing musical in the history of American cinema (a stat that admittedly is a bit deceptive, because it doesn’t factor in inflation, and I’m sure that movies like “The Sound of Music” and “Singing in the Rain” had a bigger audience back in their day; nonetheless, the box office totals for “Mama Mia!” have been impressive, and at least a bit surprising).

Much like a lot of my favorite punk bands, Abba toiled in relative American obscurity when they were around, being primarily a European phenomenon. With each album, there were the whispers in “the industry” about whether, finally, this would be their big breakthrough, but it never really happened for them in the States.

Now, some thirty years later, Abba finally have their big American hit, with a smash movie and a corresponding soundtrack that reached number one on the Billboard charts, with a bullet. I guess our country’s musical tastes have finally caught up to them. I, for one, have always liked Abba. I liked their perfect pop tunes, which seemed so much more hummable, so much more fun, than most American hits of their era, the Foreigners, Kenny Loggins, and their ilk.

I normally hate movie musicals because the music is almost consistently awful. I always wondered why a real band couldn’t do the music for a musical, why the industry always had to settle for the 2nd team, for Andrew Lloyd Webber and his cohorts. “Mama Mia!” is proof that good music makes up for a lot of boners, up to and including Pierce Brosnan’s singing voice. The hits just kept coming: “Super Trouper”, “S.O.S.”, “Dancing Queen”, “Take A Chance on Me”, and probably close to a dozen more. It was awesome. I don’t think there was a dud in the bunch. I tell you, Ulvaeus and Andersson were two muthas who could really pen a tune. And the movie didn’t take itself too seriously, which meant that Meryl Streep didn’t take herself too seriously (I think it might be, at least for me, her most watchable performace). In short, I really enjoyed myself at the Mommy Matinee.

For those keeping score at home, as of 8/24, Yahoo Box Office reports that “Mamma Mia!” has grossed $124,469,900 in 6 weeks of theatrical release, while “What We Do Is Secret”, in its 3rd week, has grossed $28,419. I personally recommend both films.

Why I Love My Pontiac Torrent and Hate Corporate America

2008-07-31T15:09:00.000-07:00

On Monday, Melissa and I traded in our ’02 Saturn SL1 5-speed compact for a Pontiac Torrent. There is no way to sugar-coat it: three weeks into parenthood, and Melissa and I have already capitulated to the status quo, buying our first SUV (it is officially labeled a “small crossover”, but I won’t even pretend that label will protect me from ridicule by at least a couple readers of this site, who over the years have endured my rather predictable tirades on SUV-driving suburbanites). I’ll just note that we could not comfortably fit both the kid’s car seat and the dog carrier in either my Buick Regal or Melissa’s Saturn when we tried driving the crew out to visit my in-laws in Downers Grove this past week. I’ll also point out that I’ve never had anything against minivans and suburban cul-de-sacs, per se, just that I resent being fed that lifestyle as a given rather than as one of many options. While Melissa and I may one day move somewhere more bucolic, we may very well stay put in our Northwest Side bungalow for the next 30 years, and I hope that the fear of sending my kid to a school filled with a lot of minority children who live in the apartment buildings down the street will not unnecessarily color whatever decision we make.

I don’t believe in the concept of creating the perfect lifestyle for yourself. It’s one of the reasons that I settled down in Chicago in the late 80’s rather than continuing to roam the country, because here was a city with a lot of interesting people, most of whom were just trying to live out their lives rather than perfect a lifestyle. As a refugee from the West Coast, I liked that you could see great bands and get good beer on tap, but that the place didn’t put up with pretensions, that it was the anti-Boulder of happening cities.

So I reject the idea of families being pushed into one of a couple cookie-cutter lifestyle choices. Hey, most kids grow up fine in the suburbs, but they can grow up fine in the city, too. I don’t think you have to weigh the benefits to your kids of diversity versus liebensraum when deciding whether to stay in Andersonville or move to Wilmette. Neither concept is a trump card, and neither place is de facto better than the other. And right now, for us, the Northwest Side is a fine place to be.

The American obsession with picking the right car is a lot like our drive to have the perfect lifestyle. Until recently, for many that meant choosing the biggest monstrosity one could find to hog the road, another manifestation of our seemingly never-ending quest to have enough elbow room. Of course now, with $4 gas, that has all changed. I can’t take my 50cc Kimco scooter out for a spin without someone looking at it admiringly and asking questions about how much it cost or what kind of mileage it gets. As recently as a year ago, I was the butt of many a joke from the guys in the alley, calling me Easy Rider or asking when I was going to graduate to a Harley. But that has all changed.

The quest for the “right” car has led the educated set, be they urban or suburban, from soccer mom to boho, to treat the entire endeavor like a high school term paper, to research what are the sensible, superior alternatives, and that generally means a car made by the Japanese. Now, I have nothing against Japanese cars. My first car, which I got when I was 19-years old, was a Mazda 626. It was a perfectly fine if rather dull vehicle, which I put about 100,000 miles on, including a couple of cross-country treks, before leaving it in California after packing my bags into my girlfriend’s ‘72 Olds 98 and taking off for Chicago. I’m sure that most of the Toyotas, Hondas, and Subarus that folks are driving these days are perfectly good cars. I just don’t buy the notion that they are the only good cars.

Even though I generally regard the automobile with a rather callous practicality, I can’t shake a deep-seated love for almost all things General Motors. My dad mostly bought GM cars. When I was growing up, he drove a ’64 Cadillac Sedan DeVille and then a ’72 Chevy Monte Carlo, both of which were beautiful machines, although as a kid on road trips, I preferred the wide-open backseat of the Caddy. After he passed away last year, Melissa and I drove my dad’s ’98 Buick Regal back from California, and I fell in love with its smooth ride, how the leather seats cradled your body, driving 2,000+ miles with nary a sore muscle between the two of us.

Lately, General Motors has been taking it on the chin. The attacks have come from many corners, but perhaps the most vicious have come out of Wall Street, which suffers from what I call Eddie Lampert Syndrome. Sears was a fine, if rather humdrum, company until a few years ago, when Eddie Lampert bought it. Sears sold solid products, from to tools to appliances, that a huge percentage of Americans had come to trust. Sears had a reasonably priced men’s clothing department that, after the demise of Montgomery Ward’s a few years ago, was where I bought my casual shirts, my jeans, socks, and underclothes. But Sears, while making a solid profit, suffered from a lack of growth, which according to Wall Street wisdom is a cardinal sin. Actually, the dagger pointed at Sears’ heart was at face value an asset, namely the billions of dollars in cash the company still had on hand from its spin-off of Allstate several years before, making it a ripe takeover target for an entrepreneur arrogant enough to believe that he knew more about the retail trade than the thousands of folks at Sears who had spent their careers in the field. Enter Eddie Lampert.

Lampert tried to work his entrepreneurial magic on the old standby. He looked to improve margins by cutting middle-to-entry level salaries at the stores and shaking up entire departments at the main office in Hoffman Estates. But guess what: Sears’ sales and profits have plummeted since Eddie Lampert took over the company. It turns out that being an entrepreneur with no merchandising experience isn’t necessarily the best qualification for running a retail company. Go figure. But perhaps the most basic problem with Lampert’s style of management is that if you pay your employees like shit (like Eddie Lampert does), and you treat your employees like shit (like Eddie Lampert has), then you end up with shit employees (like Eddie Lampert is now saddled with). It used to be that I could go into the Sears at Six Corners and be serviced by friendly, knowledgeable people. Shopping there was a pleasant experience. Now, it seems as if half the staff only took the job so that they could keep getting welfare checks or stay on the right side of their parole officer. A lot of them act like they are doing you a favor by taking your money. Much of the business media, like the Wall Street Journal and CNBC, talk about Lampert like he is some kind of a tragic hero, his hubris driving him to put the Sears albatross around his neck. But the plain fact is that the albatross was flying just fine until Lampert came along.

To be direct: Wall Street and its mania for continual profit growth is killing some of the best businesses in the country. The fact is that General Motors is still one of the two best selling car companies on the planet, with global sales of $178 billion last year. If a young internet company had 1% of those sales, even if it was leaking money like a sieve, investment analysts would be jumping over themselves proclaiming what a great buying opportunity is at hand. OK, so GM is probably not as efficient of a corporation as Honda or Toyota, but GM still makes lots of great cars; in fact, as a whole, they make better, more interesting, more dependable cars than they made twenty years ago. But to the talking heads on Wall Street, GM is on the wrong end of the trend, and to them that’s all that matters.

I also have a problem with Japanese car companies (and German ones too, for that matter) treating America like we treat banana republics, putting up factories in union-unfriendly, right-to-work states, most of them south of the Mason-Dixon line, states with a laissez faire autocracy that the citizens of Japan or Germany wouldn’t stand for in their own countries. When the 2010 Census gives a sackful of new electoral votes to these states while taking votes away from the states of the upper Midwest, where all those auto jobs used to be, everyone who bought Nissans or Toyotas should know that they are at least a little complicit, because it is foreign manufacturers such as these Japanese car makers that have fueled much of the growth in the New South. The end result will be a further pandering to the South’s backward economic and social agenda, as this part of the country will soon hold even wider sway on the national political stage.

So, when it came time to look for a larger replacement for our Saturn, my first impulse was to get another GM. However, most of the suggestions from friends and acquaintances were to check out the Subaru Outback or Forrester, the Toyota RAV4, or one of the Honda crossovers. We actually test drove the Subaru Forrester, which was a fine vehicle, although the 4-cylinder engine struck me as rather anemic and tinny when I tried flooring it coming out of the intersection, and the sticker was about $5,000 more than I wanted to spend. Besides, there were a couple of Forresters in our neighborhood that I’d pass when walking the dog, and, while I really don’t have much of a fashion sense about automobiles, when I imagined trying to live out my mid-life crisis in the vehicle, pulling a Cerwin Vega amp and a Fender bass out of the back, I couldn’t help thinking how uncool I’d look coming out of that car, sending out a dweeb dad band vibe in all directions. I might as well dress myself in a nice, fuzzy sweater with elbow patches right now, write a few songs about animal friends who recycle, and book a gig at the Heartland Café.

I can’t say that I immediately fell in love with the Torrent, but I liked it, and it grew on me over the past week as I tried out other cars. I liked its V-6 engine. I liked its ample cargo space, and how its back seat could be adjusted to provide more room for stiff, rangy middle-aged men like myself. I liked that the Torrent didn’t do what so many other crossovers try to do, namely look small, like they are some kind of outsized sports cars. And the headlights on the Torrent are a bit arrogant, like a car that might be driven by an asshole. Melissa and I actually had a debate as to whether it was better to be thought of as a yuppie or an asshole as you drove down the road (I assume you can guess what end of the teeter-totter I sat on that one). And the fact that the Torrent is not the educated choice de jour meant that I got $2,500 cash back and was able to haggle a few hundred more off at the closing, allowing Melissa to get her sunroof and for us to save about $3,500 versus what we would have paid for the Subaru.

Other than my home, it was the most that I’ve paid for anything in my life. While we’ve only had it three days, and I may feel more passion for my dad’s Buick, right now the bloom is still on the rose.

My First Week as a Dad

2008-07-13T00:06:00.000-07:00

The warning signs were there, which I chose to ignore: folks talking about how it takes men awhile to bond with their babies, that the early, gurgling grabber stage is not satisfying for us. And I recognize that I am a victim of the modern age, insisting on some kind of instant gratification for this decidedly long-term project Melissa and I have undertaken. But I was not prepared for the sheer drag it is going round-the-clock, day after day, with this sucking, shitting, pissing flesh bag I now call my son. At his worst as a puppy, my dog was so much less demanding, more comprehensible, more fun.

There are few more effective ways to ruin my day than to spend it in the company of women. And that’s one of the things that no one warned me about this whole baby thing, that women would soon be circling our home like sharks smelling blood, wanting to hold the baby, to feed him, to talk about how “handsome” he is. In one sense, I’m all for the visits, be they from friend, neighbor, or mother-in-law, as it means that much less time that I have to deal with my vacant-eyed lump. But all that cute baby convo has left me lurching somewhere between existential angst and the loony bin.

There’s a good man that I worked with, Nick, a proper Christian, a tosser of pints, a fan of Oingo Boingo and the Who, a father of four. When he was asked about how his night or his weekend went, Nick would typically respond with something along the lines of “I have four kids under the age of eight, how do you think it went?” Or sometimes he would opt for the more direct one-word response: “Brutal”.

At the time, I read this as the droll humor of a humble Midwesterner, not wanting to brag about being blessed with a big family. But now I wonder if there was not more than a dollop of straight talk in his comments, that maybe Nick was the only one direct enough to tell me the unvarnished truth.

And so I wonder what’s next. I’ve been told about the happiness I will feel the first time my son smiles up at me in recognition, about the 1,001 joys and surprises that await. So, at least intellectually, I am patient. But somewhere lurks the whispering suspicion that maybe it’s all a quiet conspiracy, and now that I am in on the joke, one of my friends who is a father and likes to hold court on the clever lines in “Ratatouille” or how much fun he has practicing T-ball with his son will nudge me at his next barbeque and snicker: “Gotcha”.

Grilling the Sacred Cow

2008-06-23T19:44:00.000-07:00

Within the tight circle of friends who read my blog, there was a common complaint that the targets on my list of overrated rock ‘n roll bands were too easy a mark. My initial response was to note that, easy targets or not, these bands were still far more respected than they had any right to be and that their mediocrity had been given a pass for too long. One specific complaint was that it would have been “a lot more fun” to read a withering critique of the Pixies or the Beach Boys, because they are widely acclaimed within our little cult circle. My response was that I love both the Pixies and the Beach Boys and wouldn’t dream of drilling any of them a new asshole, even if I could rouse up the muster to start such an activity.

But the complaint got me thinking: Yes, it would be fun to take on some of the sacred cows, the ones that add supposed meaning to our lives, and it didn’t take long for me to come up with a baker’s dozen who either don’t deserve the adoration that has been heaped upon them or who just plain bug me. It is my sincere hope that at least one of your own sacred cows is on the grill.

Wes Anderson: I admit that I’m not much of a movie guy, and in terms of movie criticism I will typically defer to others. So when folks whose taste I generally respect raved about “Rushmore”, I just assumed that I was missing something, even though to me it was just another indulgent tale of love between some rich kid and his own ennui. But at least “Rushmore” was grounded in what felt like real characters. Melissa and I kept hearing about how the “Royal Tennenbaums” was “funny”, so we rented the DVD, but I don’t think either Melissa or I laughed once throughout the entire film, and the characters were such cardboard cutouts that I fell asleep somewhere in the third reel. But nothing could have prepared me for the sheer absurdity of “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”, which has to have the shakiest plot line to come out of Hollywood since “Straight to Hell” (that at least offered the redeeming facet of getting to watch Joe Strummer and a bunch of the Pogues drive around the desert in a fleet of old Yugos). “The Life Aquatic” should be mandatory viewing in film schools as a textbook example of what happens when you send a bunch of vacant rich people to the French Riviera with $50 million and tell them to make a movie. I admit that I never saw “The Darjeeling Limited”; I bet some people found it “funny”, but I’m sorry, Wes Anderson sucks.

Saul Bellow: “The Adventures of Augie March” has one of the best opening lines in all of American fiction: “I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” And there is no question that Bellow can turn a phrase with the best of them. But it is hard to claim someone is a great novelist who has a near total inability to write about over half of the human race, namely the female half. It is like there is some hard, corroded part of Bellow’s psyche that takes over his prose as soon as he begins to write about the fair sex. The women in his novels can be inscrutable conquests, or victims with no will of their own, or often just ciphers, but never human beings. Bellow’s not much at writing about anyone who’s not white, either, but that is a forgivable sin, as writers are first and foremost storytellers of their own culture. But that culture includes women, and everything I’ve ever read by the man immediately curdles with his own bile whenever he tries talking about “the ladies”.

Leonard Cohen: One problem with this poet-turned-musician is that he’s not that great at either. While not a bad wordsmith, he’s no Walt Whitman; he’s not even a Philip Levine (to my mind the best poet currently living in America). And Cohen’s music is pretty run-of-the-mill too, if you ask me. I think a lot of folks fall for his persona, the “serious artist” routine, with a deep voice, deeper passions, and even deeper despair. I can’t really argue with all that, other than to note that I’m not buying it. Cohen’s despair is the despair of someone who expects wild berries to proliferate across the land, free for the picking, for sex to save his soul, for the world to be fair. I’m sorry, I have no patience for that kind of thinking. I don’t wring my hands that things don’t always work out for those kind of folks. And I try not to hear their song.

Elvis Costello: I know the man behind the New Wave triptych My Aim is True/This Year’s Model/Armed Forces has earned at least half a suitcase of mulligans, and Costello gets style points for marrying Pogues siren Cait O’Riorden. But his prolific past can only forgive so much. The fact is that Costello has probably written as many mediocre songs over the last 30 years as anyone this side of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and his collaboration with Burt Bacharach was a musical trainwreck that should have been confined to the early morning hours of the Jerry Lewis telethon.

Phillip Glass: The midget of modern counterpoint, the king of scales, Glass is living proof that less is often a bore, and he has probably done more to turn folks off to contemporary classical music than anyone on the planet. There is a way to infuse repetitive musical structures with soul: Bach, Scott Joplin, some Gamelan comes to mind. Unfortunately, the more appropriate comparison in Glass’ case is C.L. Hanon.

Ira Glass: I already have “This American Life” alum David Sedaris on this list, but I have to add Mr. Glass himself. For the first year or two of its existence, I actually liked his radio show, as you could sense Glass and Co. trying to get their sea legs, looking for inventive ways to tell people’s stories. But that was many moons ago. Glass now acts on the air like a past-master running through his turns, like an old equestrian taking another Dappled Grey through her paces, and there are few people on this planet who can simultaneously bore and annoy me like some art school clown grown cocksure with his own relevance.

Chuck Klosterman: When I half-heartedly railed on Klosterman in response to one of Random Anthony’s blogs, he accused me of just being jealous. Actually, the fact that there is a separate Klosterman display at the local Borders fills me more with hope than jealousy, as it means that not every successful writer has to be a purveyor of thrillers, or chic lit, or grand metaphors for the African American experience, or kids books, or fine, academically-honed literary form. But the more I read by this guy, the less interested I get, with his tired recitations of how much he loved Tesla growing up as a teen in North Dakota, like that makes him more of a real man, more salt-of-the-earth, than his editors, whereas if he tried pulling that kind of shit where I grew up for sure someone would have cold-cocked him right out of those stupid looking glasses, because Tesla is for pussies. Maybe I just don’t relate to his Midwest enthusiasms, or maybe moving to New York and becoming a show pony has gradually taken all the stuffing out of him, because the only thing he’s written that I’ve really enjoyed was the essay on the Lakers and the Celtics from his first published collection, “Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs”, along with maybe his wrong-headed tirade from the same book about how much he can’t stand Coldplay. Whether it be his rock ‘n roll travelogues or his readings on NPR, Klosterman is a one-trick pony, a vessel full of generational relevance that the book industry could sell to “his people”, a la Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis. But as his vessel empties and his audience slowly ages into a less desirable demographic, it has become clear that there is a whole lot less here than meets the eye.

Toni Morrison: I remember Sandra Hunt teaching Multicultural Lit back at NEIU, hammering home all the symbolism in “Song of Solomon”, a perfectly fine story absolutely destroyed in the last 150 pages by Morrison’s need to turn the book into a monument to the 400-year struggle of the African-American people. It is unfortunate that literature has become hijacked by academics. On the one end are the university professors hired to talk about bullshit like symbolism and foreshadowing, turning a passionate and personal act like writing into some kind of mining operation, requiring advanced study to decipher its structural engineering. On the other end are the writers themselves, by and large kept men and women, hired by the universities as creative writing instructors or guest lecturers, who have become enablers in the process, willing to dirty their stories with overt symbolism and other obvious stunts indicative of the writer’s intent. Morrison is probably the most egregious perpetrator of this crime, and the fact she won the Nobel Prize for Literature is a travesty, on a par with Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

David Sedaris: On the odd occasion when I’ve picked up a tome by either Oscar Wilde or Voltaire, I am quickly bored by their eager desire to play the show pony, to wax clever on things of which they have only a dilettante’s knowledge, all for the amusement of their well-heeled audience, who like nothing better than a clever smart aleck. As I put the book back in its place on the shelf, I think, “Thank God society is no longer run by vacant aristocrats, so we don’t have to listen to turds like Messieurs Voltaire and Wilde.” Unfortunately, the recent popularity of David Sedaris has disabused me of that relatively mild optimism about the human race, because it is clear that, at least in some circles, the kind of arid, self-satisfied humor popularized by the likes of Wilde and Voltaire and now perpetuated by Sedaris has an eager audience in the here and now. That chestnut that public radio hauls out each year where Sedaris waxes on about being an elf at the Macy’s Santa display was kind of funny the first time I heard it (although I don’t think that it ever actually made me laugh out loud), but please, give it a break already. And I don’t give a crap about how wacky it is being a gay man in France, or what it’s like being able to pick up everything and move to Japan on a whim. Sedaris is amongst the group of writers whose entire shtick boils down to going, “Hey guys, I’m so clever. Look at me!”, augmented with an occasional, “Look at all the other people; aren’t they stupid.”

David Foster Wallace: Wallace’s popularity is argument number one that we live in a decadent, irrelevant age. The many hours I spent plowing through “Infinite Jest”, Wallace’s epic tome, were an unredeemable, wheel-spinning waste of time. When an author takes you on that kind of an extensive ride, you take it for granted that you will actually end up somewhere, that plot lines will be tied together, themes clarified, that the conflicts and travails facing major characters will be resolved, or at least referenced, before the author decides to put the book to bed. Apparently Wallace didn’t think any of those things were important enough to include in the 1,200+ pages of “Infinite Jest”. There is all of this bowing down to Wallace’s “talent”, as if being an overwriting show-off makes you brilliant. If Wallace’s wit and word play, signifying nothing, are the best our generation has to offer, I’d prefer a tale told by an idiot.

Andy Warhol: Another cultural bellwether, whose spot atop the artistic pantheon is an indication that the medium has indeed become the message, that the will to popularity, the drive to put yourself in the right place and hobnob with others of your ilk, is a more important indicator of artistic success than inspiration or insight into the human experience.

Wilco: If earnestness were one of the Seven Deadly Sins (and it probably should be; being earnest is at least as deleterious to the health of your eternal soul as gluttony or sloth, for instance), then Mephistopheles is probably busy decorating a dorm room for Jeff Tweedy in the Fifth Circle of Hell, tacking up a poster of the surf crashing on the shore and a seagull in flight, with some platitude about catching the updrafts in life or turning your face to the sun, because such a poster would be an appropriate reminder of Tweedy’s own unctuous “charm”. I had heard so much about the “experimental” nature of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” that I was actually suckered into buying it, even though everything from the album that they played on the radio (it’s a very bad sign when the only radio station that will play a band is WXRT) sounded like typical singer-songwriter shit. I would put on the CD, shut my eyes, and imagine six white guys onstage, three of them with beards, feet planted, strumming away with a self-satisfied eagerness. As an intro to some of the songs, there would be the beginnings of “experimental” noodling, which occasionally offered the prospect for something interesting to develop, but these mini-jams were abruptly shut down so the band could commence with its 4-chord strum, kind of like hard rock bands in the 70’s would tack 30-seconds of lush instrumentals onto the beginning of a song before rocking out, a kind of musical nonsequitor where the band hinted that it could play something much more interesting if it just wasn’t so compelled to rock your socks off, except that in Wilco’s case it is more like Jeff Tweedy walked into the studio, sipping herbal tea, and announced, “Alright guys, you’ve had your fun, but Tweedy is back. Make room.”

Classical Philosophy: In the past 20 years, there has been this attempt to revive the “classic” writings of ancient Greece and, to a lesser degree, Rome. It started with a bunch of crotchety old guys like Allan Bloom, who used the argument to bludgeon the multi-culti types against whom they were fighting a rear-guard action for control of academia. By now, the cultural focus on Classical thinkers, from Plato to Virgil, Aristotle to the Stoics, has trickled down to the rest of us, but the joys and revelations of Classical philosophy are dim ones at best. The entire methodology of Greek logic, with premises and the resultant conclusions, is a house of cards if the premises are wrong. And almost all of Classical logic and science are built on faulty premises, as neither ancient Greek nor Roman used inductive reasoning or the scientific method to test their extrapolations and hypotheses. I hate the rigidity of Roman rhetoric, especially compared with the soaring prose of the Jewish prophets that form the other basis of Western lit. Language is a gift of the spirit, whereas the Romans treated it as architecture, as something to be constructed like a math proof. In terms of the critical questions of our existence, I much prefer folks like Wittgenstein, or Kant, or Hegel, who discuss the nature of truth and language, about whether the human race has a destiny, of the relationship of Man, God, and Law. In contrast, Classical philosophy is dominated by platitudes. Today, a Plato or a Seneca would fit right in on the Oprah show, which is all fine and good, I guess, but, in all of my readings of these marbled logicians, not a single one has ever offered any kind of real answers for either my own life or the world around me.

The Boy Scouts of America: Always Prepared to Be a Dickwad

2008-05-20T06:58:00.000-07:00

I know that I’m breaking no new ground with the revelation that I find most grown men who have maintained a connection with the Boy Scouts to be a little weird. Tree climbing and archery have their place, as do khaki shorts and red bandana neckties, just not in the lives of grown men who are gainfully employed. And let me add that my concern with the Boy Scouts has nothing to do with the pitched battle they have been waging with the gay activist community, as I don’t really have a dog in that fight: as far as I’m concerned, gay men can do what they want within the privacy of their own homes, and the Boy Scout troop leaders can rail against them in the privacy of theirs.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that a founding principle of the Boy Scouts of America is to inculcate a craven capitulation to all forms of authority in millions of American boys, effectively warping our entire culture and creating a national pathology.

My old boss Rick was by all accounts a “nice guy” in a nasty industry. He took the notion of doing the right thing very seriously. Whatever his faults as a leader and manager, he always tried to see that the folks in his department got a fair shake, and I appreciated that. He would organize annual departmental gatherings, sometimes to his mother’s old hobby farm, taking the entire office on a hayride, or to his summer home on Lake Delavan, where we’d go tubing off his speedboat on the lake. These were very wholesome affairs, very family oriented. More than at most jobs, my boss tried to convey the message that we were all in this together, that we could count on one another in a pinch, in short, that we were all friends. And it seemed to be a message that most folks in the department took to heart. Of my eight co-workers, five of them had been with the department for at least 15 years.

Unfortunately, Rick is also a lifelong volunteer for the Boy Scouts, which almost by definition makes him an abject toady who treats any and all instructions from his superiors as if they were brought down from Mount Sinai on clay tablets, and he expected his subordinates to do the same.

A couple of weeks ago, half the department was ordered into the conference room. They were told that cutbacks had to be made and that their services would no longer be needed. They were ordered to clean out their desks and vacate the building that morning. A one-month severance check would be in the mail. As it was the end of the month, health coverage was being cancelled that day at midnight.

Now, there was no skin off my back, as I had left my position about a month earlier to “pursue other interests”, as the memo says when you walk the plank into the vocational abyss. But I was ticked off, nonetheless, once I heard about the way the axe had fallen. I learned a long time ago that most folks at your job are NOT your friends. Corporations often spend a substantial chunk of cash to facilitate the illusion of camaraderie, but of course most of us know that it’s bullshit. But how hard would it have been for Rick to insist that the company use $50,000 or so to make sure that these folks were treated right, that years of service would be honored, that insurance would be extended? Or, failing that, Rick could have taken $20,000 of his bonus money to see that the those who worked with him all these years were left with at least some kind of a cushion. At the very least, he should have found a better way to break the news than simply ushering them into the showers and turning on the gas.

It took my buddy Jason, one of those to lose his job, to point out the relevant variable: “Hey dude, the guy’s a fucking Boy Scout. That’s all you need to know.”

Having suffered through three years in the Cub Scouts in the early Seventies, I thought back on what I remembered of those days. The highest rank I achieved was that of Webelos, which is an acronym for We Be Loyal Scouts (a scout may be loyal and trustworthy, but I guess being grammatical is not on the list).

There is a Scout Law we had to memorize at the meetings between mouthfuls of cupcake. There is also a Scout Oath, which is basically redundant, as the gist of it is that you are supposed to follow the Scout Law. And the Scout Law is not really a law at all, but a list of a dozen adjectives, stating that a Scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent. A lot of these adjectives are pretty redundant themselves: “loyal”, “obedient”, and “reverent” all driving home the point you should unquestioningly obey all forms of authority, while “friendly”, “courteous”, “kind”, and “cheerful” underscore that, even in those moments when you aren’t under the direct purview of your superiors, you should take care not to be a general pain in the ass.

Looking back at it, this is exactly how Rick ran our department. In his mind, I’m sure he thought that he was taking a principled stand, jettisoning his supposed “friends” and co-workers without any kind of a safety net, since his boss assured him that the cutbacks needed to be made and that they were following company policy.

In fact, I bet Rick thinks he deserves a merit badge.

California Uber Alles

2008-05-02T20:53:00.000-07:00

I recently got back from California and, like I imagine is true for a lot of folks who have left the land of their birth, I identify more and more with my home state as the years go by. Don’t get me wrong, I am still ambivalent about the place, and I think that L.A. is one of the most unlivable cities on the continent, but there are a lot of things that I love about it, too.

Most important is music, which after all is the lynchpin of the human experience, maybe the only thing, with the possible exception of Hegelian logic or the scientific method, that has redeemed our species, and which would be Exhibit A if mankind ever had to defend our existence before a cosmic tribunal.

I find it comforting when I’m in Southern California to hear Green Day coming through speakers at the local supermarket or hamburger joint. Unlike in the Midwest, I can go an entire week without hearing a single classic rock song in the public space, serving as the background for our collective lives. Sometimes I think that purgatory may consist of an unwinding of all the crappy songs trapped in the recesses of our memories, that God won’t let us pass through the pearly gates until all the dross we’d heard blasting through the speakers at crappy bars or poker parties has been unwound and expunged into the ether. I know that if I were an all-powerful deity, I certainly wouldn’t let even the faintest memory of “Peaceful Easy Feeling” into my heaven.

I don’t think that the pop music is objectively superior in California, but it is different, less fuddy-duddy, less stuck in the muck of the Baby Boomer. One of the things that drives me crazy living in the Midwest is how a lot of folks assume that the music made by people born and raised in other parts of the country is actually indigenous to my native land. So here is a brief primer:

The key members of the following bands are NOT native Californians: the Doors (Jim Morrison: Florida; Ray Manzerak: Chicago); the Eagles (Don Henley: Texas; Glen Frey: Michigan; Joe Walsh: Kansas); Steely Dan (Donald Fagen: New Jersey; Walter Becker: New York); Guns and Roses (Axl Rose: Indiana); Poison (the singer is from Pennsylvania, the lead guitarist is from New York). Most of the cornball country balladeers, noodling instrumentalists, and overwrought hair bands that have plagued the “L.A. music scene” for much of the past forty years were the products of other parts of the country. I guess it’s the burden of growing up somewhere that people want to move to, which is all fine and good, but don’t try to hang these gaggle of stinking musical albatrosses around our necks: blame New York, blame Indiana, blame Texas (generally the best option, no matter what the malady). Most native Californians are used to the tawdry shenanigans of these folks; “inlander kooks”, we used to call them on the beach, as we put up with the spoiled detritus of less enlightened climes, spending Daddy’s money on Marshall stacks, overpriced hair stylists, and tainted blow.

The following bands are native Southern Californians: the Beach Boys, Van Halen, Oingo Boingo, the Germs, Social Distortion, No Doubt. Fast, loud, but melodic, that’s the Southern California sound. Are No Doubt superior to Guns and Roses? Maybe not, but at least they are indigenous to the culture, a mixture of rock, punk, ska, and R&B, not the overblown country guitar shit that passes for “classic rock” in most of the country. Thirty seconds watching Axl Rose, from how he walks to his ignorant racist rants, and its clear that he is pure hillbilly. Keith Morris and Brian Wilson: just by the slant in their voice or the glide in their strut, you can tell that these dudes grew up on the beach.

Back in 1979, the Dead Kennedys parodied Governor Jerry Brown’s run for the Presidency with the song “California Uber Alles.” It is a pretty funny parody of hippy fascism, imagining what would happen if they actually took over the country, when the suede denim secret police would come for your un-cool niece. While I appreciated it on the level of satire, I also saw it as a call to arms, It was a time when you risked getting jumped on the boardwalk by a bunch of dumb jocks for the cardinal sin of dying your hair yellow and wearing an earring, or maybe a bit of eyeliner. And here was a song that, even though it was outwardly about politics, was secretly about something much more insurrectionary, namely the right of self-determination. I took it as an anthem for all of us California beach kids trying to be ourselves. “California Uber Alles”, Jello Biafra screamed over and over to the throbbing bass, “Uber Alles California.”

Fuck the Eagles. Fuck Led Zeppelin. And fuck all the stupid pot smoking jocks that listened to them. We were a bunch of California beach kids, and we were going to do things our own way. California Uber Alles.

Jello Biafra took exception to the fact that some SoCal skinheads had taken to shouting the slogan while sig heiling at shows; Jello couldn’t handle the taint of being associated with anything that politically incorrect, so he quickly tamped down any notion that the song was anything but a political parody. You see, Jello wasn’t from Southern California; he grew up in Boulder. I still consider him an adopted Californian, the same as I do with X. Unlike Don Henley or all of those Hollywood hair bands, Jello and Exene didn’t come to L.A. to live out their warped Middle American dreams, they came to California to actually become one of us. And I love them for that. But they never understood how much their music meant to us as a cultural statement. They blanched at all the anger, and the idiocy, and the blood at shows, not seeing that the source of it was the same youthful adrenalin that fueled our ecstasy, our belief that the world could be anything we wanted it to, that we could be free.

California Uber Alles… Maybe it wasn’t the best choice of words for folks to glom onto. And maybe California is not an objectively superior culture. But it is mine, even after 20 years in the Midwest. Chicago may be my home now, but there is part of me that will always feel most at home hanging out in West Newport, listening to some ska coming from one of the beach bungalows, diving in the surf, lying in the sun. It just wouldn’t be the same if the neighbors were playing Reo Speedwagon.

The 15 Most Overrated Bands in the History of Rock ‘n Roll

2008-03-21T13:48:00.000-07:00

As most of you who know me are probably well aware, there’s nothing like hippies to fill me with bile: none of the other groups I tend to have knee-jerk contempt for, not Black nationalists, right wing talk show hosts, Islamic fundamentalists, White Sox fans, or even Southern rock aficionados can get me riled up like this lame ass, self-absorbed generational clot of losers.

In that vein, I noticed the following blurb in this morning’s Chicago Tribune: Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, has now gone public, some 49 years after penning the tune, to state that “Puff the Magic Dragon” has nothing to do with the joys of smoking marijuana. First, what kind of idiots does he take us for? Puff the magic dragon frolics in a magic land with his friend Jackie Paper. The allusions are so obvious, the images so trite, that the meaning of the song is not even really up for debate. The symbolism is so ham-handed that it doesn’t even warrant the word “clever”, until you add the qualifier that it might be clever “for a stoned out hippy.” Even if Yarrow’s lame denial is true, why tell everyone now, almost half a century after having written the tune and decades after even a vague notion of controversy has long sense faded away? My only guess is that Yarrow is looking for some free publicity, trying to make up for the fact that a Peter, Paul and Mary concert was inexplicably left off public television’s recent pledge week programming.

After reading Yarrow’s comment, I immediately went off fuming into my study, and I almost added Peter, Paul and Mary to my list of overrated rock bands. But circumspection won the day, as I realized PP and M are not even vaguely rock ‘n roll, and I decided that it was time to put this list to bed, as my net is being cast too wide.

So, here it is. I guess I should adjust the title to say, “15 of the Most Overrated Rock ‘n roll bands of All Time,” as I’m sure this list is not comprehensive, and I look forward to reading other potential additions. But this is a start, done in alphabetical order:

7 Seconds: This band almost didn’t make the list, simply because 7 Seconds is pretty insignificant and, at first glance, seemingly UNDERappreciated. But someone has to stand for all that generic hardcore from the 1980’s that seemed like a fresh break at the time but who’s light has steadily dimmed with time. As melodic as Schoenberg, as catchy as a test pattern for the Emergency Broadcast Network, 7 Seconds is as likely a culprit as any from that sorry era to be singled out. The fact that they recently toured and have had a bit of a revival in hardcore circles doesn’t help. Hey, these guys, along with most of the horde of tuneless 20-year olds they rode in with back in the day, belong back in the dustbin of history.

Bob Dylan: It’s not like Dylan isn’t an OK poet. And it’s kind of cool how he tours the world with his band, in cultural incognito, ignoring the machinations of the record industry and corporate media. And yes, this choice is technically for a single guy, and not a band. But a lot of folks act like a sheet of Dylan’s lyrics is hallowed ground, while the opaque cultural and political paeans that he’s famous for, written to inspire a generational “fuck yeah” amongst his fans, strike me as both culturally and musically flaccid. How much hot air can a hippy blow out his ass? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

The Eagles: These guys aren’t really even rock ‘n roll, but they sell a whole lot of albums and concert tickets to folks who think of them as rock ‘n roll. Pretentious, egotistic, and puerile, and those are their good points. Why can’t someone make them go away?

Happy Mondays: After watching the otherwise fine “24 Hour Party People” devote the final 45-minutes to this band, I did some research, and found that they were quite popular back in their native England and still hold a fair amount of street cred amongst the rave set in both the U.S. and overseas. Maybe I’m just missing something here, but all the Happy Mondays songs that I’ve ever heard struck me as dull, uninspired, 2nd tier at best, the workmanlike performance of a bunch of tuneless, soulless and, most damning of all, groove-less chumps. And then, while doing a little historical research on the history of Cabaret Metro, I realized that Happy Mondays were the horrible opening band I caught at that club one night on the Pixies’ Doolittle tour. I was tripping on ‘shrooms at the time, and the Happy Mondays were so bad, almost evil in their mundanity (the mundane being the dull edge of evil), that I retreated to a back hallway and was softly banging my head against the wall, muttering “No…. no…. no”, trying to retroactively will the cosmos to change its mind and not allow such an insipid band to exist. Luckily, the Happy Mondays were just the opening act and soon enough got off the stage. God, these guys are truly awful.

KISS: A circus act, not a music group.

Jane’s Addiction: Personally, I hold a soft spot for this band. Perry Farrell lived across the street from me in a communal house of musicians and assorted other freaks and weirdoes back in the mid-80’s, and I kind of liked the guy. I even briefly dated the infamous Jane, the inspiration for the band’s name. But now that its wave has long since crashed, its clear that this band wrote little of lasting significance. Even its two most famous songs are really not much: “Jane Says” is in essence a single riff played over and over on the acoustic guitar, the kind of jam someone might come up with over the campfire; “Been Caught Stealing” benefited from its fun topic and light-hearted music video, which got into heavy rotation on MTV, but centers around a rather unmemorable attempt at white funk, a minor league stab to swing like the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Misfits: A circus punk act, and only marginally a music group. They wrote a couple of catchy choruses, and I loved it when my 5-year old nephew would sing, “Mommy, can I go out and kill tonight?” to piss off his mom. But those are pretty meager virtues for a band whose logo is still seen on at least 25% of the leather jackets worn by hardcore kids, or at least the ones in Chicago, to this day.

New York Dolls: They couldn’t play their instruments, or write good songs, or sing well. They weren’t attractive, even in their salad days. I can see why they gave so many others the courage to get up on stage and try their best, but enough of the hero worship of these vacant, riff-challenged, nincompoops.

Ted Nugent: Speaking of nincompoops. But I won’t damn “the Nuge” for his political broadsides, because rock ‘n roll shouldn’t be politically correct in the first place. However, the man was never much of a songwriter, and he has tried living off the same handful of tired riffs for the past thirty years. “Dog Eat Dog” and “Free for All” are competent rockers, they make the lengthy B-list of songs that I don’t mind hearing when my neighbor across the alley blasts the Loop-FM as a soundtrack as he and his buddies plow through a case of beer in his garage, but the rest of Nuge’s catalog is utterly forgettable, and sometimes even a dumbshit can stumble on a decent riff or two before succumbing to permanent mental torpitude.

Oasis: Another English band with all of the trappings and none of the riffs for rock success. Then again, America had Huey Lewis and the News, which had neither.

Pink Floyd: The anti-Cyndi Laupers of rock, these boys just don’t know how to have fun. I really don’t understand the huge popularity of this band. You can’t dance to them, they aren’t much to look at, and their lyrics are almost uniformly sophomoric. I guess it’s a testament to the fact that a lot of white people like to get stoned, sit very still, and take their inner thoughts way too seriously.

Polyphonic Spree: More concept than music group. It is essentially a one-man show, and not a good one at that. On stage, I feel like I am watching some sad loner trying to channel his private Meatloaf, a persona best kept locked within the privacy of his own basement. I’ll give the man credit: it took a lot of chutzpah to ask 20-odd “musicians” to join him in this project. The fact that he can recruit half a dozen relatively attractive young women to be his background “singers”, who seem to spend more time in a choreographed tossing around of their hair than in actually singing, tells me that the life of a coffee barista in the greater Dallas area must be even more pathetic than I had previously imagined.

Red Hot Chili Peppers: It’s not like these guys are bad. Some of their better riffs have a nice groove. My first problem with the band is that if the Red Hot Chili Peppers didn’t exist, the record industry would have had to create them, and that, in essence, is what it did, taking a band with a lot more perspiration than inspiration and promoting them as the dick-waving white boys who were ready to party. As rock or funk or whatever, most of their hits are merely workmanlike. And I have a real problem with the near deification of their recent work. Songs like “Californication” are just lame retreads of better songs that they wrote a decade or more ago. It is high time for this band to disappear back into the Malibu hills and live off their sundry royalty checks.

Henry Rollins: I’ve already given a tirade or two in earlier blogs on how much I can’t stand this man, and I won’t repeat them here, but why can’t this first-rate jagoff get a real job? He just won’t go away: second-rate singer, third-rate songwriter, fourth-rate poet, incompetent interviewer. What’s next? My bet is that we’ll find him on the cooking channel, presenting his recipe for deluxe mac and cheese or scrumptious pot brownies, entertaining us with long winded stories about how he wishes he could show Rachael Ray his cock.

Sonic Youth: I am a bit conflicted about this one, as there are a number of folks I respect who really like this band. But I just don’t get it. Sonic Youth has always been a follower, the ultimate musical dilettantes, dabbling in whatever was the latest hip thing to arrive in their Manhattan neighborhood, be it crunching barr chords, hip hop, or apocalyptic noise. None of their stuff sounds very original to me, even with all of their pretentious guitar tunings, and none of them can really sing. Most damning, they gave one of the worst performances for a major act that I have ever seen when they opened for Public Enemy at the Aragon circa 1989, jacking away on their guitars for over an hour, offering the audience 75 minutes of undistinguished sludge.

A Hierarchy of Undesirable Jobs

2008-02-23T15:19:00.000-08:00

As I’m getting ready to leave my job in corporate America to strike out on my own, I’ve been thinking about which categories of employers are the least noxious, with the given, to paraphrase our friend Sean’s dad, that they wouldn’t call it work if it wasn’t a pain in the ass. So here is my categorical breakdown of employers, from least undesirable to most toxic, many of the insights gleaned from my own ill-fated forays into the world of work and most of the rest from similar stories told by friends:

1. Working for yourself: This seems to be the least noxious option, at least as judged by the odd birds who I meet on the tennis courts, the bars, and assorted other gathering places, and an option which I hope to soon transition to myself. Most of the advantages are self-apparent, namely the ability to live by your own schedule and your own rules. Of course, you still have to please your customers, clients, or whoever it is that pays you, and I’m sure that’s a real hardship for those with an insatiable drive to “get ahead”, but one thing that I’ve been struck by is how most of the self-employed, be they futures brokers, computer gurus, real estate salesmen, musicians, or political consultants, really don’t care about that part of the rat race and have managed to carve out a pleasant existence for themselves, pretty much on their own terms. The biggest downside of working for yourself, other than the fact that you are responsible for your own paycheck each month, seems to be the tendency for the self-employed to work at home which, having done it one day a week for the past several months, I know would drive me stir crazy if I did it every day, and I think this isolation keeps a lot of these folks from having a balanced perspective on the world. So, my caveat to advocating this lifestyle would be to either set up an office away from your house or, at the very least, find a way to get out each day and have some meaningful interaction with the rest of the human race (and by this I don’t mean just the interaction you have with the supermarket checkout girl or the other oddballs you meet on the tennis court).

2. Working for a friend/family/partner: I know that a lot of folks would probably blanche at this idea, and it violates rule number one about work, namely to remember that the people at work are not your friends, but I’ve found that most of those I know working for a good friend or member of the family tend to be pretty happy about their jobs and their lives. It’s a good thing, and a rare one, to work for someone you genuinely like and respect, and starting off with someone you already like before you even begin your job is a good start. Plus, these businesses tend to be relatively small ones, and there is often a kind of bond built between everyone at the place, be it a construction firm or an investment company.

3. Working for a corporation: This is also a somewhat better option than it might seem at first. Corporations tend to pay fairly well. They have good benefits. There is usually at least some notion worked into the corporate by-laws about giving back to their employees and their community. There is also the fact that misery loves company, and most corporations are large enough to have plenty of people to commiserate with. Also, corporations, even though they are often big and bureaucratic, generally have competent enough management that you will probably be given the support and direction to do your job effectively, and that, no matter how otherwise meaningless yours tasks might be, goes a long way to making one happy.

4. Working for the government: Unlike working for a private corporation, those working for the government, and by this I include those in the public school system, are almost never given the support and direction they need to competently do their jobs. Certainly, the first-rate benefits package, a generous pension, and a likely job for life are not to be lightly regarded, but these consolations don’t erase the day-to-day frustration when the institution you work for is, almost invariably, run by brown-nosing incompetents who have neither the ability nor the motivation to support you.

5. Working for an entrepreneur: By this, I mean working for a person or a company run by a person who believes that with hard work and smarts he or she can conquer the world, or at least his or her sector of it. Avoid these businesses. These people are assholes. They may pay you well, but they will exact their pound of flesh for every penny, they’ll toss you to the curb if either their company or their perception of you takes a bad turn, and they seem to think that everyone on the planet should be as single-minded and driven as they are. Entrepreneurs are a walking pathology looking to spread their disease to everything they touch.

6. Working for a bureaucracy of do-gooders: The bureaucrats out to save the world are a scourge; they make entrepreneurs look human and decent by comparison. Beware working for organizations looking to help the world: the folks in the trenches may be very nice, but those making the decisions in these non-profits tend to be self-righteous and dim, with an exaggerated view of both their own intelligence and importance. They are the types who are just dumb enough to believe that they know how best to order the planet, but unfortunately just smart enough to develop a plan to implement their ideas. They are likely to skimp on the supplies and support needed for you to do your job, not to mention being downright miserly when it comes to any pay raises and bonuses. In their minds, they may be doing this to spread the money around to other, in their eyes, “more deserving”, parts of their charitable empire, but they will never skimp when it comes to their own salaries or the remodeling of their “non-profit” headquarters. There may be intrinsic joys that come from doing this kind of non-profit work; there better be, because working for a jackass, do-good bureaucrat will surely test your patience in a dozen and one petty ways.

The New Puritanism

2008-02-08T21:03:00.000-08:00

I like Mark Bittman’s cookbooks. We have a couple of them, one a general primer on cooking fish and another an even more elemental tome entitled “How to Cook Everything”, a label that is more truth than hyperbole, as the book has helped us out with many a meal, from whipping up an old-fashioned breakfast to making sure that we knew what to do with an odd Mediterranean vegetable we picked up at a farmers market.

But whereas keeping the pulse of the latest trends may be useful in running a restaurant or jousting with Bobby Flay and Rachael Ray for the title of America’s Chef, it can get in your way if you are attempting to critique the American diet and the industry that feeds it. Over the weekend, Bittman wrote a fairly extensive op-ed column for the New York Times titled “Rethinking the Meat Guzzler,” filled with enough half-facts and hyperbole that I had to take issue with it. I’ve attached a link to the article below so that you may read it for yourself:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

First, like most trend-following urbanites living on the coasts, gaggles of whom have worked themselves into high dudgeon over the issue of industrial food production yet live hundreds of miles away from where their food is grown or raised, Bittman gets some of the basic facts wrong.

For instance, Bittman blames the expansion of corn and soy production, the bulk of which he rightly notes is used to feed livestock, for “the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.” Well yes, it is true that the Asian livestock industry, particularly those involved in the production of hogs and poultry, increasingly rely on soymeal produced from Brazilian and Argentine soybeans to feed their animals. However, virtually none of these soybeans come from rain forest. First, Argentina doesn’t have a rain forest, and the crops are grown in native grasslands not that different from those in the U.S. Midwest. And while the great expansion of the global soybean industry over the past decade has been into Brazil, the vast majority of this expansion has been into either traditional agricultural land or the open Cerrado, a native savanna with few trees sitting on flat plains and plateaus that run unbroken for several hundred miles.

But there is more to Bittman’s narrative than the trudging out of predictable boogiemen. He couples it with a variant of the New Puritanism, one which, as befits our trivial age, is concerned not with our souls, but something much more mundane, in this case our stomachs. The thrust of his argument is that the U.S consumer eats too much meat, it’s a bad thing, and the rest of the world is catching up to us fast. I won’t argue the basic fact, except that Bittman’s notion of what it means to eat a more varied diet is just as bad, if not worse, for the environment than good, old American carnivorism.

I will agree with one thing about a meat-less diet: if this means getting a huge bag of beans and a bag of rice and then living off them for the next couple of months, as many families still do in places like sub-Saharan Africa where they can’t afford a better option, well yes, that does indeed leave a much smaller footprint on our planet than eating at McDonalds several times a week. But if by “vegetarian” you mean buying the broccoli or arugala dish at some fancy restaurant in Manhattan, or going to Whole Foods to buy organic pea pods, well that is a very inefficient way to get your 2,000 calories a day. Besides all the acreage it takes to grow these plants, and all the water that has to be piped into the deserts where these types of tender crops tend to be grown, not to mention all the migrant laborers that have to stoop in the fields to pick them, just the transportation issues alone make the entire operation an ecological nightmare. A truckload of meat shipped in from western Kansas will fill the stomachs of an awful lot of Chicagoans. A truckload of broccoli, not so much.

There has developed a fetish over the farmers market, one that Bittman perpetuates, and one that I also admit to falling prey. I love going to the local farmers market in the summer and picking out fresh picked fruits and vegetables. But this is not an efficient way to feed people. It works great as long as the market only attracts that odd foody with enough discretionary income to afford such a luxury. If a significant portion of our population tried buying their food from these markets, it would quickly turn into a logistical nightmare. Having a group of small farmers fill up their pickups and drive 50-100 miles into a parking lot to wait for customers to drive by and buy some of their goods is just not an efficient way to feed people. 300 million people at 3 meals a day: that’s almost a billion meals to be made in this country, 365 days a year, and the free market prices it so that most will choose the most efficient option to get their calories. You want to leave a small footprint on the planet? Well then, stop spending money on things, and stop going places. Find yourself a cave like the Desert Fathers, and start to fast. It is a sign of my privileged status, as well as Bittman’s, that we are able to pay for the luxury to eat fresh, locally produced food.

There is also the seasonality of farmers markets to deal with. Farmers markets in Chicago are a valid option about 4 months of the year. For two-thirds of the year, we’d be living off root vegetables, pulling a boiled potato and maybe a parsnip or two out of our pockets for lunch, like our ancestors did. And before my L.A. friends get all cocky on me, yes you have a year-around growing season, but you live in what is essentially a desert, your have to pump, truck, or ship everything you need to live in the place from other locales and, other than odd bergs like Las Vegas that shouldn’t exist at all, you’ll be the first to go if there’s ever a global collapse. But it doesn’t matter what the town, all major metropolises are parasites.

All the folks who carefully monitor their diets should get over the notion that they are actually helping the planet by eating a big plate of salad for lunch. They are as big a part of the problem as anyone. But Bittman’s argument conveniently reinforces their cosmogony, one in which all “healthy” personal choices are also healthy for the world around you. It is an enlightened selfishness, made only more pristine by the abrogation of the normal pleasures it takes to achieve this enlightened self.

In this New Puritanism, living long and healthy lives is an inherently good thing, and the rest of unwashed humanity who engages in the traditional worldly pleasures, all of those nasty vices like nicotine, saturated fat, and demon rum, are not just making poor health decisions, they are morally weak, regressive, faintly reprehensible.

There was a time, not that long ago, when it was a normal thing to sit down and order a beer on your lunch break, but today such a wanton act of pleasure would be sure to get you the hairy eyeball from at least some of your co-workers. Butter, cream, beef: these are just a few of the things being castigated in our pursuit of health, despite the fact that these are all really good things to eat, at least if done as the occasional treat. It may have all started with young women trying to fit into their size zeros, but now a lot of men eat like women, chewing on dry chicken sandwiches for lunch, ordering egg white omelets at the diner for breakfast. That may increase your odds of extending your life, but does it really make me less moral if I prefer a meal rich with flavor and buoyed with fat?

From using his cookbooks, I know that Mark Bittman would probably agree with me about most of this, that he loves flavorful food, and he is not afraid to use all the classic ingredients, things like milk and butter, in his recipes. But in his Times commentary, Bittman proves himself to be a victim and perpetuator of the contemporary urban mindset, that somehow my diet of meat and potatoes is more destructive to the planet than the spinach salads and eggplant paninis being downed by the dietary Puritans. It is a common conceit. I’ll grant that most of the food in the grocery baskets at Whole Foods is probably healthier for you than what I tend to eat. But if the entire world lived on a diet made as inefficiently as that found at these specialty grocery stores, then Malthus would have been right, and most of us would have died of starvation long ago, because it is the mass production of the industrial food industry that has allowed us to feed the vast majority of the seven billion mouths on this planet. Can our diets be improved? Sure, and maybe eating a little less meat is a good start. But Bittman and his ilk need to get off their high horses long enough to see the forest from the trees.

Waiting at the drive-thru in your air-conditioned SUV to order a Teriyaki chicken salad is a sorry asceticism. Besides, at least from my reading of the Bible, God tends to reveal Himself to the passionate, and by this I don’t mean that He comes to those who are “passionate” about business, or some great moral cause, which a is contemporary perversion of the term, but that he comes to the drunks and the whores, to the lustful and egotistic, to those bold enough to want to experience all the joys of our planet.

Lists for '07

2008-01-16T18:35:00.000-08:00

I have an itch I haven’t yet scratched. We didn’t send out our usual, well documented Christmas letter this year and, even though I get up at 5 AM every weekday to trudge to a meaningless, 10-hour job and am lost in a backwater of the cultural stream, I will not rest at ease without telling the world my favorite songs, words, and images of the year (many of which were actually created a little further back)

Music

1. The National: “Boxer”. This is poetry for the modern urban leisure class, toiling through crappy jobs and living in tiny, overpriced apartments, but it all seems worth it when you run across a thing of beauty like this LP. It ridicules all the obvious targets, the moneyed and the vacant wandering their way through the urban landscape, and finds transcendent little moments in life. It is all done with a quirky energy: pure, simple, true to itself. Of my three favorite bands that were at the top of their game at the start of the year, namely Silversun Pickups, Arcade Fire, and the National, I thought that this band had the least prospect for being able to top their recent heights, but with “Boxer”, they have created something different yet just as beautiful as their previous album, “Alligator”. Meanwhile, Silversun Pickups seemed to spend most of their energy touring the big summer fests, while Arcade Fire released an LP that, albeit brave and bold was, at least to me, too caught up with its own perceived importance, like, to paraphrase “Amadeus”, when the band walks off stage after a show they are surprised that they haven’t yet started shitting marble.

2. Sunny Day Real Estate: “Diary”. A buddy gave this for me to download at work, and it’s gotten me through many a dull afternoon. The first three cuts, “Seven”, “In Circles”, and “Song About an Angel”, may be the tightest 1-2-3 punch to start off an album in the history of rock ‘n roll. Argument A that emo can rock.

3. Thin Lizzy: “Bad Reputation”. I pulled this oldie out of my dusty stack of LPs last summer, and I kept playing it for weeks. The rockers are good, but I especially love the weepy love songs and tragic ballads, cuts like “Dancing in the Moonlight” and “Downtown Sundown”. Lynott takes that maudlin Irish sentimentality and blends it with a touch of soul.

4. The Kinks: “Something Else”. I bought this CD so I could hear the original version of “David Watts”, which I knew mostly from the excellent Jam cover. The guy behind the counter at Laurie’s Planet of Sound noted “this is a great record” when I went up to buy it, and while it took a bit of getting used to, boy was he right. The Kinks take classic English riffs, from the pop song to the sea shanty, and give them a twisted, 60’s sensibility. Several of the songs reward repeated listenings with fresh nuance. For instance, the first time I heard “Hairy Rag”, I thought it was simply another 60’s song about the joys of marijuana. Then I noticed the underlying critique on the depressing lives of the English working class. And then I thought about how everyone in the song was made complacent by their marijuana use, as they’d “curse themselves for the lives they led, get a hairy rag and then they’d put themselves to bed”, and I came to the conclusion that Ray Davies was actually saying, “C’mon guys, quit getting stoned and do something about your lives.” Like he’s the Pied Piper of Seneca.

5. Morton Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium”, as performed by the Chamber Choir of Europe. Melissa and I first heard this piece being performed by a Scottish youth choir in the Portage Park gymnasium a couple of years ago. The song was haunting then and is almost as beautiful on this CD, performed this time by a crew of young Scandinavians. It is coupled with some of Lauridsen’s other works, including the very pretty “La Rose Complete”, which I believe I heard Sean and Gary sing with the NEIU (my alma mater) choir (which performs some very nice stuff, BTW). However, “O Magnum Mysterium” remains the masterwork on this CD.

6. “Uncle Bob” Gailbraith’s 50’s compilation. My 80-year old neighbor back in California made this CD for Melissa and I to play on our drive back to Chicago in my dad’s Buick. I had relatively low expectations, looking for it to be full of Musak, which Uncle Bob collects obsessively. Instead, it had some really rockin’ stuff, great tunes by the likes of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, along with a bunch of guys I didn’t recognize. An honorable mention goes to Wes’ collection of old country, blues, reggae, and rock ‘n roll, which he titles “Psychodelicatessen” and is now 30-some CD’s long, but it was Uncle Bob’s CD I remember when I think back fondly on that long drive across the desert.

7. The Smiths: “The Singles”. We picked this up on sale with our BMG membership. I forgot how good these songs were, Johnny Mars’ tripped out 80’s guitar a perfect complement to some of the best lyrics in the history or rock ‘n roll, alternately poignant, defiant, ridiculous. “I wanted a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now….” Or how about, “If a ten ton truck should kill the both of us, to die by your side, well the pleasure and the privilege is mine.” I can’t listen to this record without laughing. It might have ended up higher on my list, except that it disappeared into that black hole of CD’s, otherwise known as Melissa’s car, and I didn’t get to hear it that much.

Movies

1. “Once”: Probably the greatest movie ever made about writing and performing music. I never understood why the music in musicals has to be so universally awful, why they had to be clever, soulless pieces written by some gay man tinkling the keys on his baby grand up in his Manhattan apartment, and this movie is living proof that it doesn’t have to be that way. Glenn Hansard and Marketa Irglova do for the musical what Elvis Presley did for the pop record, turning it from an empty commodity into something that matters.

2. “Control”: OK, I was a little biased going in to this one, as I think Joy Division/New Order is probably the greatest band of my lifetime. Let’s just say that this film by Anton Corbijn, who cut his teeth making music videos and is a big fan of the band, satisfied all my expectations as a fan. The Joy Division tunes are great, appropriately front and center, and the renditions played by the actors in the film are also first rate, strong enough in fact that I see no need anymore to live out a small dream of mine, namely to play bass in a Joy Division cover band, because that tribute has now been done quite well by someone else. The acting in the film is impassioned. The script, as it comes primarily from source material, notably “Touching from a Distance”, Debbie Curtis’ biography of her late husband, sometimes dips into a inky Romanticism, like the quill of the English schoolgirl at the heart of Ms. Curtis’ bio, but even here I was suckered in. All in all, a first rate entertainment.

3. “A Scanner Darkly”: I have long been fascinated by Philip K. Dick’s paranoid visions and off-kilter spiritualism, and I quite enjoyed Richard Linklater’s earlier animated-live action feature “Waking Life”, so this film was right up my alley, and it delivered. There’s nothing like two hours of animated delusions occurring in a world that is half-1970’s Orange County and half-Brave New World to warm the cockles of my California heart.

4. “Little Miss Sunshine”: It’s just as funny, and as sweet, and as spot-on in its targets for parody as everyone says it is. The feel good movie of the year for feel bad people.

5. “The Lake House”: Yes, I know, this one’s my guilty pleasure, but I have a soft spot for Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reaves whenever they pretend to be Chicagoans. I kind of liked the time travel element, and while this has chick flick written all over it from start to finish, it is the first movie that made me think nice things about Ms. Bullock since “Love Potion Number Nine”, or maybe “While You Were Sleeping”.

Books

1. “The Fish Can Sing” by Halldor Laxness: This is actually the 2nd time that I’ve read this book, and I enjoyed it almost as much this time around. This is a great comic novel that tells a series of short vignettes about the young life of Alfgrimur and the odd collection of folks gathered around the cottage where he grew up. It is a seemingly simple book that has a lot to say about music, your muse, and how to live a good life.

2. “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy: Gripping from start to finish. It’s about post-Apocalypse America, but rather than taking place just after the bombs have dropped or in the distant future where motorcycle gangs or some other odd macho fantasy has taken over, the events in “The Road” occur maybe 7 or 8 years after civilization has collapsed, when the planet is still gripped by nuclear winter, and there is essentially nothing left alive and nothing left to eat, with much of the remaining human race forced into cannibalism. There is no food, no sun, and seemingly no hope, as a father and his young son traverse the blighted land. Nothing I’ve ever read has made me as happy to sit in the yard and drink a Coke. In that sense, it is a very religious book, as it helped me appreciate what a beautiful world we live in.

3. “Fool the World (An Oral History of the Pixies)” by Josh Frank and Carolyn Ganz: A breezy read about my favorite band, done in interview format with all the relevant witnesses.

A Merry Christmas to All My Pagan Friends

2007-12-24T14:00:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of the holidays, I wanted to cut back on the vitriol and share the gift of good will with all my friends and readers, be they Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Pagan. I would like to invite all of us to break spiritual bread together in the knowledge that we are all cut from the same cultural cloth, part of the same people.

I know that fact is difficult to recognize sometimes with all the doctrinaire dolts getting airtime, walking around in the cloth of my faith, along with all of the religious nay-sayers who have elbowed in to compete with them for space on the shelves and on the airwaves. Yes, it’s become all the rage in our great public forum, the mass media, to pit the secular against sacred, the God fearing against those who deny his/her/its very existence. But I encourage everyone to take a step back from this simplistic, two-dimensional debate and recognize the common intellectual heritage we all share. It is not too late to pull ourselves from this cultural precipice, to hark back to the not-so-distant past, when we made room for both Bertrand Russell and Reinhold Niebuhr, when great minds were at the center of our culture, unlike the trivial combatants who have come to dominate the current age.

I share a common cultural heritage with all my atheist and pagan friends, one based on the scientific method and belief in the ability for the common man to decide own his spiritual fate, both gifts from the Protestant Reformation, which began when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg and may have reached its zenith when Francis Bacon advocated for the first time in human history the primacy of inductive reasoning. Whereas classical Greek and Roman logic was based around deductive reasoning, that the truth was best divined after first developing abstract concepts to look at the world that could then be used to decipher specific evidence, Bacon turned Classical logic on its head, saying that you can’t decide the truth of overarching theories without first examining the specific evidence, paving the way for the modern, experiment-driven scientific method that we all benefit from today.

But enough of my Protestant apologia. I’ll just say that I am quite comfortable in debating the facts of the world with a Born Again Christian as well as any one of my many pagan/agnostic/atheist friends in a way that I would not be with someone from a different cultural history, because somewhere back in our cultural genetics is the recognition of debate as a good thing, that this type of argument takes place in a sacred space where everything may be questioned because that is the only way that the truth will be discovered, both for us as individuals and for our society and the planet as a whole.

So I break bread with the Pagan and the Jew, the Agnostic and the Methodist, because all are united in our search for meaning. If I have an issue, it is with the Humanist, because his worship of man ignores our base monkey selves, the carnivorous primate in us who tracks across the planet, alloying vision with blood lust.

It is no coincidence that our most famous current humanist, Christopher Hitchens, is also one of the most vociferous defenders of the war in Iraq. It is a man with dreams that is to be feared, not a man with religion. It is when a religious man dreams of changing the world that he causes problems, but as Hitchens demonstrates in his abject support of the American military empire, beware a Humanist with dreams most of all, for all too often the gulags are soon to follow, and Robespierre may soon be lying bleeding to death in his bathtub. The modern anthem of the humanist is John Lennon’s “Imagine”, which I had an immediate aural revulsion of when I first heard it, like I could instinctively tell at age eleven that it was a song written by a man in his pajamas, both vacant and scary.

But I trust that you, my dear reader, are the antitheses of that, no matter what your religious persuasion, or lack thereof, and I encourage you to pursue your own spiritual quest in this solstice season, whether that involve taking communion or howling at the moon.

Oprah and a Planet of Whores

2007-12-15T17:41:00.000-08:00

Like many men, I suspect, I am periodically subjected to a pregnant woman whom I know only casually sharing her ultrasound, publicly passing around a photo of her barely evolved fetus, sometimes giving it a cute name or describing distinctive family characteristics to the indistinct blot on the photograph.

Since when did showing a photograph of your womb become a public event, to be shared with vague acquaintances? I’ll tell you when: Since women started behaving like whores. I guess that’s the price men must pay for modern society’s near universal open crotch policy. I know that I spent the better part of two decades as a single man, riding high on free pussy.

Let’s face it, you have a better chance of tossing a penny into Lake Michigan and striking a mermaid than you do of finding a 25-year woman who is still a virgin in this town. I don’t care what the race, religion, politics or socioeconomic status of a bride these days, it’s a pretty safe bet that she isn’t going to the altar having never accepted another man’s cock. In fact, it’s now considered the only reasonable way to lead your life. I’ve heard grown, 30-something, settled people gathering and whispering askance at a couple who are young and getting married without first living together to test things out. “How imprudent!” seems to be the tilt of the gossipers. It represents the absolute failure of the Catholic League and all these right wing religious groups, their total inability to grasp the direction of the culture around them, that most Born Again Christian girls are also quite ready to spread their legs for a man, you’ve just got to work a little harder at convincing them of your “sincerity”.

Every guy knows this. And, like I’ve said, we’ve benefited handsomely from these new arrangements. Of course, there’s a price to pay. A nation of promiscuous women has quickly become a nation without shame. It’s become a nation of Oprah watchers, willing to cluck about their feelings for hours on end like a barn full of hens, willing to make public all of their intimate physical and psychic complaints, real or imagined, whether waxing about inattentive partners or talking about their yeast infections.

And of course a nation of whores is even less equipped to properly clothe and instruct their daughters than their own mothers before them, leaving us with a generation of 12-year olds dressing up for school like they are preparing to race down to the strip club and do a quick pole dance on their lunch break.

I know it won’t even start to turn the tide, but the next time a woman at work or a casual friend shows me a photo of her fetus in the womb, I’m going to tell her, “Please, unlike your pussy, why don’t you save that photograph for your husband.”

Here's to Michael Forbes

2007-12-09T13:50:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should state up front that I find golf to be one of the biggest wastes of human ingenuity and natural resources on the planet, ranking somewhere between NASCAR and the burning of the rain forests, the sporting equivalent of the millions of old Air Supply albums slowly rotting away in landfills across greater American suburbia.

In the first place, golf is not really a sport to at all. The whacking of an inanimate object is not a sport. Golf may require a lot of talent, it may take a lifetime to master, as they say, but a sport involves some notion of direct human competition. Sport is, in its essence, ritualized warfare. Someone’s got to be trying to stop you from hitting that inanimate object into a hole. Football is a sport. Basketball is a sport. Ice hockey is a sport. Golf is an outdoor hobby, beloved by many, but it is not a sport.

I’ve had friends tell me that I look at golf with a jaundiced eye because I am a lover of tennis, and that the players of tennis and golf are like cats and dogs, forever doomed not to get along. That may be true, and while I’ll save for another time any kind of extended defense of the game of kings, let me briefly state that tennis is a battle of brain and brawn, one that rewards all the great sporting skills, including strength, speed, and dexterity. The fact tennis is a sport may not make it superior to golf, but for me it is a much more satisfying game. So I realize that I’m a yapping terrier here, upset at the Persian who left its filthy hair all over my master’s Ottoman, when I probably wouldn’t give a shit if a dog had done the same thing.

That said, I blame golf most of all for being a land grab by those who want to mercantilize our public space, to buy up our open space and then charge the well heeled jocks among us to walk around and whack their balls on it. This may not be so apparent in an older community like Chicago, where the public space, from the city parks to the forest preserves, were set aside long ago, back when the ideals of American democracy were taken seriously. But if you head out to many new communities, particularly in the South and West, a huge chunk of the “public” open land consists of golf courses.

When many of these golf courses are first built (and “built” is the right term, because they are among the most artificial of environments, a fantasy landscape created to mimic an imaginary pastoral scene that never really existed, often plopped into a native landscape of scrub brush or desert), it may seem like a fair exchange, because the course is paid for by the developer, it lowers the overall density of the development, and it allows the folks who can afford to live around it a nice view and peaceful walks at night. But what is lost in this equation is that soon all of the property on the outskirts of this development will also be developed, and that in a decade or so the golf course will be the primary open space left, as the city fathers didn’t deem it a priority to set aside truly public spaces like parks and nature preserves, and the developer was only too happy to cooperate with this blinkered idea of what constitutes a community. So golf courses become the primary open space in these towns, accessible only to those willing to pay to play on it or live around it. The rest of us plebes are not welcome.

Which brings me to Michael Forbes. You might have seen on the news that Donald Trump is trying to buy up a 1,400-acre chunk of mostly open wilderness on the northeast coast of Scotland to turn into a designer golf resort, but that a few of the Scottish locals are stepping up to fight him (for a summary of the battle over the proposed Trump resort, click the Tribune link here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/thursday/chi-trump_hundleydec06,0,2253940.story)

Key among them is one Michael Forbes, a former worker on an offshore oil rig, who saved up to buy 23 acres of Scottish heath that is in the middle of the proposed golf resort and who refuses to sell his land to Mr. Trump, no matter what the price. There’s also Mickey Foote, producer of the first Clash album, who now lives in the Aberdeen area and has helped organize opposition to turning 1,400 acres of pristine Scottish wilderness into “a gated community for rich people.”

The Aberdeenshire Council’s infrastructure committee recently rejected Trump’s proposal, looking to negotiate some environmental safeguards before approving the project. Predictably, Trump refuses to negotiate, so the two sides are at a standstill. If this was in the U.S., with the federal courts and U.S. government now firmly in the hands of the people rich enough to afford a phalanx of D.C. lobbyists, Mr. Trump would simply have some governmental authority declare that Mr. Forbes land is now Trump’s via eminent domain. And a version of that may still happen, as the Scottish executive has “relieved” the Aberdeenshire Council of its authority in the matter.

You couldn’t find a more appropriate poster boy for golf than Donald Trump, if for no other reason than his abysmal taste in women matches well with the Stepford Wives of the PGA. Not so coincidently, he is also the perfect symbol for the new American aristocracy, where the sons and daughters of wealth who learn to play the game have the inside track to much of the trillions being handed out by the global banking industry, even when, as in Trump’s case, he’s shown no ability to manage money, has a penchant for trashy architecture that rivals his bad taste in women, and has had to declare bankruptcy two times and counting. If he didn’t have the right connections, Trump would be the kind of dissolute spendthrift that the Republicans write laws against. Instead, he’s an American icon. “You’re fired,” Trump arrogantly declares, playing his role for the camera, and America, or at least a large chunk of the TV watching public, eats it up.

After failing as a real estate developer in the 1980’s, Trump struck it rich, at least for awhile, in the “gaming” industry, as it is called, and, while I’ve spent many a night with my parents in the casinos of Laughlin and Vegas, and I really enjoy the occasional game of Texas Hold ‘em with the guys, “gaming” has got to be one of the most tawdry ways on the planet to make your cash, a mathematics of guaranteed return that feeds on the human addiction to take bad risks. If you ask me, the bourgeoning U.S. casino industry is a tell tale sign of the approaching Apocalypse, up there with multi-million dollar executive bonuses and aerosol cheese.

So here’s to Michael Forbes, a little guy who refuses to be bowed by the Great American Jackass. I wish him well.

A Letter to David Brooks

2007-11-21T19:27:00.000-08:00

The following was sent to David Brooks in response to his Nov. 20 op-ed column "The Segmented Society" (I've included a link to the original article at the top of the page). Given that my letter seems to be in email limbo at the NY Times, Mr. Brooks may never read it, but you can. And a tip of the hat to Kevin O., who alerted me to the article, I presume in an effort to stoke our mutual hatred of That Dastardly Generation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/opinion/20brooks.html?

Dear Mr. Brooks,

With the unbridled arrogance typical of the Baby Boomer, you somehow assume that the cultural cohesion of your generation is a good thing. Back in the day, when there were only five television stations to choose from and the record industry was using a small Sahara of cocaine to bribe their way into dominating the airwaves, we didn’t have much choice but tune in to the lowest common denominator, be it “Laverne and Shirley” or “Frampton Comes Alive!” But the same technology that at one time limited options soon expanded them, and so now people can watch and listen to what they want, and the world is a better place for it.

Van Zandt is perturbed because not everyone wants to listen to his watered-down, white boy version of the blues. Well, that’s too bad, because his music is B-O-R-I-N-G. Bruce Springsteen is a gifted songwriter; it’s just unfortunate that he’s been saddled with a bunch of hacks like the E-Street Band. Nowadays, if you want to listen to a genre of music created by black musicians, you don’t have to be spoon-fed the pale imitation that dominated FM radio for 20 years. You can opt for Miles Davis rather than Chuck Mangione, Al Green instead of Tom Jones, Bob Marley rather than the Police. This has freed eclectic white musicians to pursue their own sounds, which means they can now dig deeper and explore more satisfying, varied places than when the quickest and most obvious route to success was to mimic the stylings of black folks. I’d put the musical chops and expanse of Sigur Ros or Arcade Fire against the likes of Van Zandt any day. And because they are willing to explore a deeper palate of sound, today’s rock warriors are much less likely to “stink” than the white pseudo bluesman of the 60’s and 70’s flogging the same tired 12-bar progressions over and over again.

You also have a tin ear for some of the wider cultural resonances, implying that the popularity of the Obama candidacy has been fueled by a yearning for “cohesion”. That’s a Baby Boomer conceit, and it is typified by Baby Boomer politicians, the Clintons being the most obvious example, who try to be all things to all people. When first bursting upon the scene, Obama was a revelation to many of us because it seemed like he might be the rare modern politician who would actually tell the truth, that he would tell the country what needed to be done, not what he assumed we wanted to hear. But then Obama started running for President, and he almost immediately started acting like all the other politicians, adding up constituencies and then saying whatever he thought would get their votes. Which is why the bloom has kind of come off that rose, and why much of the grass roots enthusiasm is instead being created by Ron Paul, because he at least will say what he actually believes, and people, especially those not born between the years of 1945 and 1960, find that attractive.

I look forward to Van Zandt trying to canonize his blinkered vision of what he thinks is culturally important music and promoting it as part of a standard school curriculum, because that will surely kill that tired genre once and for all, just like learning literature in school killed the joy of it for most kids, all except for the smarty pants kind who do what they’re told, get good grades, go to Ivy League universities, and then wind up writing for the Times. A pop music canon may be a lot of things, but it’s certainly not rock ‘n roll.

Sincerely,
The Asshole of the Century

I'm a Supper Man

2007-11-11T12:36:00.000-08:00

Our friend Becky from New York is in town, and between her family gatherings and assorted goings on, she usually tries to squeeze in a quick visit to Melissa and I out here on the Northwest side. This has led to a conflict between Brunch Culture and Supper Culture, which expands beyond a simple scheduling issue about what one does with one’s Sunday to encompass differing visions of what makes for a well-lived life. I would like to advocate for the pleasures of the Sunday supper.

For the uninitiated, here are a few specifics: Sunday supper is served in the early afternoon, the jewel stone of the traditional day of rest, a big meal typically eaten a couple hours after church is over, where everyone in the household, and often extended friends and family, breaks bread together and gives thanks for the blessings of this world. In contrast, Sunday brunch is typically eaten around noon, after a leisurely start to the morning, and while it may be served at someone’s house, in practice it is more often partaken of at a restaurant.

Sunday supper is superior to Sunday brunch in myriad ways. It caps a day well spent, be it in praise of the joys of the planet and the love of God, or out on a day trip, or even something more prosaic, like doing errands or working in the garden. The activities of the day are done, and it is time to relax with those near and dear. In contrast, brunch is typically one of the first things you do after getting out of bed, but by the time brunch is over, the day if basically done. Before you know it comes the darkness, and then bed, and then back to the grind for another work week.

Besides, the food is much better at Sunday supper: the hearty dishes, the pork chops and the pot roasts, the flavorful sides, Brussels sprouts and garlic mashed potatoes or Swiss chard with hard boiled egg, a bottle of wine to share, and then maybe, if it’s in season and you’re lucky, some peach cobbler or blueberry buckle for dessert. Contrast that to the shallow joys of a Sunday brunch, the fatty breakfast meats, the French toast where they try to sneak in some savory element, like pea shoots or mango salsa, just to fill things out a bit. And hey, I like having a cup of coffee or tea, or even a mimosa, in the morning as much as the next guy, but I’ll take a good glass of wine or a couple of cold beers during supper over that any day, maybe finishing things off in the living room, sharing a bit of port, taking the edge off the inevitable downer of another work week looming ahead.

We didn’t have Sunday suppers when I was growing up in California. This is a Midwestern concept, one that I found very alien upon first moving here: “You mean you serve a meal on Sunday not much later than you’d normally eat lunch, but you call it supper, and it’s the biggest meal of the day?” It was part of an alien culture, something that I would have to adapt to, like tailgating, REO Speedwagon, and baggo, things I had vaguely heard about growing up but imagined as oddities, like hot dogs without ketchup. After almost 20 years here, I have adapted, reveling in the joys of tailgating, baggo, and Chicago style hot dogs (the REO Speedwagon I still have a problem with), but Sunday supper is more than just a matter of regional taste, it is a way of looking at the world, of orienting your spare time towards doing things while the sun is up, of being close with your entire household, of breaking bread with them, of sharing a big collective meal, rather than the brunch attitude of picking and choosing your friends and your favorite things off the menu.

I didn’t really go to many Sunday brunches growing up, either, but at least I understood the concept, that it’s a fancy breakfast people have towards the middle of the day. I certainly understood the time component, of getting up late and having one less meal to contend with, except that my idea of Sunday brunch back in my 20’s consisted of a Jack in the Box Bacon Cheeseburger and a large Dr. Pepper.

So I came to Chicago with a fairly clean slate regarding the issue of the central Sunday meal. During the past decade of being married to the granddaughter of an Eastside steelworker and a half-dozen years of living on the Northwest side, where Sunday suppers are still commonplace, I’ve grown to appreciate their joys.

Sometimes I get sad on the way home from church, looking at all the folks in the neighborhoods near the lakefront lined up outside their favorite eateries, waiting for their overpriced brunches. It reminds me of my not so distant past, of a hundred wasted Sundays, dissolute, atomistic, standing in line. If I’m feeling particularly generous towards my fellow man, I might imagine taking a carload of these hipsters home, of reading them the Bible and then serving them pot roast with prunes, a favorite of my wife’s family from back in the day when they’d all drive from their respective suburbs down to her grandparents’ place on the Southeast side to share Sunday supper together. But I imagine that to many of those folks standing in the brunch line, eating pot roast and prunes, not to mention listening to a crazy man recite the prophet Isaiah, would be a particularly miserable way to spend their weekend. So I leave them to their own quite different Sunday reveries, just like I leave Becky’s family to enjoy their Sunday brunch, with their designer coffee, their bagels, their Belgian waffles and fresh fruit, all of which are fine things. It’s just that to me they pale in comparison to the joys of the Sunday supper, of a Middle American life well lived.

Control

2007-10-31T20:06:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to narrow down all the great music of my lifetime to an even dozen, or twenty, or even 100, let alone a single act that would encapsulate an age, but Joy Division would come as close as any to being that band. I’ve been trying to get friends to start a Joy Division cover band for several years now, but I don’t think I need to do that anymore, because Anton Corbijn’s “Control” did that for me.

The first thing that a music pic should do is convey a love for that music, and that I think that is the strongest point of Corbijn’s film. Joy Division recordings are mixed in with the “Control” band’s renditions, and the band, led by singer Sam Riley in the Ian Curtis role, do a credible job of channeling the original’s musicianship and energy. At times, the soundtrack swells, like the sound engineer was a teenager turning the receiver up to “11”, and with classic cuts like “Transmission” and “She’s Lost Control” blasting out of the big theatre speakers coupled with Corbijn’s music video imagery, my hunger as a fan was fed.

Much of the film’s narrative was based on “Touching from a Distance”, a biography of Ian by his wife, Deborah Curtis. Corbijn, who knew Ian Curtis personally and was one of the band’s photographers, went to the closest source material he could find to fill out Ian’s biography, and to the degree that the movie is Deborah Curtis’s recounting of events, it is the tale told by a rather provincial English girl, in love with the poetic rock n’ roller next door but neither understanding nor accepting of the world in which he moved. In this telling, Ian’s tragedy is one of a life doomed by his love of two women (his wife Debbie and his mistress, an exotic Belgian siren named Annik) in tandem with his drug use, his epilepsy, and the callousness of the music world that wanted more from him than he was prepared to give.

It is a vision colored in large part by Deborah Curtis’ weepy eyed English Romanticism. Of course, Ian would kill himself because of his conflicted love for two women. I mean, didn’t Romeo and Juliet die for love? So why not a Wordsworth-quoting singer like her husband? It’s a valid view of the man, she was certainly a lot closer to the action than most, but I don’t think that it is a definitive portrait. With Joy Division still sounding as relevant as ever, with many of their songs beginning to approach the timeless quality of a Mozart or Miles Davis, I suspect it won’t be the last one, either.

Perhaps the freshest insight “Contact” gives us into the poetry of Ian Curtis is how he reflected the culture of industrial northern England, how Ian’s recital of a Wordsworth poem as a young teen, something he might have picked up in the local public school, dovetails with his own poetry, how his pleasures outside of his writing and his music are kind of quaint and very English, down to his favorite color being “Manchester Blue”, that of the local soccer team.

The film quoted the following excerpt from “Touching from a Distance”, taken from a poem that Ian wrote to Debbie on Valentine’s Day when he was just 16 years old: “All New York city’s broken hearts and secrets would be mine, I’d put you on a movie reel and that would be just fine.” Which is both emotionally intense and oddly innocent, and provides the context for a young man who 7 years later would sing: “Beyond all this good is the terror, the grip of a mercenary hand, when savagery turns all reason, there’s no turning back, no last stand. Heart and soul, one will burn.” It’s dark stuff, sure, but exciting in that its an original voice in the cultural wilderness, unmitigated by the demands of commerce or rock cliché.

The common line on Ian Curtis is that, a classic tale of a young rock god who died too young, he can encompass all of our myths about rock ‘n roll without any of the baggage. Like Jimi Hendrix or Buddy Holly, we never have to watch him grow old, to make a mediocre album, to sell out to a life as English gentry or Hollywood foppery. But I think this is selling the tragedy short.

When Kurt Cobain died, I, like thousands of others, went into a brief state of depression, not so much because of who he was or what he’d done, but because of what he could have been. Sure, “Bleach”, “Nevermind”, and “In Utero” were all great records, but it also seemed like Nirvana was on the cutting edge of something of more general importance, that millions of kids around the planet were getting turned on to the same song at the same time, and with this collective enthusiasm for something intense, for something that was honest and real, came the prospect that the world could change, that one day we would wake up and the sky would be purple, just because we willed it so. I know it sounds goofy, but that’s how it felt listening to them.

I never thought that I would say this, but with over a decade of perspective after Cobain’s death, I now think that the suicide of Ian Curtis was probably the greater loss. While Nirvana wrote a bunch of great music, a lot of it, at least to my ears, now sounds dated, a product of the environment around it at the time, a blending of hard rock chord patterns with “alternative rock” song structure and sentiment. However, Joy Division remains timeless, a musical font to which I keep returning, a pure melding of sonic electricity, of poetry, of song.

I could recite the musical advances of the band, such as Peter Hook’s use of a 6-string bass, the higher range allowing him to take over the melody line while Sumner’s guitar focused on creating a wall of sonic ambience that played off this melody. Or I could discuss my theory that punk rock broke down a wall so that is was once again cool for white teens to make white sounding music, focusing on the front beats, unlike all of the blues inspired rock of the 1960’s and 70’s, that “post punk” is an all-encompassing term used to categorize all the bands playing out this idea, and that no band did this with more intensity than Joy Division, that they did it first and they did it better. Or I could point to the dozen or two brilliant songs later penned by Sumner, Hook, and Morris after they went on to form New Order, posing the obvious question: Just how good would they have been with Ian still fronting the band? However you pose it, the loss of Curtis’ voice and what it could have meant for music, for the planet, for my life, is huge.

I think that in one sense that is what killed both Curtis and Cobain, or more exactly what drove each of them to take their own lives: that they both realized the genius of what they were doing and it scared the shit out of them, if for no other reason than they weren’t sure if they could keep it up, that each of them were in a creative state of grace, driven in no small part by their cockeyed psyches, minds that had tasted more deeply of existence than most of us mortals, and that this was a creative peak upon which they could not forever stand.

As Curtis sang in “Decades”: “Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders, Here are the young men, well where have they been? We knocked on the door of Hell’s darker chamber, Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in.”

It is this spirit, of a life given totally in an effort to see wider and feel more intensely and then to convey this feeling through music, that I celebrated while watching “Control”.